For our September Cover Story we jetted up to NYC to link with The Bashmen, a musical duo comprised of Artist/Creative Jidenna and Artist/DJ/Producer Swanky at No One Home on the Lower East Side.
The space provided the ideal setting for a candid conversation with two individuals with Nigerian and Jamaican backgrounds, respectively, about everything from the origins of their group and sound, their connection to the beautiful game, their unique childhood experiences, and their vision for how soccer can grow in the US.
Who Are The Bashmen?
Although The Bashmen has manifested as a musical duo, it represents much more to Swanky and Jidenna; for them, The Bashmen is a way of life.
Jidenna: We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Everything’s a little joke. Yeah. We kind of live life like that and I think is is we don’t we haven’t had the chance to present that as much in our art.
So The Bashmen is for the ordinary people, the unimportant people. The people that grew up partying in the basement that ain’t afraid to sweat, that ain’t afraid to be honest and stay rude and be themselves.
We live in a very vain time. I’m saying we’re not about that. I got vintage Adidas sambas on. I didn’t go to the store for the shoot. These are ten years old. That’s the Bashmen. These leather jackets is vintage, It’s not new. Yeah.
Swanky: I hate exclusivity. I think it’s stupid. I think bottle service is stupid. I think collections are stupid. I think standing on the line is stupid. I think holding the wall is stupid. All that shit is stupid.
Going back into what you’re saying, this is accessible. We’re trying to have a good time. I don’t want to be too cool.
Jidenna: Says the man wearing sunglasses inside (laughs)
Creating The Bashmen Look
What started from curiosity, playing around with prompts on midjourney, turned into an obsession for crafting the Bashmen look for Jidenna. This experimentation allowed him to go back to his creative roots.
Jidenna: Before I did music, I was a, painter, and I used to sketch a lot. When I was a child. I fell in love with music production because I looked at it like video games and, I actually also was a young little engineer, pretty nice with a soldering iron, like hardware engineer.
It’s funny because now I would consider myself, like, an AI creative prompt engineer.”
Jidenna: It all started out as a joke with The Bashmen. We didn’t know what our look was gonna be, and so I hopped on to Midjourney…I don’t know where it came from, but I was thinking about what would happen if I merged two things that would be perceived as opposites.
Equipped with that thesis, and some experimentation with prompting, Jidenna found exactly what he was looking for.
Jidenna: I think I typed in ‘A crew of Scottish rastas, and a bunch of guys with dreadlocks in kilts with Afro-Caribbean colors popped up’. If you think about it, its not that crazy. One, there’s an Irish/Scottish heritage in Jamaica. Two the plaid that you see in Scotland has red, green, black, hints of yellow or off white, and then they had soccer socks on”
When we saw it we laughed, that started out as a joke, but then it became an obsession for me to make The Bashmen look with Midjourney. I told Steph (Swanky) to get on it and we really refined the look.
The Bashmen share stories about their connection to futbol
For Jidenna and Swanky, football was always a part of their lives, growing up in Nigeria Jidenna played football exclusively before he moved the United States. Swanky, whose entire family immigrated from Jamaica, reflects on how the game brought him closer to his family members on the island as a kid growing up in East New York.
BONUS
Jidenna and Swanky share their connections to their country’s national teams through the new kits:
The Drop: Swanky
The Drop: Jidenna
Vision for the growth of the game in the U.S.
Jidenna: I want to see in the U.S. what you see in Paris. When you go to a basketball court in Paris, there are goals underneath the basketball hoop. So a young kid growing up can learn how to play basketball or soccer.
At any given time they either kicking a ball or they’re shooting the ball. What I want to see in the U.S. is for that to become standard. All you need for both sports is a ball and some sort of goal. What I would want to see is courts all over the country where you can play either sport.
And I want to see that specifically in neighborhoods of color and low income neighborhoods. That is what it’s going to take, because then you’re going to get a style. And I want to say, I actually think that Americans, especially black Americans, will play the game in a way that we have never seen around the world because we will be relatively newer to the sport.
You’re going to find innovation that you’ve never seen. There’s going to be a swag on it, and there’s going to be a basketball mentality that’s applied to soccer. I want to see that because I even had it when I was playing. I just wasn’t good enough to execute. But I started thinking differently, it’s very similar.
I really believe that once we see that here, the game is going to change. If I was MLS I’d be, I’d be investing in these courts, not just bringing old Premier League or European players over here.
