DUCKWRTH: THE BOUNDLESS ARTISTÉ
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PHOTOGRAPHY: FILMAWI / STYLING: CARA HAYWARD / MUA: ELYSE THOMS / WORDS BY SETH PEREIRA
Every turn of the page in the LA history book is dog-eared by defiance. This spirit of rebellion is something that can be felt across society, whether it was in the form of the Black Panther Party in the mid 60s, or the LA riots in 90s, the West Coast has been moulded by resistance. Some of these warriors chose the airwaves as their arena in which to decry the oppression and rally the troops. In places like South Central (location of the Watts Riots), these battle cries first grew from the words that filled the pages of creatives brought together by the Watts Writers Workshop.
Eventually, a handful of these revolutionaries would form the Watts Prophets, a collective of poets and spoken word artists, whose militancy and radicalism became ubiquitous across all genres the West Coast would birth for decades to come.
Duckwrth, a musician and multi-faceted creative, raised in South Central would be radicalised by this music, and the prevailing attitudes of rebellion that had been fostered by his forbears. The fearlessness they exhibited would feed into Duckwrth’s bravery as a creative, who refuses to be constrained by something as arbitrary as genre. Although a disciple of Gangster Rap and G-Funk, Duckwrth’s earliest influences came from the Gospel music reverberating throughout his childhood home, usually coming from the living room where the family Gospel band was practising. This exposure early on would help Duckwrth develop into an artist that draws from every genre imaginable when creating his own art: “I have a wide palette of music, so musically it just kinda all comes out. So it's hard for me to just stay in one place when I listen to so much different music.” Despite growing up amidst a particularly turbulent period of LA’s history, thefamily support system ensured that Duckwrth’s focus was going to be the arts: “I kind of had a very sheltered upbringing, but intentionally. My mom angled me towards the things that would get me out of my neighbourhood, she saw that I was artsy so she put me in art school.”
A true creative that is able to move freely between mediums, graphic design would allow Duckwrth to truly explore his love for fonts, colours and shapes. Although he never graduated college, the experiences that followed enriched him with a vision for music and artistry as a whole, that placed him in a completely different bracket because of his innovative way of thinking.
“I find creative inspiration anywhere, I usually go on really long aimless walks. I just really be walking, especially in New York, and I dunno it can be like how this old liquor store has this palette of baby blue that's definitely eroding from when it was first painted in the 1920s, but that shade of blue could inspire a whole collection.”
“I think I’m just bored. I look around and see the same things, thealgorithm shows me the same things. So as of the moment the boredom is creating the weirdness, I love it.”
The collections have been hued in the brightest yellows, with a dusting of futuristic pop, before being splashed with deep reds that bleed into Punk infused rage. Since his debut album I’m Ugly, Duckwrth has created with such free will and total disregard for barriers and constraints of any kind, which has made the resulting cocktails all the more intoxicating, especially in a world so reliant on soulless algorithms: “I think I’m just bored. I look around and see the same things, the algorithm shows me the same things. So as of the moment the boredom is creating the weirdness, I love it.”
Being impossible to categorise, has meant that Duckwrth is hard to ignore, and industry titans like Billie Eilish have been taking notice. The songstress had Duckwrth open up for her on tour in 2022, which would be the first time Duckworth’s mother would see him perform. But these milestones would be meaningless if he hadn’t reached them on his own terms, being happy with the art he’s creating and protecting his artistic integrity remain two of the most important things to Duckwrth. “I’ve been leaning more into what makes me happy, and I think that at the end of the day thats what I'm most concerned about. And of course like I want to continue to be inspiring and want the reach to be vast, but at the end of the day I just wanna be happy with the shit I create.”
"Fashion is just expressingwhat I feel inwardly you know?... It really plays a factor in how I feel that day you know? I'm usually peacocking, I’m usually a peacocking dragon."
This approach has seen Duckwrth veer into new territory once more, and the maestro has lent his talents to film, featuring on the two blockbuster movie soundtracks, Space Jam A New Legacy and Spider-Man Into The Spider Verse, the latter becoming his most streamed song to date.
Tapping into the psyche of a character and building a soundscape in their universe was a challenge that Duckwrth relished: “writing for a film is always different because you're writing for a character thats not you. You’re writing for a scene, you're writing for a feeling, an expression so it's like you’re very specific with what you're writing about. It’s cool to tap into Spider Man and whathe's feeling and what he'd wanna listen to you know?”.
Fashion is the next artistic region Duckwrth intends to spend more time in, its something thats been a part of his journey since the very beginning, when he’d design and sell rings during his college days. Having something tangible to go with the feeling that his music evokes, helps strengthen the connection people have to his art and its also important to have something existing in the real world when so much of our lives is now immaterial. Esoteric reasoning aside, Duckwrth simply sees fashion as another way of expressing himself, “fashion is just expressing what I feel inwardly you know? I can express with my garments shape, colour, fabric, all that. It really plays a factor in how I feel that day you know? I'm usually peacocking, I’m usually a peacocking dragon. Honestly my sister helped me out a lot. She wouldn't let me leave the house like ashy or looking like a bum, cause i had to kick it with them, so she’s like nah you not about to do that, you not about to embarrass me.” This segues neatly into what we can expect from Duckwrth in 2025, a brand new album of course, but also much more in the way of visuals and fashion, the perfect alignment of the three worlds that make up the vast Duckwrth universe.
