The young artist navigates his final year of high school, life in Indiana, and 2020’s racial reckoning
“midwxst is every other teenager with a microphone.”
The young artist’s description of himself rings overwhelmingly true. When I sat down to chat with the artist a few weeks ago, I found myself engaging in lively conversation with an extremely bright kid. Good GPA, track star, plays in the high school band—in a lot of ways, midwxst is just like any high school senior.
That’s not to say that his life has always been simple. He was diagnosed with ADHD at an early age and had a hard time with the medication. He had a lot of pent up energy that he didn’t know what to do with, stating, “I focused, but on the wrong things.” He took art and vocal classes from a young age, but when it was time to sit still and listen in a classroom setting, he always had a tough time. He’d be twiddling his thumbs, bouncing his leg, looking around—anything to make the time go faster. He had an overactive imagination and a sporadic mind, and, like many young people also living with ADHD, it used to make him upset.
midwxst doesn’t think of his hyperactivity negatively anymore. Now he calls it an advantage, and his perception is spot-on: like so many of the young kids making music these days, he’s not afraid of bending genres or of bringing in outside influences (take, for instance, the Taylor Swift sample on “Trouble”—you can tell he’s young cause he called it an “old sample”). His other influences include J Cole, Autumn!, Summrs, Endoh, d0llywood1, and the early stuff from Duwap Kaine. This summer, he’s been listening to classics like Big Pun and KRS-1.
He explains that music is a way for him to step back from his real life, from the pressure of high school and college preparedness. “My life is getting busy,” he says. For midwxst, music is a way to rant, relieve stress, and perhaps most importantly, to connect with people who feel the same way he does. And so, all the energy he didn’t know what to do with as a kid manifests in his art.
If there’s one way to describe the midwxst sound, it’s energetic. Trance pop, bedroom pop, hyper pop—whatever you want to call it, he’s doing it, while bringing in influences from R&B and hip hop as well. midwxst is a rapper, too, even if his bars are more melodic than the conventional sound. He cites Tyler, the Creator as a huge inspiration (during the interview, I could see the Flower Boy posted hanging on the wall). “He taught me that you don’t have to fit into a genre. You don’t have to be making what everyone else is making right now.” He shares a story about meeting Tyler at a fashion camp he attended at University of Southern California before he found his groove in music. The two were chopping it up, he says, when Tyler gave him advice that he takes with him to this day: “Make what you want to make. Do what you want to do…You have to make the music for yourself.”
He began working as midwxst last year, taking the project seriously about 10 months ago, but the young artist has always been creative. Since elementary school, he’s been in music classes: show choir, vocal class, high school band. He laughs as he explains how he was a pretty small kid freshman year—yet he chose to play the baritone. “Imagine this 4’11” kid playing this big ass instrument,” he smiles. While he first began making music as $uspect, midwxst is a name that is close to his upbringing. Not too many artists are willing to represent the fly over states, yet his experiences diverge from the region’s reputation as being dull and lifeless.
While Midwxst was born in South Carolina, he moved around a lot, specifically Memphis, Connecticut, back to Memphis, and even Belgium for a year and a half. Showcasing his sentimentality, he stopped the interview to go find his Belgian bus card, with his old address and his mom’s phone number scribbled across the front. His family would stay in a place for six months before moving on to the next community. “I never got the chance to get familiar with where I lived. I wasn’t able to get a cultural connection—only a locational connection.” The unlikely state of Indiana has been the longest he’s ever lived, leading the former industrial powerhouse to become the exception to this rule. “I’ve developed a sense of connection with it.”
“These places get taken for granted a lot… Indiana, Michigan, Ohio. They don’t see the value in it because they don’t have the Statue of Liberty in Ohio. We don’t have anything people can name off the top of their head in Indiana. We have corn, but we have more than corn.” His influences are rooted even closer to home by his parents.
While his father was in the Air Force, they moved around a lot because of his mother, who kept receiving better and better work placements: “She’s very good at her job,” he says as his eyes light up and he sings her praises. His mother’s talents meant that he got to watch his family come up. They started in a small house in a worse-off neighborhood. “Now I have a pool in my backyard—I never expected to have that. It makes me so thankful for the people that raised me.” While his mom is into R&B (Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé), his dad is a hip hop head with an ear for the old and the new. Although these days his playlists include the likes of Lil Tecca, Lil Baby, and JuiceWrld, the CDs in the family basement include names like Barry Bondz, Kanye, Ne-Yo, and Trey Songz. It was also his father who brought him to perform at the Chicago Underground Vampire Club show last year. It was a school night, so dad wanted to make sure he was home on time. His parents have left an impression that you can hear in any midwxst track: “It taught me that music is universal—you don’t have to tend towards a certain sound.”
The downside of living in the Midwest is that he doesn’t have too many other musically inclined kids to hang out with in person, but making music has opened up his community, and it’s all happening online. midwxst got into the internet’s DIY music scene much like the rest of us: he was searching for a community that he couldn’t find in person. “Nowadays we’re seeing a different side of the scene…a lot of kids deserve the light to be shined on ’em.” He cites Quinn (FKA p4rkr), glaive, and members of NOVAGANG as good friends and enormous influences. He sits in discord calls with them “24/7”. “You see people blowing up now and they are young, like 14, 15, 16…and it’s relieving. No matter what age you are, if you make good music, you make good music. Half the people that are blowing up right now are using a $40 mic.” He goes on to stress that you don’t have to be a pro. “You can just use your friends’ beats and make songs. If it blows up, it blows up—you don’t have to worry about it.”
“The thing is with kids running the scene now…we’re still kids,” midwxst explains, reflecting on how user-generated platforms have set a new precedent for accessibility. “I’ll be mid-song and someone’s parents will walk in and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, gotta go to bed.’” But just because they are kids doesn’t mean they don’t have real shit to say. His track “Wonder” was pointed and served as commentary on the current political moment. It discusses themes of police brutality with a sincerity that some wouldn’t expect from a teenager. “The cops here have a reputation for being biased and racist… my encounters with the police have not been good.” When he drives and sees a police cruiser, he feels paranoid. When he gets pulled over, he keeps his hands on the wheel. On the track, he talks about his father giving him this advice and why it’s necessary. “That might be my last time driving, my last time being pulled over, my last time saying goodbye to my parents…it’s the reality we have to live in.”
For midwxst, police brutality has hit uncomfortably close to home. He mentions a young man, Sean Reed, who was shot dead in Indianapolis, Indiana weeks before our interview. His shoulders slump and his voice lowers in volume as he places himself in Reed’s position. “That video hit me because it was in my state. It made me realize that…change needs to happen.” Ultimately, he was inspired to record “Wonder” after attending protests over the murder of Breonna Taylor. He recalls emotionally breaking down while recording. “I knew it wasn’t really about me…but that line ‘Treyvon, Arbery, how many more are there gonna be,’ that line stuck with me. They were just minding their business…It makes me wonder if America is really as free as it says it is.”
midwxst feels a sense of responsibility—if he already has people’s attention, he wants to direct it towards a worthwhile cause. “I have a platform that I can use to spread a message. I have a platform that I can use to make people aware of what’s happening right now, of what the world is going through.” He hopes that “Wonder” encourages other young people to engage in difficult discussions. “It’s good to make people uncomfortable; it’s good to be uncomfortable in conversation.” He stresses that people shouldn’t feel alone right now—they should use this moment as an opportunity to share their own experiences, and to empathize. “This is the perfect time to come together. This is the perfect time to unite.”
While the life of a young artist may reflect that of the average American teen, Midwxst’s critical reflections prove that the next generation is anything but ordinary. Despite all that’s currently happening, midwxst wants to share this message of positivity: “If you want to do something, do it—and don’t wait…You don’t have to cater your interests to anybody.”