That’s where they filmed the video for “Creme De La Creme,” and that’s where Cooper makes Lucy songs in a shoebox-sized studio adjacent to his bedroom. He signed the lease a couple years back after the property turned up in the “For Rent” section of Craigslist, and stayed there with a few other guys from Dark World. Lucas used to live in the oldest still-standing house in Hadley, a sleepy river town.
Maybe it’s because of the rural setting, or maybe it’s the feeling of futility that comes from a bunch of small-town kids trying to make it big, but some of the Dark World videos emanate a specific sort of loneliness - the same kind of all-American melancholy that Harmony Korine has built a film career around. It’s the sort of day-in-the-life poetry that a lot of the most celebrated hip-hop is known for, but coming from a gangly redhead who lives in the middle of nowhere, it feels original, goofy, and a little sad. I grew up in the suburbs, where everyone hates one another, goes “Debt Collector,” a mumbly track that also mentions buying blunt wraps at Cumberland Farms, or “Cumby’s,” a regional convenience store. On his own songs, Lucas raps about living in Western Mass. This fall, he’ll head on tour with Wiki, the Manhattan rapper best known as a member of Ratking.
“He’s good at keeping everyone together and giving everyone their shine.” Lucas is also probably the scene’s most visible character. “It’s been his ship since day one,” says Sen Morimoto, a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist who’s known Lucas since middle school. He puts in work every day to keep energy up: booking shows, emailing music blogs, and selling one-off merch pieces via Twitter DMs. Within the scene, Lucas is like some combination of coach, starting forward, and team mascot. Some of their songs seem to want to be taken seriously, and there are plenty of earnest moments in the Dark World catalog alongside all the jokes. A lot of their music is just as ambiguous, not just defying genre but also frequently defying normal standards of taste. It’s a label and a collective, though its members don’t often use those words, choosing instead to call it a “syndicate” or resisting classification entirely. It’s catchy and a little bit dumb, an unpolished afternoon project that sticks with you.ĭark World is a group of 20-plus boys, most of them from the woodsy towns of Western Massachusetts. Filmed on VHS then crudely edited in iMovie, the video is a no-budget, vaguely gothic posse showcase that happens to be set in a barn. The stumbly beat was made by Nick Atkinson, 20, who goes by Ghost, and the song features Cooper’s angelically reverbed voice too. DJ Lucas - is probably the closest thing Dark World has to a “hit.” Lucas raps on the track, his flow growl-like. With nearly 47,000 YouTube views at the time of this writing, “Creme De La Creme” - a murky earworm by 22-year-old Lucas Kendall, a.k.a. It’s avant-garde in an innocent way: the production is tinny and cheap-sounding, and something about Cooper’s vocal just feels off, as if English wasn’t his first language. In the clip, he sits backwards on an old wooden chair and exaggeratedly mouths the words: She say she wanna dance with me/ But she don’t know how. Handy, a baby-faced singer who records as Lucy. For a portion of the video, he wiggles around in a down comforter, like a lumpy caterpillar with a human head.Ī few dozen clips later, there’s an unhinged ballad called “She Say She Wana” by Cooper B. When the song starts, Gods Wisdom’s delivery is coarse and phlegmy and slurred, sounding sort of like chopped-and-screwed screamo or some kind of evil, bedroom-pop approximation of crunk music. It opens with footage of sitcom legend Roseanne Barr talking about the CIA mind control in Hollywood. There’s a homespun video for a sort-of rap song called “Christian Dior,” for example, that was made by a 22-year-old named Ruvi Ender Arnold, who records as Gods Wisdom.
Dark World’s YouTube page is easy to get lost in.