A Long Talk With clipping. About CLPPNG

clipping. has terrorized my family for about a decade now. When I was in high school, I discovered “Get Up,” a track propelled forward by the constant, grating beeps of an alarm clock—the entire beat is, essentially, an inexplicably successful (yet still immensely annoying) version of Nathan Fielder’s attempt to make the “Blues Smoke Detector” a thing. Naturally, I made the song my personal alarm the second I heard it, and let it be known that I am a heavy sleeper. In other words: As a result of thin walls and my own poor sleep schedule, my family has been forced to become intimately acquainted with clipping., to such a point that none of us can hear my brother’s alarm clock without immediately rapping the first lines to the song in our heads.

I personally love this for us; my younger brother, however, got a little tired of 15-year-old me running into his room and yelling “GAME DON’T WAIT!” the second he woke up. But he’s not the only one who has suffered as a result of “Get Up,” it turns out; the track’s beat is sampled from producer (and film score composer) Jonathan Snipes’ wife’s alarm clock, which now lives in a box somewhere in Snipes’s studio instead of on their bedside table: “She had to stop using it.” (When I mentioned my brother’s trauma, Snipes immediately got up to search for the rotary perpetrator itself, pulling cardboard boxes off of shelves to look. Mind you, “Get Up” was recorded in 2014, which means clipping. has held onto the infamous clock for 10 years now. As rapper and frontman Daveed Diggs explained, “We might need it for a sequel or something, you never know.”)

In the 10 years since clipping.’s first studio album, CLPPNG, was released with legendary Seattle label Sub Pop, a lot has happened: Donald Trump, #BlackLivesMatter, the pandemic, Hamilton (which might seem out of place in this list, but it was certainly life-changing for Diggs, who suddenly found himself a household name—and not for his rap projects, but for his swaggering, indelible Broadway portrayal of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson). But despite Diggs’s meteoric rise and clipping.’s growing cult following—despite undergoing the hellscape of the past decade like the rest of us—the beating (or, perhaps, beeping) heart of the trio remains the same: a sheer love for music, experimentation and each other.

The members of clipping. were friends long before they were bandmates. In all, the group has known each other for around 23 years at this point, with Diggs and producer Bill Hutson being childhood friends, who was Snipes’s college roommate. At its start, clipping. was not intended to be a band; it was a passion project, formed simply as the natural progression out of the trio’s friendship and shared enthusiasm for rap and experimentation. After all, each member already had bands they they were better known for—from Diggs’s group The Getback (with Rafael Casal and Chinaka Hodge) to Snipes’s “ravesploitation” project Captain Ahab to Hutson’s solo work as Rale, all three musicians had established niches within the rap scene.

clipping., on the other hand, “was this other thing, which could be incredibly constrained and conceptual” due to it not being the group’s “main thing.” In other words, they could get weird with it. Their first record, midcity, is a prime example of this mentality: It was released on their website, mixed and mastered entirely by themselves and largely for themselves as well. But as it turns out, there was indeed an audience for “getting weird with it” (myself very much included), and suddenly the group found themselves signed to Sub Pop’s historic roster.

Along came CLPPNG, clipping.’s first record with a major label—and, moreover, their first record made with the growing realization that clipping. might end up being the trio’s main project, rather than a side gig. If midcity shows a band discovering their identity in real time, CLPPNG depicts a band fully confident in their sound. And since then, clipping. has only grown more self-assured. Their subsequent releases (the phenomenal afro-futurist space opera Splendor and Misery and their most recent double horror records, There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned, titled after samples used in their respective albums) have narrowed in focus yet expanded in concept, growing more experimental even as their sound becomes, perhaps, more widely accessible. But it was CLPPNG that originally began to set clipping. apart as an entity all its own 10 years ago: despite the myriad comparisons they often get to groups like Death Grips, clipping. are defined by a unique, collective mission, constraints and sound—equal parts Guce, John Cage (CLPPNG literally features a rendition of his “Williams Mix,” after all) and something entirely new.

A couple weeks ago, Paste had the opportunity to hear these three longtime friends and collaborators reminisce about what fueled their first record with Sub Pop and the guiding aesthetic, musical ideas and practices that have shaped their career ever since (and also ask them the important questions, like what alarm clock was used on “Get Up”—next time I visit home, my first stop will be my brother’s nightside table to check).

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Paste Magazine: Just to start out with the most obvious thing, CLPPNG is known for its deliberate decision to omit any use of the first person—there is, of course, not a single “I” on the album (or in its title). You all use generative constraints of this kind a lot throughout your discography, and I’d love to hear more about how that plays into the process of making a clipping. record. There’s so much in conceptual art and experimental literature and music that uses similar tactics—the French movement Oulipo, where writers would not use the letter E, or the band Matmos, who I think you’ve worked with, or, of course, John Cage and Alvin Lucier and so on. What kind of rules did you originally set when clipping. first started, even with midcity? And how have those changed, shifted over time—for instance, the “I” rule wasn’t present in midcity, but there was a point in which you were trying to avoid using keys in general. What’s stuck, and what’s fallen by the wayside?

William Hutson: I think there was an original idea that songs just weren’t in a key. We were not using the Western musical language of tonality, it’s all these electronically generated sounds and field recordings, which would mean we’re not really addressing tonality, but that went very quickly. We got like two songs in[to midcity] before going like, “Oh, a cool melody would sound really great here.”

Jonathan Snipes: Yes. And we sort of figured out how to make songs that felt like they were doing that without actually doing that too. “loud” and “guns.up” were probably the first two songs we made, right? And in “loud,” there’s no drum sounds—no pitches, really.

Hutson: There’s a pitched sound and it has an interval, because it goes up and down, and that interval is musically meaningful, but I don’t think we ever figured out what those notes were. But it feels like notes—at least, in a way. You know?

Snipes: And then the next song had a sung hook. So we immediately broke that rule. [laughter]

Hutson: That kind of stuff happens all the time. That still is a lot of how our songs work—is that we [Bill and Jonathan] will have an idea of what we’re doing, and we give it to Daveed, and we talk through it and he goes away, then he comes back, and he’s like, “I wrote a singing part!”

I love that you have this philosophy of constraints that’s really generative, but at the same time, you don’t constrain yourself to the constraints, and you’re willing to let them go in service of a song. Where does that philosophy originate for you all?

Hutson: Jonathan and I, especially, have always been inspired by so much of, like, ‘60s, ‘70s process music. And I’m still part of a community of composers who still, to some degree, write music like that. So there was always this sense that this is how you write experimental music: You come up with—not to be reductive, but—a gimmick or a trick or a rule or something that produces the sound. Like, playing this instrument incorrectly in the following way produces this sound. And you’d stick to that. There’s this sort of purity and rigidness to it. I think, to some extent, that’s still sort of how both of us think about stuff—Jonathan, would you agree?

Snipes: Yeah.

Hutson: We think about that stuff like a lot—or, at least, we certainly did then, especially when this was going to be, like, This Is An Experimental Project. I mean that word, right? “Experimental” always… There is this sense that an experimental piece is experimental in that you came up with a rule before you knew what it would end up sounding like, and therefore the audio is whatever that rule produced. And so it is sort of like an experiment, right? You know, like [Steve Reich’s] “Come Out,” or “It’s Going to Rain,” or [Alvin Lucier’s] “I Am Sitting in a Room.” The idea of phasing a loop predates the actual resulting sound, and the resulting sound is just following through that sound.

But, at the same time, we always knew that we were going to then make rap songs out of that. And at the time, at least at the beginning, we didn’t have a “process” way to guide what the words would be. The words were always going to sit on top of and be separate from whatever sort of “purity of process” we were enacting—so then, we’re always gonna throw out that purity, right? It’s always going to produce something that was one element of a complete artwork, not the complete artwork itself. So I think that we were never really super pure about anything in this band. The rules are, I think, inspirational jumping-off points; they’re things that we use to produce ideas—like, “What if we did this? What if we plugged this into this this way?” Or we take these more conceptual ideas, sure, but then we have to decide what the song is about.

Daveed Diggs: I think that happens a lot, where the ideas sort of influence the topics. A lot of the ingredients in the soup of creating a thing are either processed or conceptual ideas, in terms of like “Oh, here’s a rap trope we would like to use,” and that will then inform a follow-up: “Oh, I bet if we did this specific audio process, it would give us a sound that feels like it’s part of that world,” or “This thing that the guys came up with reminds us all of this type of music, let’s write a song that’s in that.”

Snipes: The sweet spot, at least for me, is when the concept is incredibly audible, you know? It’s actually not when we gear the concept with layers and production stuff, it’s when we actually are very, very narrow in how we present it. And there are times where the concept becomes inaudible, when we’ve done all this work and we don’t get credit for it. In those cases, we’re pretty quick to abandon it and just make something that has, like, an aesthetic. But I think the real goal for me when doing this really conceptual stuff—and not all our songs are like this—are creating songs that you hear and you know exactly how they’re working, like “Run For Your Life” or “Get Up.” And it’s still a good song and the process is communicated. It’s like a weird little triumvirate of all these things lighting up. This was true to a degree in “Dream,” too—there are a lot of concepts sort of coexisting in that song. We have field recordings of birds cut into rhythmic loops so that they’re falling on beat; we have these drums re-amped from hundreds of feet away in nature, and I think that’s audible. I think you can tell that that’s happening. And then Daveed is rapping very closely into binaural mics and a dummy head—the idea is, if you listen to it in headphones, it’s like Daveed is literally behind your head, which…sort of works! [laughter]

Hutson: I mean, the initial concept of that was this idea of these whisper songs (after the Ying Yang Twins’ Whisper Song)—

Diggs: The whisper genre! It was a short-lived niche.

Not to be confused with mumble rap.

Hutson: And we were like, what if we take the “whisper song,” and since we’re an experimental group, what if the beat is also this sort of whispered, like, ambient, you know—

Snipes: A whisper beat. [laughter]

Hutson: Yeah, whisper beat, whisper song. And then it became very surreal and dreamlike, which is what made Daveed come up with the refrain of Biggie’s “it was all a dream,” and from there he started mixing those dream visuals with dreaming about rap stardom.

Diggs: Yeah, that’s a good example of all of the ideas coming together and, like, it worked. [laughter]

Hutson: Yeah, it’s a really bizarre process.

Snipes: We should revisit “whisper beat” as a concept. I think there’s more to be mined there.

Diggs: I agree.

Hutson: Another song [from CLPPNG] that does that—interestingly, we didn’t get much credit for it, but it’s still audible—is “Story 2.” So many people didn’t hear how it worked; they had to be told how it worked. I remember when the record was being mastered, the mastering artist Brian was tapping his foot along with that track while he was working on it, and finally he turned around to us and went, “What the hell is this music school shit?!” [laughter] “I was tapping my foot and now I’m off beat, how is this happening?” And then we explained to him that it was adding a beat every four measures. But that was another [instance where] I think it all comes together like that, where the concept of the lyrics supports the process of the music. It’s just this feeling of running faster and faster but getting further and further away, still feeling like you’re further and further away even as you’re running towards the thing, because you’re just not getting there.

It all feels a lot like this Robert Creeley quote I’ve always loved—annoying, I know, but I’m an English major, so—

[The band gestures to themselves]

Okay fair, like, who am I talking to?!

Hutson: I have a PhD in theater history. [laughter]

Fair enough. None of us can talk at this point. But, anyways, there’s this Robert Creeley quote about poetry, where he says that “form is never more than an extension of content,” and that always comes to mind for me when I listen to clipping. I love how your songs often lean into that idea of form and content being so thoroughly enmeshed in each other that it’s hard to separate them, and how there’s so much unseen connective tissue tying all the parts of the song together—which seems like it’s how your songwriting process works as well.

Diggs: I mean, that album [CLPPNG], probably more than a lot of the later ones, had us all still in the room together a lot, which doesn’t happen as much anymore. But even so, the pieces of work are always in conversation with each other. There’s always a lot of change that happens even after all the parts are laid down—by then we sort of know what the song really is, and how the pieces actually speak to each other, so it’s there that tweaking happens.

Snipes: The “Intro” to the album is one we definitely tweaked—we sent in a version of it and Sub Pop was like, “I don’t know, it’s kind of harsh and fast to be the lead-off track.” And we were like, “Oh, that means it’s not harsh and fast enough.” We redid it to be harsher and faster. Actually, I recently found the older version of that, and it sucks. We also rewrote the main melody in “Work Work”—that was a pretty late addition, and I found that original version too. It’s not good either.

I love the instrumentation in “Work Work” so much—actually, all the instrumentation throughout the whole album is so varied and unique, while also being somewhat more accessible than the harsher noise of midcity, particularly the first half of that record. Were you trying to make a tangible shift to something a bit more expansive, a bit less abrasive?

Snipes: Honestly, I feel like half the things on midcity feel like they could be on CLPPNG and vice versa. I feel like we kind of figured out what that sound was and just kept going.

Hutson: Yeah, what it has more to do with, for me, was that when we made midcity, clipping. was not going to be any of the three of our main bands. It was a side project that the three of us were doing. And when you have a side project, you can be like, “Hey, this is where we do this really limited, narrow idea.” But once that was signed to Sub Pop, it was so clearly far and away the most successful or popular thing any of the three of us had ever done.

Snipes: Well, at the time. [laughter]

Hutson: Oh, yeah, of course. But we all had bands before this that we took more seriously, or that were what we thought we were known for; those were our main things. And then clipping. was this other thing, which could be incredibly constrained by very conceptual ideas, this sense of “Oh, we’re gonna do noise and rap.” Once it was going to be sort of the main project for us, however, it needed to expand to contain more ideas than just the ideas you give to a side project. I think we all needed to put more of ourselves and our own identities and ideas and the things we love into it. So it just had to grow naturally that way—because if we were gonna pay this much attention to it, it had to.

This was obviously the first album with a major label, and you talked a few weeks ago about how having that kind of major-label-budget was a huge thing for CLPPNG—you didn’t expect to stay signed, necessarily, so you figured it might be the last opportunity to get to make a clipping. album with that kind of budget. So you tried to just fit all of your wildest experimental fantasies into the record as a result. Clearly, and thankfully, CLPPNG did not end up being your final album with Sub Pop. Since then, what have you done in albums that you never would have thought you’d be able to?

Diggs: There’s a lot of that stuff.

Snipes: Yeah, every record tends to have at least one of those that’s really hard to do—for the horror records, it was definitely “Run For Your Life.” That was really, really hard.

Getting the sound to sync up with the car?

Snipes: Yeah, especially because you don’t really know if it works. You go out, you make a bunch of recordings, and then come back to the studio and then figure out what you need to do the next time you go out. I think we went three times for that.

Hutson: Yeah, we went out three times. We kept having to go out, because we got more Doppler shift on the sound than we expected. We didn’t really realize it would be so noticeable. The track speeds up and slows down when the car is coming towards you and driving away from you, so you have to adjust for that. It was pretty funny though, because every time it took Jonathan standing on this empty mountain road holding a microphone and our friend Christopher queuing the songs in the back of a van with a giant speaker pointed out his car.

Did anyone drive by while you were doing that?

Hutson: Oh, plenty of people. We kept having to pull over and wait for people. It was a pretty deserted mountain road, though, so it was maybe like every five to 10 minutes that someone would come by and we’d have to get out of their way and wait. And it was so quiet there that we would have to wait quite a while for them to not be audible anymore; they’d have to be pretty far away for us to not also hear that.

Oh, my God, that sounds so tedious.

Hutson: We do it to ourselves. [laughter]

Diggs: It’s an appropriate word for many of the processes. [laughter] Pretty much all of it, except coming up with it. The first draft of things tends to happen pretty quickly, but then finishing them—

Hutson: If it takes us six months to make a track 2% better and only we’ll notice, we still do it.

Snipes: There’s also new stuff that we can’t talk about that, honestly, is not as elaborate, but had a bunch of big recording sessions involved. The horror records also had a bunch of more conventional recording sessions, with drummers and percussionists and guitar and bass and stuff, which we didn’t do too much of on CLPPNG—except for the children’s choir and the saxophone. We will never do another children’s choir.

Hutson: Well, never say never! [laughter]

On a different note, I know both CLPPNG and just clipping. at large are, obviously, so immensely grounded in rap history. I think you’ve mentioned before how each song on CLPPNG almost responds to a different sub-genre or classic locale of rap—and I have some theories, but I’d love to hear about any examples that come to mind. Was that an intentional choice from the get-go? Or did it just kind of emerge as songs kept coming up, and you found yourself thinking, “Oh, this sounds like X?”

Hutson: I think some of them are clearer than others. Our working method for a lot of these would be maybe starting with a particular sound, or some sort of idea for making a sound, and then jumping off from that to “Oh, what type of rap does this sound fit into?” So we’d come up with something that would make a sound and then we would build a track around that. Like, “Work Work” very much sounds like New LA at the time of League of Stars [with a] DJ Mustard type beat, and then “Summertime” sounds either like G-funk ‘90s LA or maybe mob music, ‘90s Bay Area stuff—something smooth. That was the basis for those. “Tonight” had a kind of a Memphis feel, which is why we asked Gangsta Boo [to feature]. What else is on there? Oh, “Dominoes.” “Dominoes” started as an idea of a chopped and screwed song, but every individual sound is slowed down or in the process of slowing down. So it’s all record stops, right? It’s all about messing with speed—instead of slowing a whole song down to DJ Screw tempo, it’s “What if every single sound is slowing down?” That’s the attack and decay of the sound—that it’s slowing.

Snipes: It’s kind of inspired by that Aphex Twin remix of “808 State,” too, where he sort of does that but at a much faster tempo—which is really one of the greater things he’s ever made, I think. You know what song didn’t work in the normal way, one we’ve never really done a thing like since? “Inside Out.” For that one, Daveed wrote to a click with no beat and then we made the beat around the words. I actually really like working that way.

Diggs: We’ve done it a couple of times, I think, but yeah, pretty rare.

Snipes: I think that beat is so pointillistic, because we had the spine of the rapping to work off of—so we could be a little more collage-y and spare. Even though that’s one of the ones that feels like it has real drum sounds in it—they aren’t, but they sound like real drum sounds. There was also always a lot of synchronicity in the sound design to have, like, just whatever else I happened to be working on in my practice outside of clipping. Like, those wood hits in “Inside Out” were things I had recorded for a movie that hadn’t been used, and there’s a bunch of loops in “Body and Blood” that are some synth sounds I made for that Disney Tron Uprising series for the composer Joe Trapanese that were either outtakes or things that had been rejected for being too harsh. But yeah, those little squiggly synth sounds in there were from those sessions. The spine of our song “Block,” which is on our very first clipping. release, was the synth track that I had made for a friend of mine’s classical song cycle that I was doing synth production on, and that track had been deemed too, like, unpleasant. So, I just took all of those sounds and we turned them into “Block.”

So things from other jobs that have been deemed too harsh and unpleasant?

Snipes: Yeah, sometimes. [laughter] That is a thread in this stuff—often, we just have something that sounds interesting and that we feel fits in the definition of what a clipping. sound is, and we just sort of riff on it.

What is the definition of a clipping. sound? I’m just curious.

Diggs: I think it’s just the one that all three of us like. [laughter]

You use a lot of samples, obviously—both your own and also from throughout hip-hop history and a variety of sources. I assume, for a lot of them, the samples kind of come first, as with the concept; it would be hard to imagine a song like “Wriggle” just stumbling backwards into that sample. When do you decide to use a sample, and what makes something worth sampling for you?

Diggs: I think pretty much the only time we use a sample is when there’s an idea, but when it’s specifically about that sample, for a number of reasons—I think, conceptually, it’s important to this band, but also, every time we use one, it’s such a pain in the ass to get the song cleared. [laughter]

Snipes: I mean, certainly with “Wriggle” and also “Enlacing,” we started with the sample and built the whole thing around it. But “Body and Blood” actually sort of happened simultaneously. I remember Bill had the idea to sample that song and that was sort of in the bucket of ideas we wanted to use, and he also had the idea that we should make some slow four-on-the-floor stuff at rap tempos. I had made a couple of sketches of pounding, slow four-on-the-floor stuff, like more dancey stuff, and one of those was that “Body and Blood” beat that was like that Tron sound—a recording of rain in the gutter outside my house, and like a severely distorted kick drum. And that was about it. I think, Bill, you were like, “Oh, I can hear the ‘Body and Blood’ over this beat in that exact way. Maybe this is the one that samples that.” But that’s extremely unusual for our sampling, that those ideas happen separately and then we find a way to combine them. Usually that song is made around the sample.

On the topic of “Body and Blood,” I also wanted to ask about clipping’s approach to female narratives and rap, which is pretty unusual; I don’t think there are many songs by male rappers that celebrate, for lack of a better word, women killing men in cold blood for shits and gigs—which I, personally, really enjoy. It’s great. [laughter] I think that thread started, maybe, with “Body and Blood,” but that ended up being such a unique throughline throughout the entire discography. What was the original inspiration for that–was it political in nature, or was it more just like, “Yeah, this is fun”? Has your approach to that topic evolved over time?

Diggs: “Body and Blood,” or at least part of it—the “She got her own home, she got her own set of power tools” part—was actually in response to that Webbie / Lil Boosie song, that “independent woman” song—

Hutson: I-N-D-E-P-E-N-

Diggs: [laughing] D-E-N-T!

Hutson: She was just spelling.

Diggs: Yeah, they spell independent and then say, “Do you know what that means?” And then say “She’s got her own house, she’s got her own car.” And I love that song, this is nothing against that song, but we were just like, “Well… let’s extrapolate this idea further.” [laughter]

It’s a bit of a low bar, yeah. [laughter]

Diggs: And then it was, like, what is the bar at which that becomes actually scary? Like, what’s the line?

Hutson: Yeah, it already had the “body and blood” sample, which was from an album by Death Pile called G.R., which is a power electronics album about the Green River Killer. So, we were, basically, fighting for more female representation in serial killers.

Diggs: Exactly. Female representation in serial killers is really important to this band.

Finally, finally, an artist who represents the class of people most in need of greater representation. [laughter] Jumping off of that, both with those songs and more generally, how aware are you of gender and misogyny in the process of writing tracks? Misogyny has a long history in rap—and in most music, honestly—and while clipping. plays on those tropes, it often feels carefully constructed, such that it doesn’t ever quite feel like it’s perpetuating them. I’d imagine that’s always a bit of a minefield, though, so how much does that awareness play into your songwriting? Or is it more of a subconscious choice?

Diggs: I think we’re aware of it, or we were certainly aware of it early on—I don’t think about it as much anymore. I used to be really careful about pronouns; there were songs that switched gender pronouns in the middle for no reason. Like, I used to be really specific about this.

Like “Wriggle,” I think—the chorus says “girl” one time and “boy” the next, if I’m remembering correctly.

Diggs: Yeah, “Wriggle” for sure. But even things about a single character, I used to try and sneak those things in just to complicate the issue a little bit more—and also to feed into the initial “no first-person,” the “no central narrative spine” or “human at the center” of these things. I mean, of course it’s clearly my voice rapping it, but I thought maybe, “Oh, if we complicate the gender pronouns a little bit, that might make it more amorphous, might help with that.”

Hutson: We definitely do use misogyny as a trope—as a feature of rap music. It’s deployed in our music in a way that’s, like, referential more than anything else. It feels like there’s scare quotes around it, almost. We started out as a band that played at The Smell and all these places where we knew the people who ran the place, we knew everyone in the audience, we knew all the other bands and they knew exactly who we were. So when Daveed would say “it’s clipping., bitch” at the end of the show, they knew we were sort of jokingly referring to Britney Spears saying that, you know? But once we grew outside of an audience that knew us personally, that knew our politics and felt safe with us, I think we started to use those things less often.

We were aware of and worried that people are going to hear us and actually take meaning from it about who we are or might be, and we don’t want to have to go around explaining the use of that word. That word does still appear, but again, it always feels, to me, like it’s in some sort of scare quotes in the songs. I think it’s clear, and we haven’t run into people, like, willfully misinterpreting our deployment of misogyny as anything more than a sonic choice—as something that feels recognizable as rap. Because there are words like that, you know? Our friend, James [McCall], [the rapper] Nocando/All City Jimmy, jokes about how he always uses the N-word in the next line after he says something that he’s a little nervous was too pretentious. [laughter]

Snipes: So funny.

Hutson: He’s like, “If you ever hear me say the word ‘perspicacity’ in a bar, in the next bar I’m gonna drop the n-word.” [laughter]

You’ve talked before about how “Knees on the Ground” [recorded in 2014 but released alongside “Chapter 319” on Bandcamp in 2020] was kind of a turning point in how you viewed the songs in relation to politics, which I always thought was really interesting, because both CLPPNG and midcity definitely feel political, even if it’s less overt. “Inside Out,” for instance, is very obviously about police brutality—it’s just less tied to a specific incident in real life than something like “Knees on the Ground.”

Diggs: Yeah, I think “Knees on the Ground” and, later, “Chapter 319”, were both protest music—essentially, those were two times where we just had to say something about this specific moment, and so those are us talking. It’s not the hive mind clipping. entity telling stories that may or may not happen to align with your politics; it is very specifically about this moment that is happening right now, and it is the three of us making an artistic statement about it. “Knees on the Ground” was the first time we started having conversations like “Oh, there’s a responsibility of a band, of this band, to do something with this moment, to try to be useful or additive to the conversation that needs to be happening.” We don’t often write like that. So while songs that are on [CLPPNG], for instance, still speak to the general moment we are in, they’re not protest music.

Hutson: I also think the function of the “no I” [in CLPPNG] is something I’ve always thought of as incredibly political. That was a deeply political idea—not in the sense that it’s an activist polemic, but rather that it’s about trying to express another way of seeing things. What I think about are 1970s Robert Altman movies, this idea of trying to tell stories about the collective, about plurality and multiplicity, and not single sole heroes. It’s not a single person’s life, it’s this mass of people. Look at the way in which Altman, in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, almost smashed first-person perspective of the camera into a flattened medieval painting, the way he would move the camera further and further and further back until he’s so far away from the actors but so zoomed in that, from that perspective, they all look flat, with no vanishing point. They look like they’re all the same size and all squished together.

And that movie is not necessarily a political movie about that, narratively, but the form it takes shows his politics. So I think, for us, it was that kind of a thing—our politics are wrapped up in this sort of fractured multiplicity, multiple perspective, lack of subjective center situation, and it’s visible with “no I,” the no first-person. But it’s easy to miss, right? It’s easy to miss, but I think those choices are also deeply political. It’s just a different kind of politics than writing a song about a specific political movement with a direct political message that is supposed to be gleaned.

Yeah, that’s what I was getting at, because I think that even just the form of the song, the constraints placed upon them and the lack of subjectivity challenges the “cult of authenticity” in a really fascinating way that’s especially unique for rap. But you guys have been very explicit about how, whatever clipping. might be, it is not intended as a takedown or satire of rap itself—I know that, for a while, a lot of audiences and critics insisted otherwise, which is so strange, considering how much your music feels like an ode to the genre.

Daveed, I think you’ve talked before about how rap is all about partying with the horror—through the horror—of day-to-day miseries, which feels like such a central thematic beat for clipping. The third-person-omniscient perspective of many of the songs on CLPPNG, for instance, allows for both distance and intimacy in a really interesting way. Thinking of, for example, “Inside Out” or “Check the Lock,” although that’s from a later album—those are songs that let us see reality in all its clinical brutality while still highlighting the desperate attempts to party through it. How do you maintain that balancing act of party/horror, of dance music/grim reality?

Diggs: I think horror is maybe too strong of a word, unless we’re talking about our horror records, but I think what rap music is good at is not only refusing to soften the hardness of reality but sometimes exaggerating it too—and then making it into party music. It’s the revelation in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, that just because you were sampling disco music didn’t mean it had to be “hip hop, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a hop, and you don’t stop,” you know what I’m saying? Like, you could tell real life stories on top of danceable beats. That’s the thing that rap music has always been really good at—so we’re just continuing that. Although these are not real life stories, they are doing the same thing. They’re not fun stories, on top of danceable beats.

Hutson: Yeah, they take place in a version of the world as it is. And joy still exists, even though everything looks terribly fucked up.

That it does. I think the attention to detail in so many of the lyrics—“Inside Out” comes to mind—really helps ground the songs. There are all of these tiny little details that really make it feel alive, human, lived-in. How much thought goes into crafting these worlds? And does it start from the details and extrapolate out or does it kind of narrow in?

Diggs: “Inside Out” was a real turning point for me as a writer, because it was the first time I tried this thing where I was just going to describe what was in the frame, as if the lyrics were a camera panning around. I think we definitely discussed that.

Hutson: Yeah—back then we would call them haiku songs, right? It’s just observations. All of the lyrics take place in one instant. They’re a snapshot. “Knees on the Ground” does that too.

Snipes: And that’s something we actually do in the beat, literally, in “Knees on the Ground.” It’s very very concrète, like there’s an entire verse that happens inside of a gunshot.

Hutson: Yeah, you hear the beginning of it and then it freezes and then you hear the end and the—

Snipes: —and the bullet clink.

Hutson: Oh, my God, yeah. Oh, my God, remember when we went up to the parking lot structure trying to get clean shell casing clinks? From dropping shell casings?

Snipes: We had all these shell casings because we recorded a bunch of gunshots, us shooting guns—which became our song “Shooter”—because we wanted to make a song out of gunshots, and we had all these shell casings. I remember recording them in the various rooms in this apartment and it just sounding boxy and weird and small and inside and bad. So I was working on some other element of the beat and sent Bill to go out on a mission to—

Hutson: Oh shit, I did that alone?!

Snipes: You did that alone, yeah.

Hutson: Oh yeah, I was on the roof of the Lowe’s parking lot by your house. [laughter]

Snipes: Yeah, ’cause back then none of the other businesses had moved in, so it was just this totally empty rooftop parking structure, and nobody was ever there. That’s the same place we did the field recording for the “Intro” of [the EP] Wriggle, which has a field recording in the background with a siren that hits at one particular point. That’s that same rooftop parking structure. I’ve recorded there a lot. Not so much since the Smart and Final moved in. [laughter] You know where that was, Bill, that’s the former Builder’s Disco. You remember that?

Hutson: Oh yeah! Oh my god, that’s amazing. Builder’s Disco!

Snipes: I remember us there in college and there was this giant building that was about to be destroyed that was “Builders Discount something”—but the concrete had been sheared, so it just said “Builders Disco.”

Hutson: We kept joking that we were going to start throwing parties there, at the Builder’s Disco.

Snipes: Yeah, exactly.

Hutson: Oh my god, I forgot about that. That’s like 22 years ago now. Good lord. But yeah, anyway, that Lowe’s parking lot is so inauspicious, but that’s totally where some rap history was made.

Although, surely, at the time, neither you nor the Builder’s Disco would think of it that way, which is crazy—it’s been 10 years, and clipping. has gained a genuinely very devoted following in the interim, which I know you’ve all said came as a surprise, considering it was originally more a passion project than anything else. Final question: Back in 2014, did you think that you would still be doing clipping. 10 years later?

Hutson: I think—well, we expected to still be friends, and we’d been friends for so long before this that I always figured this is a band that will never break up. We can always just make another album when we feel like it. So no, I didn’t think that we were going to be a success. But, I did think that the three of us would hang out and keep doing this, when we had the time, for, really, the rest of our lives.