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Daveed Diggs’ sci-fi rap trio Clipping: ‘We are at war all the time. It’s one of the great tricks of capitalism’
Diggs’ harrowing music is a world away from his Hollywood films and a Tony-winning run in Hamilton. But his band’s world-building – setting resource wars in imagined cyberpunk clubs – is no less dramatic
As a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Along with Hutson’s college roommate Jonathan Snipes – who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums – the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. On Ask What Happened, he’s a troubled socially conscious MC listing human atrocities at warp speed, but over the mid-tempo house of Mirrorshades Pt 2, he becomes someone slick and aloof, describing a nightclub’s strict dress code: “God is not here – he forgot to rock his mirrorshades.” The characters all belong to the same destructive capitalist system, and this imagined society is at war: Welcome Home Warrior, with Diggs’s too-friendly address to “cyber rat-race escape artists”, is done as a military recruitment message.
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