“Maybe Tinder should have scratch and sniff,” he joked, after playing the song at FORM. “The way a black man smells, the weight of his body odor, how that transports me.” One track, “waft,” describes him lusting after strangers based on smell alone, and issues a plea for men to discard their cheap cologne. And, although a handful of queer black male artists, such as ILoveMakonnen, Le1f, and Mykki Blanco, have since come out or come up, it still feels fresh to hear Wise sing about his sex life.“That’s what I’m proudest of-that I was able to talk about desire in a way I never knew how to before,” he told me.
Still, it’s been only six years since Frank Ocean came out, via Tumblr, as bisexual. & B., or to pop music many of Wise’s favorite divas-Brandy, Beyoncé-use devotional language to describe romantic love. “Blisters” made no secret of Wise’s queerness, but in “soil” he gets more specific, his lyrics blurring the line between spiritual and sexual hunger: “I get to keep my mouth filled with you / I get to devote my life to him,” he sings on “cherubim.” An ambiguous “him” isn’t new to R.
“You’re not waiting for one particular punch line, or one chorus you’re tuned in from the first note.” He compared his vocal style to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: “If you stick around, you’ll understand why I build up this description for five pages.” Runs come often: “I don’t like hard rises and falls,” he told me, explaining why he prefers his songs to build gradually. “I want people to feel that: ‘Oh, you can tell he did that himself.’ ” That roughness allows his voice-a gorgeous tenor that flutters in a distinctive, fast vibrato-to remain the focus. “I’m very tacky, very raggedy,” Wise told The Fader. Gately made the song’s drum track using a recording of a washing machine, and there’s the same sort of halting, muffled quality to the rest of the album-beats caught in a rusted machine, heaving away. The opening track, “whisper”-a collaboration with the sound artist and production savant Katie Gately-was completed first, and served as a blueprint: stacked vocals, lo-fi synths, and industrial drums. The songwriting is tighter the arrangements clearer and, unlike the EP, each song has a beat. On “soil,” Wise’s first full-length record, he’s moved toward a more accessible sound. But when you listen to Handel . . . It’s, like, ‘He Shall Purify’ is all runs!” he told me. runs are always treated like they’re not sophisticated. As a teen-ager in the Maryland State Boychoir, he spent breaks with friends doing praise-and-worship versions of the classical works on the program. A song like “four ethers”-which has him riffing over a Berlioz sample-came easily to him. His tastes run wide: in conversation, he’ll cite Björk, Schumann, and Brandy in the same breath. At eighteen, he went to music school, in Philadelphia, where he aspired to become an opera singer. Wise grew up in Baltimore, singing in the choir at a Pentecostal megachurch. “Blisters” set the tone of his work: dark, spare arrangements lush melodies with virtuosic runs and lyrics that draw on the gospel tradition to tell stories of anguished queer love. Since 2016, when he released “blisters,” his first EP as serpentwithfeet, Wise has been carving out a particular kind of queendom in the R. “And I mean all definitions: be gay, and be merry, but also just be a fucking queen.” “I’m ready to play and be gay,” Wise sang, ad-libbing during an interlude.
It was the first day of FORM-a three-day music festival that caps attendance at fifteen hundred people, a third of whom are musicians and their friends-and the mood in the audience was both giddy and reverential. He was bare-chested, wearing a beard full of glitter, and carrying a blue pompom named Drama Pom. In May, Josiah Wise, known to most as the singer serpentwithfeet, walked on stage at Arcosanti, an experimental-living compound in the red-rock country just north of Phoenix.
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