R.A.P. Ferreira and the aspirations of an artist on this hell planet
“You can be successful in the machine, but your art will forever be compromised.”
That’s Rory Ferreira speaking to Stacy Lee in an excellent interview here. My vinyl copy of Ferreira’s latest album Purple Moonlight Pages just arrived and I am sitting here listening to it & thinking about what this album has meant to me since its release in March.
I am not a musician or a music critic and I am therefore unequipped to explain the kind of music Ferreira makes. I have heard it called art rap, jazz rap, heady rap, indie rap, etc. I was drawn to his stuff because it is chill and uses a lot of interesting words. When I listen to him I can feel my brain curling around the edges like cardboard packaging tossed into a fire. You can listen to some of his songs and report back or you can read a Pitchfork guy’s take in the block quote below:
Purple Moonlight Pages is an obstacle course of shifty rhythms, twinkly brass and keys, and gales of noise that Ferreira waltzes, bops, and struts through. Instead of loops, the Jefferson Park Boys provide lively dynamos that lurch and sway like Howl’s Moving Castle…
Ferreira tackles the implicit challenge with poise, dueling with horns, humming to chords, springing off the downbeat. There’s always been a dexterity to his writing, which is intricately syllabic and layered, but here even the knottiest schemes feel casual and loose.
That seems correct, if a bit florid. It’s a fantastic album. But during the events of the past few months—a thoroughly depressing Democratic primary, a completely avoidable pandemic, an intensification of police brutality and state-sponsored violence — Purple Moonlight Pages has been more than a great album to me. It’s been a salve. It’s been a peaceful place where I can retreat and close my eyes for a while. And it’s been a source of inspiration and hope in a quarantine that has been (for me at least) brutally inimical to creativity.
Growing up, I wanted to be Stephen King or Neil Gaiman: A broadly respected, widely read, commercially successful author with an enormous library in my house. That fantasy was hollow in several ways. First, it was statistically impossible. Most writers are poor. The rich ones are a rounding error. Second, the kind of stuff I wanted to write was never going to be widely read and commercially successful. Third, accumulating wealth for wealth’s sake is just a vapid and meaningless goal to begin with.
Now, when I think about the future, I don’t even want to be King or Gaiman. I’d rather be somebody like Ferreira:
I’ve been at this long enough to take cats on tour to open for me and have them be world famous a year later. I’ve seen friends make the compromises artistically to get the money/fame they want. Cool.
Scoping all of these things has led me to believe it’s best to keep your head down and make what you love. Everything else is noise.
Ferreira lives in Biddeford, Maine (population 21,000), where he runs a record store. If you’re wondering how a record store in a town with 21,000 residents performs, financially speaking, I’m guessing “not gangbusters.” He has a kid. He makes music and ships the vinyls out himself.
Ferreira makes just enough money off his art to fund the production of more art. That’s success. That’s what he wants. He’s going to keep making stuff and I’m going to keep buying it, along with the rest of his fans. Everybody else can fuck off. He’s not making it for them.
That’s the new dream. Carve out a little corner in this terrible hell world and make art in that corner for a couple decades before the oceans boil over. Knowing that’s what I want, and that if I work as hard as Ferreira did I can maybe make it happen some day, brings me the strangest, deepest peace.
