Words: Thomas Hobbs
Having cemented himself as one of underground rap’s most eccentric and original stars, Pink Siifu is now contemplating his next creative moves. Thomas Hobbs caught up with the rising artist, getting his thoughts on racist cops, AI, the afterlife, and music that breathes.
“The artist’s role is not to decorate our work, but to illuminate our world,” said the late revolutionary, writer, and Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara. “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
This is a quote that Pink Siifu (real name Livingston Lemorie Matthews), a fast-rising and strikingly original rapper, singer-songwriter, producer, and free jazz performance artist from Birmingham, Alabama, has been thinking about a lot lately. “That’s the mantra I try to live by,” he tells me, while walking through a gray, overcast Brooklyn. “Rebellion is fucking fire, bro. I think turning on your oppressor is beautiful. That’s true art.”
It’s fair to say Siifu is in a state of pure bliss: while chatting to me on the phone, he’s also puffing on a giant blunt with his friends. During our conversation, he merrily high-fives a hotel clerk (“I love your music bro!”); toasts to recently signing a new distribution deal with Equity Distribution; and hilariously swats away the lanternfly bugs (“Die bitch, die!!”) currently swarming through New York City just like the vengeful killer bees in Wu Tang Clan’s “Triumph” music video. It's the third time I have interviewed Siifu, and the third time he’s been based in a different international city (London and Paris were the previous locations) due to touring; a clear sign of the very global fanbase he is cultivating.
“Bro, I’m never home, right!?” he says, howling with laughter. “I’m like the travelling man. I definitely miss my beautiful girl, who I am going to make my wife, and being a dad too. If [my career] is going to get bigger and bigger, then I’m just going to have to start packing my two twin daughters up with me. Like the Scooby Doo van and shit, and we’re all traveling inside it across the world as one big family.”
All the signs point to this being a looming reality. Over the last ten years, Siifu has cemented himself as one of underground hip hop’s most innovative voices. His music - built around a purring croak of a voice rich with carnality – is explosive; it can’t decide whether it wants to ignite a civil war or a mass orgy. Siifu floats across tracks with a naturally strange blend of blinking, brain-splintering trap synths and stabs of distorted punk drums.
It’s an energy that recalls the Afrofuturism of George Clinton’s Mothership Connection-era, yet everything remains firmly grounded in the present.
An intoxicating yet bloody revolutionary spirit (“Pigs trying to rob us / White boys trying to rob us / Pigs trying to bother us, I don’t know why I ain’t shot ya!” are the artist’s viscerally screamed, screwed up chants on the vital “SMD” from 2020’s NEGRO LP) tends to linger in the air, with the song titles (“We need more colour”, “Dead White Faces” and “Long hair, don’t care”) reigniting the ideals of the 1960s counterculture (Jimi Hendrix and Sun-Ra just happen to be two formative influences) as well as all the violence that followed it.
On 2018’s ensley, Siifu created a nostalgic, free-flowing jazz rap album that gracefully dug deeply into his country roots, while also cementing a mindset about overcoming darkness with purple roses: “I’d be lying if I said the pain didn’t make us grow'' were the wise words of its psychedelic, self-empowering highlight “Skin Made Of Gold”. And with subsequent releases like 2021’s GUMBO’! and 2023’s concept record Leather Blvd (by B. Cool Aid, Siifu’s new age, neo soul duo with LA producer Ahwlee), the artist energetically launched himself into riot-inducing, Spaceghostpurrp-channelling punk (“Roscoe’!”) and lush R&B harmonies (“Brandy, Aaliyah”) that could so easily have been the by-product of the Soulquarians’ era.
Whether it’s funk, jazz, rap, blues, prog rock, soul, punk, or electronica, there doesn’t seem to be a genre that Pink Siifu can’t make into his own. And his live shows have already become the stuff of word-of-mouth legend thanks to their frenetic, unpredictable nature. “I love how the music of someone like Sun Ra feels like a living organism,” Siifu explains of his sound and approach to the stage. “The music is alive, so it lulls you into a trance. Music that is breathing and changing shapes all the time, mutating; that’s my favorite shit. Just when you expect something, the music takes you somewhere new.”
Birmingham, Alabama, is the only place in the world where all the ingredients for making iron – coal, iron ore, and limestone – are present. Perhaps it has more to do with being Black in a state defined by a very white, far-right reading of American patriotism, but Siifu says his hometown is a big reason why he’s so fearless as an artist - and as a man - today. “If n****s wanted to pick who to go to war from America, you definitely got the n****s in Alabama first up on the frontline,” he explains.
“Every Black person in Alabama is with the smoke bro! We’re definitely on some Iron shit; we’re definitely some strong-willed people. I think it comes from our ancestors. If you Black and from Birmingham, then your grandparents were definitely slaves. You’re used to fighting.”
But while Birmingham had a Black community that insulated itself from the hate of outsiders through its grassroots spirit, when Siifu visited his family over in Cincinnati as a younger man, he said it was a different story altogether. All of these life experiences tend to permeate through the music. “The white cops out there was crazy,” he reflects. “I experienced a lot of racist police n****s out in Cincinnati, for sure. When I had my license, I was driving everywhere and the police always stopped me; especially in a nice neighborhood.”
“Driving is a risk if you aren’t white in America. All it takes is one bad apple, and you get shot. Black people gamble every day with their lives in America, for real. A record like NEGRO is just me being mad, period. The police were fucking with me, they were fucking with my dad! The music was this timepiece and reflected the energy outside [post-Ferguson and George Floyd].”
Outside of music, Siifu has recently been making inroads into the fashion world, walking at Paris Fashion Week. It’s an obvious transition. Describing his unique style, he says: “I love dancehall and reggae parties in Jamaica, because if you pull up in the same fit, n****s would laugh at you! If they see you in what you wore last week, you won’t get respect. So everyone is dressed as audaciously as possible.”
He continues: “You know, I’m a Prince, Hendrix, and George Clinton kind of guy. We look at them three n****s, and their colourful outfits are just as important as what they spoke about. They looked like they stepped out of the future, right? In the future, I want to be a creative director and have my own fashion brand. I want to be an actor, too. Me and my homies coming up with ideas for TV shows and shit. I’m trying to do it all.”
As for the music itself, a new project will drop this Halloween, and all upcoming material will represent a “level up” to a more precise sound, something Pink Siifu compares to Donny Hathaway when he made Extensions of a Man in 1973. “Moving forward, I am focused on investing half of everything I earn into the music, so my execution is undeniable. I’ve been telling my girl I want to make more punk shit, but stuff that isn’t as angry. My new music is certainly going to be a little different.”
Despite this clear ambition and all the excitement that goes along with it, there’s one thing about the music industry that has Pink Siifu a lot more concerned about the future. The rise of artificial intelligence vocals means bedroom producers can now create convincing replications of the voices of slain rappers. All they need is enough hours of an artist’s vocals to feed into the program, and bingo; you have your own YouTube-based Frakenstein’s monster.
On one of Siifu’s weirder songs, 2018’s “Pop’s Tired”, amid purring vocals slowed down to sound like Satan having an asthma attack, the artist spits a prophetic bar: “New slaves up in the field / new pain they don’t even feel”, which he agrees was a warning about the risks of AI. “I’m a super sci-fi n***a, bro, so I always thought that Terminator and The Matrix was coming. This AI shit is scary. If I try to compete with the AI and put out new music then it has more material to download and learn from, right? I will always lose. If I heard an AI Pink Siifu song, I’d probably quit, because how can I compete? I think I’ll just go into acting full-time.”
Whether Siifu stops releasing music or not, you can be sure whatever comes next creatively will push boundaries and spark uncomfortable yet essential conversations. “If this all stopped tomorrow, I want them to say I was a hard worker, a family man, imperfect, crazy as hell, Black woman-loving, and beautiful,” he concludes, with one eye also looking to the next world. “When we die, I think we just walk through another door on some Marvel shit and enter another realm. Whether it’s this world or the next, I want them to say I helped the people feel more free.”
