Artist Spotlights: Bartees Strange Defies Categorization and Conclusions
Bartees Strange scales new sonic territory with confident ease, traversing explosive post-punk and acoustic meditations with the help of choppy samples and swelling choruses — all while focusing on what it means to resist genre conformity as a Black man.
Artist Spotlights introduces you to artists that may not be on your radar yet, but should be. With recently cancelled tours and income loss for small artists, there’s no time like the present to find new talent to support.
Written by Kateri David
Photo courtesy of Bandcamp
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To Bartees Strange, sound has no genre. In a single song — single verse, even — the D.C.-based singer, born Bartees Cox Jr., coolly moves from pop-punk vocals to cycling Midwest emo riffs to jaunty hip-hop beats with visionary deftness. His 2020 EP and debut album reflect these affinities, blending influences at rapturous, label-shattering heights. The result is something only Cox can name.
Born to an opera singer and military father, Cox isn’t used to standing still. After a stint in England, his family jumped around Europe monthly before settling in the rural town of Mustang, Oklahoma. Here, the singer felt displaced: The city was overwhelmingly and oppressively white, making him one of only a few Black kids. But, with his mom’s guidance, he found solace in performing gospel music, eventually touring with his siblings in the Oklahoma City Circuit Opera Company.
Gospel and Christian were the only allowed music options in Cox's childhood home, yet he maintained a profound respect for the genres. When he got his first whiff of emo from bands like TV on the Radio and Bloc Party, Cox likened the experience to worship: “I remember when my buddies got cars and we rode around listening to the radio, I was like ‘this shit sounds a lot like what I’m listening to in church,'" he said in an interview for The Line of Best Fit. "And going to my first shows … it felt like church.”
Storing away his gospel training, Coxdove head-first into the punk and hardcore scene in the final years of his adolescence, determined to create. After teaching himself guitar, he fashioned a makeshift recording studio from a Tascam 388 recorder and the family computer. Though sparse (true DIY-ers wouldn’t have it any other way), his musical background prepared him for his move to Brooklyn, where he dodged the spotlight, playing backup for various hardcore bands.
Adrift, Cox finally found the impetus to break solo after being jolted by a too-familiar sight: Looking around at a concert for The National in D.C., the music artist found he was the only Black man in attendance. The experience resulted in the making of his breakthrough EP, Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, a haunting collection of The National re-recordings. Soaked in moody lo-fi synths and sharpened by Cox’s harrowing vocals, the record struck back at the erasure of Black artists in indie music by claiming a space of its own.
Interrogating the white-created notions of Black artists is a recurring theme in Cox's work. But rather than being the sole motivator behind it, the idea hangs behind his efforts, sometimes visibly, sometimes not. To reduce Cox's projects to rejections of constrictive molds would be to ignore his artistry: On the whole, he's a creative with varied tastes, creating music that aligns with his interests. It just happens that he lives in a world that wants to dictate what those interests should be.
This is the impression with Live Forever, Cox's enthralling 2020 debut. The record is a hailstorm drive out of town and back again, a reflection on searching for our better selves and falling short. On standout “Mustang,” Cox ambles back to the town that shaped him, unloading years of disappointment. The track kicks off with galloping drums and whirring synths before Cox looks back on personal growth in a wavering baritone: “The pain of being pure again / Walking home at 4 a.m.” A grungy guitar scores the singer and rolls into a cathartic shatter as hebelts, “Is anybody really up for this one?” It reads as a challenge: to his ghosts, or no one in particular. The track crashes into “Boomer,” where Cox slides into an effortless rap cadence as he shrugs off relapses and personal failures with a woo! Growing pains follow him here, too. When the chugging guitar riffs peak at the chorus, Cox admits his deepest uncertainties: “And sometimes, it’s kinda hard to tell exactly where I wanna go / I know it don’t show.”
The singer denies having a formal music education, but it’s his vocal mastery, his huge emotional sells, that unite the disparate influences on Live Forever. In “Stone Meadow,” a shimmering plea for answers, Cox closes each verse with a choked-up tremor. When the track gains momentum and a persistent drum beat kicks in, he moves into a post-punk belt. The gospel themes return, as he calls out, “I don’t know where I’m going, Lord where have you gone.” Here, his uncertainty is totalizing.
More than anything, Live Forever is a reflection on identity and the distractions we use to avoid answering to ourselves. Ultimately, Cox offers no resolution to his search, but it’s dazzling all the same. He blends shades of hip-hop, alt rock, post-hardcore, house (and more) as if they’re natural counterparts. And, of course, to him they are. Cox’s rejection of genre isn’t defiance so much as it’s a vehicle to complete self-expression. Only in “Mossblerd,” a cross between Mossberg, a firearms manufacturer, and the word “blerd,” does Strange address societal restrictions on Black voices. “Genres keep us in our boxes / Keep us from our options,” he proclaims, exposing the problem of labeling Coxas an “outsider” in relation to being Black.
“The idea of the song is about how genres are making Black people feel like they have to be one thing,” Cox explained in an interview for NME. “I want Black people to just flourish and feel like they can be whoever they wanna be, everything they wanna contribute is valid and they don’t have to worry about acceptance from white people. With this project, the whole point of it was me being like: ‘F-ck it: If I wanna do a rap song that has a country verse and a breakdown, then we’re gonna do it.'”
Bartees Strange’s songs flicker and defy listeners; first, they resemble a familiar thing — R&B, folk, alt rock — but blink, and each track morphs into something brilliantly new. Guided by emotion, Cox effortlessly blends fractal influences to create a world all his own, one freed from the restrictions ascribed to Black voices.
In recent interviews, the singer states he’s back in the studio again, hard at work on a full-length follow-up. No matter the sonic nods or subject matter, one can be sure it’ll be distinctly Strange.
Listen to Bartees Strange on Spotify. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter @bartees_strange.