(Album cover via Uncle Meg)
With the release of Uncle Meg’s first proper album, the Brooklyn-based rapper is officially flying solo. Having recently separated from Handjob Academy, a longtime collaboration with Ash Wednesday and Clara Bizna$$, Meg has not only found creative freedom but a newfound seriousness. “It’s a huge accomplishment, 15 tracks,” Meg said, reflecting on Bug. With its release this month, the artist’s music has become much more personal at the same time that Uncle Meg has become better acquainted with, well, Uncle Meg.
When I caught up with them (Meg’s preferred gender pronoun), they were at home in Bushwick, where they live with their girlfriend and three cats. One of the cats is black, another is white, and the other is a moody kind of beast who preferred to hide in the kitchen and eschew inspection. Meg rescued all three of them as strays.
“My coworkers are always making fun of me for having so many cats, they think I’m like a hoarder and shit,” Meg laughed. But the cats just seem to show up. “It’s an energy thing, they just come to me.” (Of course, Meg doesn’t keep each and every feral feline that shows up at the doorstep– several have actually moved on to permanent homes.)
I figured out pretty quickly that Meg has a spiritual streak of sorts– not only was the apartment decorated with bones and taxidermied artifacts, but Meg invoked astrological wisdom repeatedly. When asked what life was like now that the emcees of Handjob Academy had more or less gone their separate ways, Meg answered diplomatically, for the most part: “I’m a lot happier. Not to diss or anything, I don’t wanna talk shit– but a lot of what I was writing with the group, that didn’t mean anything to me. I’d write my rhymes and I just didn’t feel anything for it. As I got older, I was like, I’m just a Taurus, babysitting two Geminis.” You don’t have to know a whole lot about astrology to make sense of that statement. Overall though, Meg had good memories of their time in Handjob Academy. “We had so much fun together, especially touring,” Meg recalled. “We just had fun and it was important for me at the time to really have that. It’s just life, it’s there to serve its purpose and when it’s done, just don’t hold on to it.”
And yet, Bug isn’t exactly a happy-go-lucky album, either. It runs the gamut both in terms of emotional range and genre. Meg casts a massive net, amassing all the dramatic “ups and downs” of their life last year (when the album was written and recorded) and scooping up artistic influences as well. The 15 tracks include trap bangers, gangster classics with clear ties to the ’90s hits of Meg’s childhood, old-school influences and borderline bounce beats, even a few unabashed homages to pop princesses.
“I ordered the tracks from light to extremely dark,” Meg explained. “The first track, “Beatnik in the City” is a fun, personality piece and the last one, ‘Cake,’ is completely dark and angry.”
This is partly owed to the fact that, during the recording process, Meg was “rediagnosed” with bipolar disorder. “It was a year of just change and growth. When I was making it, it was like, the whole album was kind of discovering, ‘Who really am I?’ That’s like an everyday thing for me now: if you can take out all this shit, then who really is at the core?”
As it turned out, Meg wasn’t quite comfortable with their cis-dom. “I’ve been finding out that my gender is more male-oriented than I thought,” Meg paused, and looked serious for a moment, before breaking into a cackle. “Which I knew when I was seven years old.” The track “Big Daddy Margaret Rose” was a way for Meg to reflect on this. “It’s a lot about personal development, and questioning myself, especially with that song, which is questioning queerness.”
On top of that, Meg was in a self-described “very insane” relationship. “I was, you know, trying to get out of it, for a while. So some of the songs are like re-falling in love, rebirth.”
These days, Meg is feeling much more stable, with a healthy relationship to boot. These are definitely posi developments, but promoting this album, which was made when Meg was in a decidedly different sort of headspace, has been a bit strange they admitted. “I’m the type of person who, like, I release it and automatically start working on new stuff.” True to that flow, Meg has already started writing new material for the next album.
I wondered if Meg understood writing and recording music as therapeutic. “Yeah, totally,” they confirmed. “If I’m in the right mood and making beats, I can just do it for hours.”
Meg figured out that it was best to avoid “taking shit too seriously,” and as much as the album is the most serious of Uncle Meg’s efforts yet, the rapper’s trademark wacky attitude and unselfconscious goofball sense of humor remain. “I’ve just learned not to put myself in boxes as an artist. Artists are very sensitive people, and if I spend too much time alone, I start to take myself too seriously and start to be too judgmental of myself. You can lose track of where you’re going.”
Then again, Meg said that like most artists, their motivation to create comes from within. “I just have to ask myself, ‘Well, who do you make music for?’ The answer is myself. I make music for myself. I just have to do it.” And that’s where the whole self-medicating, music-as-therapy thing comes in. “I feel like it’s a process of barfing out emotions, or things that I have built up over the years,” Meg said. “It’s about getting it out and releasing it, but it’s also about letting it go.”
Uncle Meg’s album release party is happening tonight, Monday November 28 at Don Pedro’s.
Editor’s Note: Uncle Meg’s quote about Handjob Academy was expanded after publication for the sake of context.