by Steve Wildsmith
There’s a box of magic stowed away in a corner of Wil Wright’s home studio.
Affectionately dubbed “Weird World,” it’s a room full of artifacts and furniture he’s collected on his travels, including shelves of books on everything from fortune telling to cobra anatomy. To be fair, it could be argued that the entire thing, part studio and part haunted curio shop, is magical — or at least a place where magic happens. After all, in the span of a single week, the musician turned in his first full-length orchestral composition (for Scruffy City Orchestra, which will perform it this fall) and released “A Pale Harvest,” the second album of contemporary classical music inspired by “a place that doesn’t exist built around the real myth circuits, Albionic shadows and actual places of a 1970s childhood.”
And somewhere in the memory card of the computers and keyboards and guitars and other instruments that populate that room are other artifacts that speak to a past, present and future dedicated to creating music through any format possible.
Film scores. A second Peak Physique record, almost finished. Blueprints for a long-awaited Senryu album. Background music for the promotional material he creates as a video content developer for the Blount County-based drug and alcohol treatment center Cornerstone of Recovery. Snippets of unfinished work, thrown-together ideas and musical non-sequiturs drawn from every area of his life.
And last but not least, some new material by the wizard rap alter-ego who’s been in suspended animation, save for a couple of brief resurrections in early 2017, for almost four years. Which is where that box — the thing that’s safely stowed the familiar red-and-gold hoodie, the red ball cap emblazoned with his moniker, the horcrux swinging from a heavy chain — enters the picture.
After almost four full years of letting that dog sleep, it’s time to wake him up. As a last minute addition to BLANK Newspaper’s Second Bell Music Festival, LiL iFFy — the man and the squad — will take the stage for another party. Although he’s always suspected that the Dec. 31, 2015 farewell show wasn’t truly the end, cracking open that box involves so much more than simply donning the threads that fans came to associate with iFFy over the rapper’s short five-year career.
It is, he muses, like escaping the gravitational pull of a supernova, only to get a few light years away and decide to turn back around for another pass.
“It’s like living inside of a concept,” Wright says. “I spent years of my life entertaining people and meeting people who had no idea that wasn’t the only music I made or even had no idea what my name was. We would show up at places, and people would be dressed like me and have all of these deep ideas and experiences about this small percentage of my body of work. And toward the end, there was a bit of a weird resentment in all of it.
“I tried to kind of let that exist in the last album a little bit — the idea of, ‘Who am I, really?’ — but it’s difficult. My wife tells me all the time that I should just accept it and enjoy it for what it is and let it be a part of things, but it eclipsed a lot of other stuff I really cared about, and because of that, I put it away. I think in order to move on from it, I just needed it to be gone from my mind. But when Rusty (Odom, BLANK’s publisher) asked me to play, it just felt like we should, and all of that positive affection and all of those excellent experiences with my friends kind of rushed back.”
For the uninitiated, the long absence probably means that the inclusion of LiL iFFy to the Second Bell lineup is a complete mystery. Cliff’s Notes bio time: It all started when Wright was trying to break a case of writer’s block. The frontman of the Knoxville alt-rock band Senryu for roughly 15 years, he was working on new material for that band when the words stopped coming. Together with DJ Tom “Ato” Thibus, the two crafted the first LiL iFFy song — “Patron Us” — by following the classic hip-hop formula: first-person braggadocio about having lots of money, bedding lots of women and besting any and all competition.
Taking heed of the adage to write about what you know, Wright — a veteran of the University of Tennessee marching band and the local indie-band coffee house scene — didn’t try to become something he’s not. Growing up in a Knoxville housing project might have been rough, but Wright never lived in one, and any attempt to transform himself into a street thug would have been disingenuous. So he drew on something he knew very well: the Harry Potter canon. It turned out to be a surprisingly smooth transition, with words from the Harry Potter lexicon easily substituted for more common rap cliches. It was a novelty at first that quickly exploded into a legitimate phenomenon that included all the trappings of conventional success: national tours. A side stage performance at Bonnaroo. Repeated wins as the best hip-hop act in Knoxville by readers of Knoxville’s alternative newspaper. Full-length albums, EPs, a handful of loose singles and remixes that eclipse the careers of other artists who have been around three times longer than iFFy.
But it was also a trajectory that altered everything from his musical DNA to his personal relationships to his identity. The final iFFy album was just straight-up hip-hop minus the Harry Potter references, and the new material avoids them as well. But just as references from Rowling’s sacred texts overshadow much of the later-career iFFy material, so too does iFFy often eclipse everything else Wright has done since.
That’s a weird place to be in. He’s grateful for the success, and to even grapple with such existential ideas can be cringe-worthy, but it’s like creating some of the most engaging and gratifying work of his life while that box full of iFFy swag glows like a chunk of radioactive graphite spewed from an exploded nuclear reactor.
“When you have a lot of kids, and one of them happens to become a doctor — and the rest of your kids are great people who have their own thing going on and want to be loved — it doesn’t stop your friends from focusing on your kid who’s a doctor,” he says. “So there’s a frustration level when you’re trying to keep all the plates spinning and you have this affection for all these things, and maybe your doctor kid is kind of a sh*thead.
“I don’t know if I could be making the things I’m making right now at such a furious pace if it wasn’t for iFFy. So it could be a bit of an existential crisis when you take your work seriously and respect yourself and also follow the ideas, even if they might lead you down paths you don’t want to go. If you’re true to it, you follow it, because ideas don’t play so freely if you start to fence them in.
“But when iFFy was over, I came back different,” he adds. “It (messed) me up a little bit. And because iFFy demands so much and eclipses everything around it, that to do other things, I had to completely break off that part of my mind and move away from it.”
Ironically, those creative rabbit holes, he discovered, led him back to iFFy. In addition to classical compositions and a new Senryu record, Wright began working with Matt Honkonen; together, the two men formed the electro-pop sex machine known as Peak Physique, but the creative chemistry wasn’t confined to that box. Honkonen began experimenting with hip-hop beats and production, and so Wright’s rap compass began spinning.
“Tom and I have sporadically written and record songs together the whole time,” Wright says. “After the shows stopped and the project ducked out of this reality, those muscles don’t go away. I write the songs that come into my mind, and I never choose not to write a song. I might write it and throw it away or put it away forever, but when it’s your sacred work, you don’t get to choose. And when Matt started working on this production, that got me thinking.”
Honkonen will join the iFFy collective as “DJ Matte Finnish,” and all of the other hype men will be on hand as well: Zac “Playboy Manbaby” Fallon and Jeff “Mr. Nine and Three-Quarters” McClain. (Alex “Porterhouse” Bayless won’t be able to make it.) They are not, incidentally billing this as anything more than an iFFy show. Wright is keenly aware that putting a “final performance” label on anything is probably counterproductive, especially when one’s creative brain often has a tendency to make plans he has no choice but to follow through on, and while some long-time fans cock an eyebrow at the number of times it seems iFFy has been resurrected, but to that, he can only shrug.
“It’s like a ghost that hangs out in this realm because it has this unfinished desire,” he says. “It’s still dead, but it’s not at peace. So maybe this is the beginning of a little reprieve in order to maybe manufacture a nice big moment. I love going into that space with my friends, and I love how much people love it. And that’s something I’ve never felt on that level, and I appreciate it so much.
“So being caught somewhere between an existential dilemma and that much love and friendship, it’s such a unique place to live — and to have so many other creative endeavors happening, and to have this one that still requires so much respect, even when it’s dormant, and to have to answer to it any time I meet a new person even though I’m not doing those shows … all of that is pretty powerful.”
wildsmith@blanknews.om
