#DontSleep Series: Kaytranada, 99.9%

#DontSleep Series: Kaytranada, 99.9%by I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Editor’s Note: With the recognition of June as Black Music Month, there will be a series of posts each week on NewBlackMan (in Exile) regarding artists and albums (old and new) that are worth your consideration. Because the term #StayWoke has been used in abundance throughout contemporary culture, the curators thought #DontSleep could provide the same effect. And so, it begins . .
Some years ago, really two-plus decades (wow!), there was a gospel song recorded by Hezekiah Walker & The Love Fellowship Crusade Choir called “99½”. In the chorus, the choir sings, “Lord I’m running/Tryna make 100 because/99 and a half/Won’t do”. While this church banger does not have anything to do with Kaytranada’s debut LP per se, something about that numerical sentiment of a bygone era syncs with this album, even with the subtractive difference of four tenths.
Kaytranada, hailing from Montreal, Canada, made a name for himself touring the world with his polyrhythmic mixes as heard in the reimagining of Janet Jackson’s “If”. Nevertheless, what I find most intriguing about him is his melancholy: “I’ve been sad my whole life, but fuck that. I know I have good things ahead. I don’t know honestly if I’m fully, 100 percent happy, but I’m starting to get there.” What one witnesses here is that out of this melancholy in perpetuity, genius emerges. Having ostensibly embraced himself, along multiple lines of differential stress, Kaytranada produces a project that stresses differences that the listening audience can embrace.
Something about this project is reminiscent of the two albums—here and here—produced by PPP née Platinum Pied Pipers in that it bends genre in such a manner that one almost wonders why said categories exist in the first place.
By way of features as varied as Craig David and Little Dragon to Phonte and Anderson Paak to River Tiber and SYD from the group The Internet to Vic Mensa and GoldLink to BadBadNotGood and Kariem Riggins to Shay Lia and AlunaGeorge, 99.9% embodies sonically what the album’s cover art presents visually: by staging a conglomeration of all-seeing eyes that stare back at the listener, the album provides him/her the assurance that something of worth, of beauty, can be created out of the uncanny hybridity that is imperfection and incompletion. This is perhaps one of the few times in recorded history, literal and figurative, when the 99 has a leg up on the 1, even in their reality as decimals.
Maybe what this aural endeavor proves, similar to the object seen under the series of eyes on the right cheek of the album’s cover man, is that collaboration is key! Then again, I am more likely of the opinion that what 99.9% imparts is that even as one asymptotically nears “the goal”—the grade A(+) marking or Hezekiah & The Love Fellowship’s 100—that might not be the optimal place to be.
Not only does getting there mean there may be nothing left to strive for, but it also could presume, counter to Kaytranada’s own spiritual and aesthetic striving, that there is no work left to be done. “100” is the changing constant but fortunately for those eagerly reaching for it because anything else “certainly just won’t do”, this album can be a soundtrack for the journey.
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I. Augustus Durham is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.
Other essays from I. Augustus Durham:
KING Me: Soul for a Black Future
Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)