All people are made up of contradictions, and multimedia artist Dirty Bird knows it firsthand. He is a Twitter-famous internet personality who doesn’t want to be known by his online persona. He is a jazz dance music producer who would not describe his music as jazz. He is a capital-A Artist who is wildly successful at every artform he puts his hands on, but he doesn’t say he likes any of them.
Known to many as Gum – a moniker he uses to replace his official name, and also serves as the name of his animation studio – the 25-year-old Virginia Beach beatmaker has bounced from gig to gig in recent years, working. as an illustrator, video collagist, middle-school teacher, and music producer and DJ. His attractive appearance is part of his appeal. “I do!” he says with a laugh when asked if he has any commitment issues. “Don’t even get me started on that.”
As a musician, Dirty Bird’s Afrofuturistic style of dance music honors the vintage rhythms of jazz and funk through the lenses of house, jungle, and garage. His 2020 Halcyon Palace EP and 2021 Time Traveler and N– U 24 It’s Time 4 Jazz albums are just a few of the projects that show his idiosyncratic versatility. Dirty Bird’s method of using unusual sounds to drive dance-music has led to the emergence of evocative, introspective, but totally groove-inducing tunes. “I like to make drum-and-bass-jazz-fusion shit that won’t get played on the radio,” he says. That makes his new project, Wagenmusik — an EP out July 14 that diverges from his often esoteric sound to make an accessible kind of dance music — all the more surprising.
For fans, the thousands of mediums he engages in have enhanced his skills in a way that confirms the self-described hard-working God. “If there’s anyone who should have a tough God, it’s him,” his frequent collaborator Swami Sound comments.
Twitter friend and supporter of the event Kiska Kasparov first found Dirty Bird in 2018 through high fashion twitter, when he posted a photo of himself in a button-down, red school uniform, and chunky black-leather ankle boots. Kasparov thought he was in good shape and noted that, at the time, he was only doing studio art as an undergraduate at New York University. “I remember one day he said, ‘I’m going to make music,’ and he did,” Kasparov recalled over a Twitter DM. “You can tell his heart is in everything he does and that makes me want to support him.”
When Kasparov threw their first “cowgirl rave” on July 30 of last year, Dirty Bird was the first person they wanted to book. People from all over the world who “met” Dirty Bird through Discord and Twitter flew to Austin to see him tour.
It seems to be a theme that fan support for Dirty Birds doesn’t stop on the web. Everyone he deals with wants to contribute to his success. Dillon Eldin went from occasionally direct-messaging Dirty Bird to hosting DJs at his local multimedia Gumfest events around New York City. The photographer laughs as he admits that he first became attracted to Dirty Bird’s personality on Twitter, knowing full well that it was the last thing the singer wanted to hear.
What got Eldin immersed in the community was Dirty Bird’s willingness to share his knowledge. “Music is educational, [and Dirty Bird is] all about positive educational attitudes,” says Eldin. “Because he was also a teacher, that’s also really good.”
Ironically, Dirty Bird’s art career would never have taken off had it not been for the withdrawal of his acceptance letter from Stanford University after he tweeted something he recalled as saying: “Yo. I just got into Stanford. Everyone can suck my ass from behind! I’m a stupid genius.” (His previous history was discontinued after that, so the exact details are lost to time.) After jeering and head-shaking school assemblies in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, his hometown, he accepted an offer from NYU to pursue a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. in studio arts.
Dirty Bird studied music production in the summer between his junior and senior years of college, but after graduating in 2019, he returned to Roanoke Rapids and became a middle school social studies teacher. During his one year there, he used Twitter to raise enough money to buy supplies and start the school’s first class. He also sat on the city council before realizing that he needed to be on the board for three or four years before making major changes.
As a Black Liberationist and former activist, Black Bird now sees his existence as an independent producer as a revolutionary event in itself. “I’m learning to win small every day with my current lifestyle, as opposed to looking for another time to show that ‘you did the right thing’ [check box],” he says. Now I am doing many small things that are growing to the point where I can say that I have lived a life that reflects my beliefs.
Although he is using his platform to share pirated documents everything from software development to movies; educate people about dance music’s Black history; or promoting other Black artists, Dirty Bird’s work is not just about him – it’s also about the community around him. Friend Eldia joined member Dazegxd remembers Black Bird sending him a DJ controller as a gift, as well as giving them their first DJ gig. “[Black Bird] is half teacher, half uncle to me,” the 20-year-old says.
Although Dirty Bird says that music is not his whole life, there are few articles that interest him more than when he was asked about Moodymann, the Detroit house legend that Dirty Bird considers his musical hero. “Oh God. Everything — EVERYTHING I know about music I learned from him,” he says. “It will be impossible for me to overstate the impact his work has had on me as a person, spiritually and naturally.”
Black Bird sits on Zoom in front of his record player, who is playing a Moodymann vinyl disc as we speak. “The most important part of listening to music is not when you’re sitting down with your headphones on, but [when] you’re just thinking about it,” he adds. “That’s the level of collaboration I’m most interested in, because my biggest comments about music come when I’m not listening to any music at all.”
With an art curator background, exhibition history, and a degree in the arts, it’s no wonder Black Bird believes critical thinking is the most important skill an artist can possess. But he emphasizes that you don’t need a theory degree to practice critical thinking. “[What] I’m talking about is more about life,” he says. “Ask questions, evaluate the answers as you receive them, make them contradict your own life, empathize with others, and assume more truth about what you are being told.”
Black Bird is able to see the art in every aspect of life, whether it’s finding a beat in the rhythm with which he washes the dishes or the gentle joy in a scary moment. He finds cosmic beauty in the minutiae of life the same way he stumbles upon samples in an old record from an obscure high school jazz band. For him, sampling is breathing new life into art. He says that most of his collection consists of rare articles from other countries that he found on eBay or a website that he does not want to publish. “You take on a lot of responsibility when you take care of that person’s job,” he says. “It takes on a different meaning of poverty when you think about the social and economic aspects of that music and being able to digitize the work or keep it forever.”
Promoting the latest buzz around the Swami Sound-led NYC garage scene, Wagenmusik is an accessible, blues-laced interpretation of the garage house and stage. Like the luxury BMW he drives to the beach to escape the isolation of his apartment, Dirty Bird frames his relationships with his colleagues as a vehicle for creating opportunities and finding direction. A few months ago, Dirty Bird and Swami Sound planned to take over the world, saving space on stages at clubs in Montreal and Lisbon.
He also sees this as part of his passion for education. “I love DJing with [Swami Sound and Dazegxd] because they know more about other music than I do and I respect them for that,” Dirty Bird says. “This is something that is rare in my work experience. I heard many songs that I liked because of them. “
