"If it’s a regular club night, the bouncer will say I can’t go in"
Jaymie Silk's outsider club music is a cathartic response to racism, capitalism and colonialism
Jaymie Silk is an uber-talented producer and DJ who has been flying under the radar for far too long, in my opinion. After making rap tracks as a teen, he moved to Montreal and made a name for himself in the city’s ballroom scene. Back in Paris, he embraced house and techno but in a singular, noncomformist fashion, drawing from a diverse range of influences and his Afro-European heritage to create atypical club tracks loaded with political messages overt and subtle. Wildly prolific, with a stack of killer self-released pop edits on Bandcamp (my faves are Janet and Jennifer Paige reworks) alongside acclaimed releases on labels such as Shall We Fade, Three Six Zero recordings and Pelican Fly, he’s also partial to a thought-provoking meme dump and enthusiastic live apartment jam. Today he releases a fierce new EP on !K7, Ghetto Capitalism.
You’ve been doing marketing for a music app for a few months now. Do you like the job?
Yeah, because it's not in the actual music business. Working in the music business is horrible. The job is cool, I can work remotely, and it's basically stuff I was doing for myself as an artist — marketing, content, strategy. It’s a great opportunity because I make good money, I’m still around music, I can travel. If tomorrow I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna go to work because I got a gig in Italy, it’s no problem. I'm almost 37 and at a certain point when you’re a working musician the reality is that you need some money on the side. Getting gigs in France is a nightmare for me. So, I'm like, okay, I can have money, I can invest in my music, and I can have time to do my thing and chill.
Why do you say getting gigs is a nightmare in France?
Well, the French market is very particular. It's not like when I was in Montreal. In North America, at least before COVID, I could be playing gigs every week or every two weeks. France is a colonial empire. People see France as having a lot of culture, which is true, but that doesn’t mean the people are cultured. I wasn’t born in Paris, I was born in a small city close to Belgium, but the culture in France is really redneck. Yes, there are fancy balls and people drinking champagne, but when it comes to electronic music, it’s horrible, it’s more about bottle service. People are not interested in music, or in what I do in music. People don't know me here. 80% of the work you find is through networks and connections, it’s not so much about your artistry. I have had albums and EPs amongst the albums and EPs of the year in Bandcamp and Mixmag, for example, but I'm sure promoters here don't really listen to what is released. I could tell them I released on labels such as !K7 or Three Six Zero recordings and I don’t know if they would have even heard of these labels. That’s why when I came back to Paris [after living in Montreal for almost 7 years] I signed with a booker. But it was horrible, they didn’t understand anything, so I'm sure I lost some momentum there.
I remember there being two major scenes in Paris when I was living there a few years back. There's this very white hard techno scene that's very popular. And then there’s a big lo-fi and commercial house scene, but it feels like there's not a lot of room for other sub-genres, or people who don't necessarily neatly fit into those spaces. Is that how it feels to you now?
Basically it’s like, are you big enough to do festivals? Or are you gonna have a residency and play every month for 200-300 euros but after three years, you're gonna quit because you don't make music or you don't have the network. People see the new generation and the Afro movement and think things are normal in France but 50% of the time, if I want to go to a club where you can’t buy the ticket in advance and it’s a regular club night, the bouncer will say I can’t go in.
Really?
Yeah. If it’s Bambounou or someone playing and it’s promoted as a big concert rather than a club night and if I already bought the ticket, it’s ok, but if I want to go to a regular nightclub, that's gonna be complicated. According to my father, it wasn't like that in the ‘80s. The French were like, we love to have Black people in the club to make us look chic and exotic but with the rise of the far right it’s different.
Tell me about the new EP, which sounds great, by the way.
Thank you. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to finish enough tracks to put out some EPs throughout the year because I knew I would have less time for making music with my new job. I felt that everything changed post-COVID, the ecosystem changed a lot, and to release just for the sake of releasing…at a certain point I was like, it's not helpful at all. But I had the opportunity to release on !K7 so I was like, okay, cool, it’s a prestige label and I wanted to use that platform to release something meaningful. I was reading a lot about James Baldwin last year and it got me thinking that life is a ghetto. The world is a ghetto now and there is this trend among DJs to hate on capitalism and I get it, but this is the world we live in unfortunately. We live according to the algorithm and we can’t really control it. So that’s where the name came from. “Ghetto Capitalism” is a tribute to the Detroit techno legacy with a high energy beat and a vocoder. The second one is “Zaga”, and I did it in February. And it's funny, because people didn’t seem to pick up that it was about Gaza. I have Palestinian friends, I’ve been hearing about the occupation since I was a kid. I knew the EP was scheduled for later in the year but I also knew the situation in Gaza would not be over by now. The third track, “U Can Do It" is a revolutionary anthem influenced by my hip-hop roots with a lot of distortion. The last track is more of a techno track; a love song with a lot of weird noise and a sexy trumpet. I think it’s going to be one of my last EPs or projects I'm gonna release with this kind of sound, because I noticed that for the audience, it's too niche. When I was younger, I think I wanted to release music and spread this kind of protest energy, or music for the club, but after a certain age, maybe it's not necessary, maybe it's not what we need. Next year I’ll do something more optimistic and not more painting. I think there are 120,000 new tracks added to Spotify every day. We don't have time now for this kind of painting.
What do you mean by “painting”?
You know, when you go into a museum, you don't always have all the cards [wall texts] to understand the art? I thought the meaning of the track “Zaga” was obvious, but people don’t get it. People are not understanding my paintings.
So you mean you want to make something where the message and the optimism are made more explicit?
Ten years ago, if you were telling someone they’re a one-hit wonder, it was an insult. But now, if you can manage to spread a message with one song, at least people know who you are and what you want to do. But I think I trap myself in ghetto capitalism too.
When you say you trap yourself, you mean because you have tended to be more of a painter — expressing yourself and not necessarily thinking about how many streams something is going to get, or how many people it’s going to connect with?
Something I’m really interested in is the psychology of creative people, the idea that you need to create something, or you're not gonna be ok. So you keep going, keep creating, and you try to dig deeper and deeper into yourself. But the more you dig, the more you lose yourself, too, because exploring different parts of yourself and expressing those deep thoughts and feelings is so complicated at the end of the day.
It’s the same with life. I noticed recently you have to dig deep to understand yourself, to be okay to be alone and to feel good around people. I see art as something major and when you think in that way, it can be really elitist. I think people who follow me will know my work and what I’m about. For them, they can understand the references in my music. But I want to escape this ghetto capitalism and be able to spread something bigger to the world.
It's interesting, because the last time we spoke, you were talking about how you wanted your music to transcend dance music. And you actually said at the time that you wanted to win a Grammy.
I think at the time I had just finished working on The Rise and Fall of Jaymie Silk and Rave Culture. It was inspired by David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. To me, it was like, okay, this is my last dance album. I had tracks that I had worked on that were more pop, more funk, or whatever. And they weren’t as good, in my mind, and at the time nothing was happening, they weren’t going anywhere. So I had worked on those tracks for a year and a half, and I burned out. I was tired after Black Lives Matter and feeling like the response to it was fake and meaningless, and I still wasn’t getting enough bookings. It reinforced my feelings of marginalization, especially in the music industry. I was living with a girl at the time and I had to leave the apartment and go away for three months to recover.
When I think about the Grammys, I think about them as someone born in the early ‘90s or at the end of the ‘80s, back when they meant something. Then, I was thinking about artistic recognition. Now, I know what I can do and I don’t give a fuck about the recognition. I know what I’m worth, I just want people to enjoy it.
You also spoke about how you went to business school in Milan when you were 19 because at that time, you wanted to make money.
Listen, my father's from West Africa. A country called Benin, west of Nigeria. My mother is southern Italian. So I didn't grow up in a rich environment. I wanted to make money, but I wanted to study psychology after school. I love psychology. Why not? But people told me there was no money in psychology so I was like, fuck that. Then I wanted to do musicology, but for my father, it's not real work. My father has this very West African mentality, like, you have to do better than I did, you’ve got to do something with yourself. So I did a test for business school although I didn't know this world at all, and I got accepted. I was excited, but I didn't know it was full of rich people. Those were the worst years of my life, to be honest, because I was from a small town with a very different social environment and suddenly I was surrounded by people who could afford to fly to New York on the weekends and were in class buying Louis Vuitton bags… that was crazy to me. You had students literally buying a joint for €50 and thinking nothing of it…what the fuck? I don't want to be poor. It would be cool to have money, but I’ve seen how it can make people weird too. The goal is not to be a millionaire, but just to be comfortable.
Tell me about James Baldwin and when you first came across his work, and how that has inspired the EP.
As I'm French, we didn’t learn much about North American authors growing up. When I was living in Montreal I came across Baldwin and at some point I started going deeper into his writing. I felt like his experience was similar to mine. When you're in France, especially during the ‘90s, you learn about slavery, the war in Algeria, and about the Holocaust. When I landed in Montreal I turned on the TV and there was a whole TV channel about Indigenous Canadians and I learned about how fucked up that history is. So I started to become interested in the history of North America and I wanted to understand the differences between the African diaspora in Europe and the USA. It's interesting because James Baldwin is African American, he’s gay and he spent a lot of time living in France. He’s a Black American but he's so different, he was spending time with a lot of Arab people and he criticised the Zionist project of Israel. People talk about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, but the complexity of Baldwin’s identity is what I love, because I understand it. I’m half Italian half African, I grew up below the middle class, I went to school with rich people. I was in hip-hop, then I was in the ballroom community. I’ve always been a bit different. So I’ve been really drawn to his writing and his ideas. It’s not about choosing a position between Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, you’ve got to think deeper than that. The world is not binary, it’s nuanced.
What’s it been like living in France over the past year?
I saw a Turkish proverb today, saying, "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace instead becomes a circus" So that’s what is happening here with our president. ? We had covid, we had the yellowjackets before that, they’ve sent out the army and the police en masse…it’s a democracy, but a really weird one. The opening ceremony of the Olympics with drag queens, Black people, LGBTQI people was really inclusive, but two weeks before that, the far right was almost in power. That’s why James Baldwin has been a big inspiration, because it’s like, I'm just watching the shitshow, I’m not going to try and change nothing, because nothing changes. Especially after Black Lives Matter, where the only magazines that wanted to talk to me about it were from English speaking countries, because France doesn’t want to talk about it. In France, racism doesn't exist, apparently.
All the people who really work hard and come from a marginalized community, they don't have a mainstream platform. I know that if you're in the mainstream scene, basically it's because at a certain point you accepted a lot of things. We've seen it this past year. I received an invitation to play on HÖR radio in Berlin three or four months ago. It was through a manager of an artist who’d released on the same label as me. He asked if I wanted to play a special program for the label and I was like, man, you clearly don't know what I’m about. No. And in 2021 I said no to…what's that label with the horse again?
R&S.
Yeah, R&S, they contacted me, but I think it's more of a PR thing for them. But it's like, how many people are gonna say yes? It's a circus. I just do my own thing, and I always say no to things like that, but it’s funny to observe. People have a short memory, people really don't give a fuck. At the end of the day, parties don't give a fuck. They're gonna support people no matter what.
Would you like to be playing more gigs and touring more than you are or not necessarily?
Yeah, but I play gigs according to my worth. I'm an artist, so I’m not just going to accept low-paying gigs so I can post about my tour on social media. I'm not interested. After I stopped working with my booking agency, I wasn’t playing gigs for like a year and a half. I had to work on myself a lot, I wasn’t releasing much. As I started to get better at the beginning of the year I’ve been invited to play gigs in Portugal and cool stuff like that. I think everything is aligned with how I live my life. And when it's gonna happen [more touring], it's gonna be the right moment.
Are you happy at the moment?
I try. Happiness is just a state, it doesn't last long. On a personal level, I'm better than two years ago. I'm always evolving. These days my mood could be better because of personal things but I'm happy to be a better person than I was two years ago.
What do you think has changed in the past two years?
I started to understand a lot of things about myself, about my work, about how I relate to the world and about my traumas. So I think it helped my music too. When HE.SHE.THEY booked me to play with Cerrone in July, I played house and disco and I enjoyed that. And I'm like, fuck it, I want to do more of this kind of stuff, I love to do it. So I'm more at peace with myself. When I have too much anger in myself, I release a lot of music, but I’m limited in my emotions. I think you connect more with people with happiness than with anger. People need happiness. And when you're angry, you need happiness too.
You mentioned earlier that your brain is wired a bit differently.
Yeah. I always felt weird and different to other people, even when I was in school. And the way I was socially, sometimes I couldn’t stand being around other people, and I was hypersensitive. I tended to connect with people who were different too, other people who were hypersensitive or had Aspergers or were on the spectrum in some way. It was really hard to connect with my emotions and my feelings and I was always overthinking. And then I finally understood what was going on with my brain. I'm what they call a “high potential individual” who experiences cyclothymic episodes.
You've been posting a lot of memes lately. It feels like you've kind of taken something that you're not necessarily a fan of, which is this algorithmic kind of self-promotion, but you're doing it in a way where you also get to share ideas that you want to express, whether they be silly or sometimes more political or profound.
It's entertainment at the end of the day. People want to be entertained. That's why I loved making club music. I started with edits and remixes, it’s just fun and I can put a smile on someone’s face for two minutes. So it’s fun doing that with the memes too, but yeah, you can spread a message at the same time.
Are you working on anything else musically at the moment?
Yeah, I have another release coming this year too.I have a track that is a tribute to DJ Assault coming out on a German compilation next month. Then I want to make an EP using only a 909. It’s been a long time since I self-released something so I'm looking forward to that. End of November, I don’t want to spill the tea but I'll have a single coming out on an iconic house label. It will be a really clubby, feel-good track. And there's an EP in the works for a French label, I think it’s coming out in March. My goal now is to make more house, more disco, more uplifting music. A lot of the tracks I release, I'm not happy with them. It’s not that they’re not good, it’s just that I’m never satisfied. But this year I’m more about releasing fewer tracks that I’m really happy with.
Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about today that you wanted to mention or talk about specifically?
It's always the same thing. We've seen it in the past year with the genocide in Gaza and we saw it during Black Lives Matter too. Some artists don't want to speak up on certain topics. Certain topics are less risky, or more common, like, you want to talk about racism, that’s cool, but you’re not taking a risk. You want to talk about climate change, you’re not taking a risk. You might talk about homophobia but you’re not talking about transphobia. Some people have been encouraging us to riot for years but now they’re not saying shit about Gaza. I was thinking about what outspoken people had to endure years and years ago. I think it was Floyd Mayweather, the boxer, who said about Muhammad Ali that the world started to like him when he wasn’t able to speak anymore.That's the trap of social media too, we want to spread the word, but we're trapped in our own little bubbles and it can be hard to break out of them and make a difference. I think it’s most important to feel good in yourself. The more good you feel in yourself and the more healthy you are mentally, the more you'll be able to help others. Capitalism needs us to consume content to feel bad so that we buy things to feel better. So we need to learn how to feel good in ourselves in order to be more efficient and to not be distracted by capitalism’s aims. Anger is often needed to change a situation. But once the anger subsides, you need to be able to think clearly and to take it one step further and to go out and take action in the real world.