Is skaiwater gay
Meet Skaiwater, the Rapper and Producer Who Caught Lil Nas X’s Attention
Last week, Skaiwater released the single and music video for “light!,” featuring none other than Lil Nas X. The rising year-old rapper-producer says securing a feature with one of the biggest artists in the world was a “surreal moment.” Naturally, the two met online. “I was in a lot of music communities, so it&#;s just like you cross paths with a lot of people, but I think we just stayed in tune,” Skaiwater explains. “I guess we have a similar understanding of things. We think in similar ways.”
Indeed, “light!” is precisely the gentle of song you’d expect Lil Nas X to appear on: an ode to self-love and not letting a toxic old flame into your headspace. “I just had a lightbulb,” Skaiwater croons on the song’s chorus. “I&#;m tryna break the cycle/Yeah, depart ahead with that groupie shit/Yeah, I&#;m sure that bitch a nice dude.” Produced by 9lives, the track is one of only a handful of Skaiwater tracks that wasn’t sel
skaiwater is nonbinary and uses he, she, and they pronouns; this interview uses the singular they for consistency.
skaiwater “hates asking for help,” they admit halfway through our ring, but that might be because the L.A.-based, Nottingham-born creator knows how to do it all. “I’ve been in the engineer chair, the producer chair, and the designer chair,” skaiwater explains. “I’ve been the cameraman, I’ve been the audio person, I’ve edited the video, I’ve edited the audio, I’ve mastered other people’s shit, so I think it’s helped me understand how to communicate what I need from anybody I’m operational with.”
You could chalk this self-sufficient streak up to their actor sign (they’re a Virgo; “I own Libra in my shit though”) or birth order (skai is the oldest of four siblings) or upbringing (their family moved around Britain “every two or three years on average”). But it’s perhaps foremost understood as the natural result of an auteur’s tunnel vision, honed through years of producing, recording, and mixing music, first for their dad and brother, then for themself.
skaiwater’s se
Skaiwater Talks Online Ignorance, Lil Nas X & Making Their Soulful, Danceable New Album
For most of rap music’s history, homophobic language – whether in lyrics or interviews, coming from artists or executives – was completely acceptable. (On more than one occasion in the ‘90s, I left a sitdown with a major rapper feeling an implied f-slur in my direction). Of course, it wasn’t only rap – offhand queerphobia was ubiquitous in mainstream identity.
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Major progress has been made since then, yet (as with culture at large) recent years have seen a palpable backslide in the discourse, even as we’ve enjoyed increase visibility for trans and gender-nonconforming persons. High-profile people engage in nonchalant trans erasure, misuse pronouns, promote stereotypes and freely drop the f- and t-slurs – and defend their right to do so.
So for an artist previously seen as ma