Known for her haunting blend of R&B and art-pop, the singer is already a singular presence, but remains unwavering in her pursuit of technical virtuosity.
Known for her haunting blend of R&B and art-pop, the singer is already a singular presence, but remains unwavering in her pursuit of technical virtuosity.
Comments
FKA Twigs Has Reached New Heights
ByEmily J. LordiOct. 19, 2020
FKATwigs
With her ethereal aesthetic, staggering performances and cerebral body of work that blends R&B and art-pop, the singer has charted a singular course for herself — and for the future of music.
By 
              Emily J. LordiPhotographs by 
              Liz Johnson Artur
“DIDN’T I DO it for you?” the Black British artistFKA Twigssings at the start of “Cellophane,” her voice bowing low over a spare piano interval. “Why don’t I do it for you?” Another piano sounds as if from underwater, and soft beat-boxing keeps the tempo like brushes on a drum. “Why won’t you do it for me, when all I do is for you?” The song, the lead single from Twigs’s 2019 album, “Magdalene,” is a quiet, searching response to rejection colored by disbelief: What begins as a relationship autopsy (“Didn’t I?”) turns subtly from past tense to present (“Why not?”). Twigs was crying when she recorded the song, which she did in the wake of her heavily publicized breakup with the British actorRobert Pattinson. (“All wrapped in cellophane, the feelings that we had,” she sings, an ostensible nod to the way the couple’s experience was packaged for tabloid consumption.) Still, the recording wassoabject, and in that way so different from her typical high-concept art-pop, that she had to laugh at herself. Envisioning the video, her first thought, she tells me, was: “I should just be a sad stripper.”
THE T LIST:A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now.
In her Grammy-nominatedvideofor “Cellophane,” which came out in April 2019, she steps onto a dim stage wearing a mint, rose and gold bikini. The camera tracks her clear platform stilettos as she walks toward the audience and begins a slow pole dance, heels slicing the floor like an ice-skater’s blades. She folds herself into the pole, then turns upside down and stretches her legs out into a 180-degree split. The ceiling opens to reveal a masked phoenix whose face Twigs tries to kick away, but the creature nevertheless sucks her in and spins her, still posing, through space until she lands in a pit where crawling people tenderly smear her with mud. She looks at the camera, shivering. But there is no telling whether she is shaken by a profound rite of renewal — returned to clay, from which she will be reborn — or if she’s just cold.
Breakup aside, Twigs created “Magdalene,” her second full-length album, the first record she had released in three years and the most widely acclaimed of her career, in the midst of another personal crisis: her diagnosis with uterine fibroids — what she has called her “fruit bowl of pain.” Pole dancing is an unlikely discipline for someone recovering from uterine surgery, as it’s dependent on intense core strength and often expressive of sexual confidence. Yet Twigs’s Los Angeles-based pole choreographer and instructor,Kelly Yvonne, who worked with her on “Cellophane” and on her earlier pole routine for the rapperASAP Rocky’s 2018 video for “Fukk Sleep,” explains that the art form is not simply a tool of male gratification centered in strip clubs; pole classes have helped women to “regain their bodies, to regain their sexuality, to take that power back.” Viewed in this light, Twigs’s use of the pole tempers the song’s story of loss and rejection with a vision of strength and prowess. At the same time, her use of oddness and artifice (the theatrical setting, the phoenix, the mud) subverts the cultural expectation that a Black woman’s performance will be simple and transparent — a straightforward narrative of recovery, a diary, an open book.
THE NOTION THAT Black women’s music (like their bodies) should be readily available and accessible is a holdover from slavery that has shaped popular Western music ever since critics framed Black female blues songs of the 1920s as direct testimonies about the singers’ lives.James Baldwin, in his 1964 essay “The Uses of the Blues,” enforces that reductive equation, but he also offers an insight that anticipates Twigs’s ironic approach to pain in her work: “There’s always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster,” he writes. Indeed, Twigs, with her splendid pole dance, shows just how hard women try to “do it for you” — whether colloquially (to satiate your particular desire) or literally (to serve you, to do it so you don’t have to). And yet, when love fails, when the body fails, women assume they are insufficient. It’s a dynamic that Baldwin might have called disastrous, yet it’s also absurd. To ask how you fell short “whilst doing these amazing tricks on the pole,” Twigs has said, “to me, there’s almost something humorous about that.” When performing the song live, she tells me, she toys with melodrama and theatricality — removing one of her “stripper” heels and hurling it across the stage with a sort of campy excess that brings a glint and glitter to her seemingly transparent lament. Even the title of the song hints at that same sleight of hand: You can see through and peel off the layer of cellophane, but all you will find is more magazine gloss.
Twigs’s ascent to the stratosphere and descent to the mud pit in “Cellophane” also offers a metaphor for the extremes she navigates while sliding away from conventional, eye-level expectations: deflation and transcendence, personal humility and creative grandiosity, the blunt reality of physical work and its stunning payoff in performance. She is a singer, songwriter, dancer and producer with epic stamina, impeccable taste and a monastic devotion to training: In her version of working at home under quarantine, she regularly practiced routines on the pole installed in her living room. She is often compared toBjörk,David BowieandPrince, because she is a world-builder who is unafraid to be strange, even grotesque. In her self-directed 2015 video for “Pendulum,” long before the dreamscape of “Cellophane,” she was bound in ropes, in a Japanese bondage style known asshibari, then hung from the ceiling by her own hair; her 2013 video for “Water Me,” which the artistJesse Kandadirected, features a close-up of her face, which rocks like a bobblehead doll while her eyes and mouth slowly expand.
But in recent years, Twigs, now 32, has begun to harness her pursuit of avant-garde innovation and technical virtuosity toward a deeper exploration of pain and insecurity — to unite stage presence with soul. One can find analogues between her work and that of contemporary artists: the showmanship ofJanelle Monáe, the introspection ofFiona AppleandSolange, the vocal drama ofLana Del Rey. But Twigs is less earnest and more shape-shifting than those artists. Perhaps no other pop star delves inside as deeply while stretching so far out — plumbing the interior, sometimes from a wry distance, while making of her own body a spectacular work of art.
WHEN WE FIRST meet, over FaceTime, this past summer, she seems reflective, high-spirited but relaxed. She is recording a new album at a studio that is a short walk across a park near her home in East London. When working long hours in the studio, she says, she eats lots of cakes and messes with her collaborators by telling them the musical ideas they come up with will work best when discarded: “You know, that sound is going to be amazing … when it’s muted!” She feels a bit woozy just now, she admits, having spent too long on her pole that day. In the event that I’m able to travel overseas to visit, she suggests I try it out, and assures me I would find it easy, as I studied dance growing up: “You’ve already got the lines, so it’s just about building strength.” (“Don’t let her fool you!” counters Yvonne later on when I ask about this: “It was easy forher. But it’s not easy for the average person … I’ve coached over a hundred dancers and I’ve never seen anything like her.”)
Yvonne is one of several masters to whom Twigs has apprenticed herself. In recent years, her new skills have included vogueing, krumping, tap dancing andwushu, a Chinese martial art that involves sword fighting. Physically small (at 5-foot-3) but athletically ambitious, she is a child of the stage who remains an ardent mentee — “I love being a student to a mentor that I love,” she says. Growing up in Cheltenham, an uneventful, predominantly middle-class town in the southwest of England, she studied opera and ballet and performed in youth groups and dance competitions and jazz combos. She earned a scholarship to a private Catholic school, where she excelled despite and because of how acutely she felt her otherness, as a mixed-race kid in a very white area. (Her mother, a salsa teacher and costume designer, is English and Spanish; her biological father, a musician, is Jamaican.) She was raised in part by her stepfather, a man whose background she denotes as “English/Spanish/Jamaican/Egyptian,” and whose occupation, she says, involves a briefcase and a fondness for numbers. When Twigs was 7, he told her that she would need to be twice as good as the white girls in her class if she wanted to stand out. “If I wanted to win a [dance] competition, I couldn’t really afford to be good. I had to be excellent,” she remembers. “It had to be so obvious that I was going to win, that it would be ridiculous [if] I didn’t.” It’s a common refrain for parents and kids of color, but Twigs, ever the student, took it to heart: “I really heard that.”
Interviewers so often describe Twigs as being “surprisingly” engaging and fun, in contrast to her edgily glamorous persona, that I am determined to not be surprised by her personality when we speak. But I am nonetheless moved by her openness and candor; her speech is as detailed and direct as her song lyrics are oblique. When I ask how she develops the confidence to keep learning new skills, she says she has been thinking about that a lot while quarantining in the midst of theBlack Lives Matterprotests. She genuinely loves exploring new things, and “changing the cultural DNA” by highlighting aspects of culture (krumping, pole, opera) that others might wish to learn more about. But it saddens her to realize how intensely her efforts have been driven by her stepfather’s mandate, which is really the culture’s mandate, that she always be twice as good. Excellence for her has been a mode of survival, a way of securing a craft — several crafts — that no one can deny or take away from her. This is the bind of Black performance, especially for Black women: If you don’t excel at everything, they’ll say you don’t deserve to be here. If you do, they’ll say it must have been easy to do it all precisely becauseyouhave done it.
Twigs’s mastery of forms of movement, as well as her status as a fashion icon — with her septum ring, baby hairs and neo-gothic style — has at times outshone her music. But her work as a singer, songwriter and producer is her foundation. On three early EPs and her first album, “LP1,” released in 2014, she innovated the ’90s-era R&B slow jam by blending trip-hop’s glitchy timing and industrial distortion withKate Bush’s high-pitched pop. Her signature sound, in which ethereal vocal pointillism details the upper limits of sensual songs driven by bouncing beats, expresses Twigs’s embrace of embodiment as well as her penchant for the abstract. She is perhaps a literalist only when it comes to sex. Yet her unique brand of erotic excellence forgoes the braggadocio and realness popularized by female forerunners in hip-hop in exchange for an aestheticized play between dominance and submission: as sonically subtle asSadeand as lyrically explicit as Prince (at least until he became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001). “My thighs are apart for when you’re ready to breathe in,” she quietly informs a would-be lover in 2014’s “Two Weeks.” The video for 2013’s “Papi Pacify” features a meticulously choreographed duet between Twigs and a man who keeps sliding his fingers into her mouth.
In time, the highly produced aesthetic of these early works came to seem, she has said, like an “ornate golden bird cage” — beautiful but restrictive. Twigs remains an unapologetic classicist, invested in balletic lines and intricate networks of sound; yet on “Magdalene,” she pulls back some of the veils and effects to reveal what she calls “a pure part of my soul talking.” The album’s layered sounds are equally organic and electronic, grounded as much in the piano as in the drum machine. The other crucial instrument is Twigs’s voice, which she has worked to develop so that it occupies the center of her music rather than its upper edge. Historically, smaller-voiced pop singers, fromDiana RosstoJanet Jackson, have distributed their creative energy across several realms (fashion, dance, film) rather than ask their music to carry the entire weight of their careers. It’s a wise bid for longevity in an industry that pushes singers known as “the voice” (Whitney Houston,Mariah Carey) to the point of burnout. Twigs seemed primed to follow these trends: She is, after all, a disciple of fashion and fine art, and she played a small but memorable role in the 2019Shia LaBeouffilm “Honey Boy.” But she chose instead to train under a vocal coach,Nadine Marshall-Smith, who helped her recover the chops she had developed as a younger singer performing with jazz bands and in cabarets; Twigs credits Marshall-Smith with helping release her voice after it “locked” following fibroid surgery. Marshall-Smith says she met with the singer two or three times a week for a year, guiding her through scales and occasionally having her run while singing to develop her confidence, nuance and power. The fruits of these labors are audible in the vocal arabesques and robust shadings Twigs performs on “Magdalene,” the album, Twigs says, on which she has learned to write for her voice.
The album’s exploration of the sacred and mundane is inspired by Mary Magdalene — a figure who, despite once being framed by the Church as a sinful prostitute, was, as Twigs learned, a healer. Twigs recorded the album’s title track, “Mary Magdalene,” at Electric Lady Studios in New York: She had been laboring over the song for months when, she told The Times in 2019,Nicolás Jaar, an experimental composer and D.J. with whom she co-produced several tracks on the album, finally got the right sound by finding “a hardness in air.” Earlier songs like 2013’s “Water Me,” where dry knocking drums cut through the ambience, display a similar effect; but in “Mary Magdalene,” the hardness is a tinny clatter that strikes through the static in the bridge of the song and grows louder, as if to overtake it. Up until this point, Twigs has petitioned the saint — “Come just a little bit closer to me / Step just a little bit closer to me” — but now the singer’s voice, zigzagged with distortion, seems possessed by her. The song is a musical séance; it recalls the traditional practice of using humble materials to invoke the supernatural, rapping on wood to call the spirits.
BORN TAHLIAH BARNETT, FKA Twigs was raised in suburban Cheltenham; her mother had moved there from Birmingham, a city in western England, to give her daughter a better, or at least a more pastoral, life. They ran low on food and didn’t always have heat, but her mother worked to make life special for Twigs, her only child. Instead of decorating Twigs’s room with the glow-in-the-dark stickers her friends had, she had her daughter’s ceiling painted dark blue and speckled with stars. When Twigs was 17, she moved with her mother to study dance at the BRIT School, an institution whose alumna includeAmy WinehouseandAdele, and which Twigs describes as “a bit of a hood performing-arts school in South London.” While there, she realized that her primary love was not dance but music, but she was rejected from the music program, so she left and went to nearby Croydon College to study fine art, literature and philosophy instead. For a time, she was a youth worker who helped traumatized kids create art, as well as a backup dancer in other artists’ music videos, but she lost her job when funding was cut for civic programs, and so she began to pursue her own music through the club and cabaret scenes. In her early 20s, she sang at the Box, a debauched though commercial London club where aerialists and fire-breathers performed for stars likeGeorge ClooneyandQueen Latifah, she recalls, and where she says she felt “like a lamb to the slaughter” but developed “nerves of steel onstage.” When I suggest that the move from studious, working-class striver to underground it-girl was not an intuitive arc, she challenges the terms of the question: “But striving to do what? Striving to sing and dance?” Those aspirations were themselves odd where she came from; and, despite her academic achievements, middle-class security was never her aim. What she wanted above all was to make things and live an interesting life.
She describes this as seeking “the world.” There is a story she sometimes tells from her teenage years in which her mother turned to her over a TV dinner one night and said, “Tahliah, you don’t want a normal life.” In this origin story, the dreamy counterpart to her stepfather’s pragmatic directive (“Be twice as good”), Twigs learns that the bleak routines of working-class life are not her birthright — she should escape them by exploring the world. But in the actual moment, Twigs tells me, “I’m just like, sitting in our council home in South London like, ‘But where is the world?’ And then I meet people and think, ‘Oh my gosh, that person might know[singsongy voice]where the world is!’ Or maybe this new music I’ve discovered that has this party —thatmight be the world.”
This is the bind of Black performance, especially for Black women: If you don’t excel at everything, they’ll say you don’t deserve to be here. If you do, they’ll say it must have been easy precisely becauseyouhave done it.
For Twigs, this search has often required following a path through the dark lit by powerful women. At the Box, a group of more seasoned dancers motivated her by appearing to be much cooler and more urbane than she was; Twigs was at once scared of them and driven to keep up. Later, she was guided by a group of Black women who hosted parties in clubs internationally (includingSharmadean Reid, the founder of the London beauty and culture hub WAH Nails, andIrene Agbontaen, a London-based fashion designer). When certain spots needed other young singers on the bill, “My girls would just be like, ‘Twigs should do it.’ … We would arrive in New York on a Tuesday and they’d be like, ‘You’re cool to perform on Friday, aren’t you?’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll perform on Friday.’” It was at one such club that Twigs met the English visual artistMatthew Stone, who told her he wanted to photograph her. “Everyone does,” she deftly replied.
In the years between 2012, when Stone’s photograph of her appeared on the cover of i-D magazine, and 2019, when she commissioned him to create her androgynous mixed-media portrait for the cover of “Magdalene,” Twigs became her own creative force, writing her own music and lyrics, co-producing her own songs and directing several of her own videos. She has always been mindful of money and respectful of contracts that regiment her productivity, yet her EPs, LPs and singles have not followed typical industry schedules; the risks she has taken have been thrilling to watch because they’ve seemed unmediated by label directives and prepackaged contemporary pop stardom. It seems unlikely that anyone advised her to make a video in which she hung from her hair, just as it’s hard to imagine the higher-ups applauding 2014’s “Video Girl,” a black-and-white art film disguised as a music video in which Twigs watches security-camera footage of herself dancing around a man in an execution chamber. Even the story behind her name encapsulates her seemingly unpremeditated, autonomous career moves, while also reflecting the tension between availability and evasion that animates her work. “Twigs,” a nickname she got as a teenager in dance class because her joints popped, is a nod toward the intimate — an inside joke about a bodily curiosity. She added the FKA (“formerly known as,” also “forever known as”) before her first U.S. tour in 2014 to avoid being sued by a band called the Twigs. But the prefix also appealed because it amped up the name’s androgyny and subverted a celebrity culture in which, as she says, the “one-name” female singer’s persona can override women’s “contribution to their art.” As she explains, “FKA Twigs felt like something to explore, rather than a female artist to become obsessed with.”
“PEOPLE ARE QUITE confused,” says Twigs’s trainerEfua Baker, “especially men,” by what Baker calls Twigs’s “two completely different energies.” On the one hand is her lovely demeanor and “childlike” tendency to lose herself in the act of creation; on the other is her almost scarily immovable will. Baker is one of a few tough-loving matriarchs (Marshall-Smith is another) who take a holistic interest in Twigs’s well-being — trying to ensure that she sleeps (a losing battle), eats properly and surrounds herself with the right people. Baker, a former model and dancer, while hardly shy herself, sometimes wishes Twigs would “just go along with” things even if they run counter to her vision. But she laughs when describing Twigs’s “fearlessness.” Once, when Twigs was directing a commercial shoot, she wanted a male athlete to unleash a primal scream of victory. The man hesitated. So, Baker recalls, “Twigs is like, ‘I’llshow you, so you’ll feel comfortable.’ … And this tiny little thing just gets on set and we’ve got, like, hundreds of people [there], and she goes into the middle of the set and justscreams, until you feel her neck is going to rip open! And then she’s just like[demure voice], ‘See?’”
Twigs’s collaborators often speak of her stamina and work ethic with mystified pride. Yvonne explains that the video shoot for “Cellophane” required Twigs to be on the pole for eight hours straight, whereas most other dancers might manage two. Imagine lifting your own body weight for that long, she says, while also dealing with the bruising and blisters that come with the pole dancer’s art.Theo Adams, who directed Twigs’s “Magdalene” tour in 2019, recalls the time when, because of an overlong video shoot in Los Angeles and an overloud seatmate on her flight, Twigs arrived in Berlin two hours before the first European show without having slept in 50 hours. In the concert, which brought together what Adams calls a series of nonhierarchical references, “from opera and commedia dell’arte to punk gigs and Parisian cabaret,” Twigs sang while executing tap, pole, wushu and several costume changes. As Adams wrote in an email, “[The show] is relentlessly taxing on both Twigs’s body and voice, and with such extreme sleep deprivation, I believed the task was practically impossible.” But she aced it. I ask her if she ever worries things might go wrong in live performance. No, she says, “because I will have practiced a not-OK amount.”
WHEN I SPEAK with Twigs a month later, via Zoom, she is tired. She has nearly completed her new album, slated to come out next year but for now shrouded in secrecy, and needs to deal with the life side of life. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, I won’t be able to travel to London to try out the pole in her home. Instead, we say things like, “Maybe we’ll meet at a show, if people ever play shows again.” What does it mean for Twigs to record music without knowing when she’ll be able to perform it live? It’s a major question for any touring musician in this age, but it’s especially salient for one whose stage roots run so deep. Describing the concept for the last tour, Adams told me that he and Twigs deliberately rejected the “industrial warehouses or vast gallery spaces” one might have expected from what he calls her “alien-like” persona: Instead, they developed the show at the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, a historic, proscenium arch theater with heavy red velvet curtains. The “Cellophane” video likewise reflects this embrace of the stage — the place where, historically, the talented entertainer and avant-garde artist have become one — not only in its basic conceit but in the click of Twigs’s heels on the floor. That sound, the weight of an actual body, while seldom heard in music videos, brings its own erotic charge.
Twigs’s video for her single “Sad Day,” which was released on Aug. 28 but was filmed before the pandemic hit, serves as a meta-commentary on the possible directions of her future work. It was directed byHiro Murai, the filmmaker best known for his inventive music videos and work onDonald Glover’s TV show “Atlanta,” and features the sword-fighting skills Twigs acquired for the stage but brings them to a late-night Chinese takeout spot and into a city apartment. In the restaurant, Twigs challenges a man to a lovers’ duel, then they fly home, where the man slices through Twigs’s face, cleaving the two halves of her body, between which something pink bubbles and blooms. The turn to the fantastic is signature Twigs, but the video’s everyday setting, and the presence of other people in the frame, reflect her desire to trade what she calls the “white space” of her earlier videos for something like the real world.
But reality is as much a hindrance as an inspiration. And notwithstanding Twigs’s inventive approach to the music video as a genre, the music industry has yet to figure out how to capitalize on the form other than by framing it as an advertisement for an artist’s album or tour. The fact that live performance is currently impossible — Twigs estimates she has lost a year’s worth of shows — thwarts her renewed devotion to the stage and the flesh-and-blood audience. It also deprives her of a major source of revenue. She admits to breaking down early on in the lockdown, falling to her knees and wondering, “Whatis going to happen?” She has always lived, calmly but fiercely, according to simple mottos, such as “Preparation plus opportunity equals success.” She says little about her new album except that it’s a “vibrant” work spurred on by another such maxim: “Keep the dream alive.”
THE T LIST:A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now.
She takes heart in thinking about how the universe has always opened a way for her. If her life were a movie, it might be like the 1986 cult classic fantasy film “Labyrinth,” she says, where, at the most vexing of times, “a little creature comes up and it’s like, ‘Hey, come over here! It’s this way!’ And you’re, like, in a nightie” — she laughs, gaining momentum — “and you’re going through leaves and then a thing opens and you’re at a party, or — what’s it called? A banquet … and David Bowie’s there to take you to the weird staircase.” In other words, she believes in her “through line,” she adds, her ability to make it through the maze.
Of course, she has done so mainly by acquiring skills. As we speak, she moves nimbly from describing the wild, otherworldly labyrinth to making a pitch for the value of becoming good at things — and one can hear how she navigates the poles that are central to her life and work: the cosmic and the mundane. With the modesty of a true artisan, she tells me that when she has children, she will teach them that “skills can take you places”: “Just learn something — the violin or the oboe or play chess a lot — and you might get to go to Italy one day and do a chess tournament.” For now, she hopes to get good enough at martial arts to do something with it in China. She has seen a lot, and created a lot. But she’s still the young woman who wants to know where the world is.
Styled by Julia Sarr-Jamois. Hair by Rio Sreedharan at the Wall Group. Makeup by Lucy Burt at LGA Management using Pat McGrath Labs. Production: Yasser Abubeker. Manicure: Sylvie Macmillan at M&A World Group using Weleda. Photo assistant: Mathias Karl Gontard. Stylist’s assistants: Christina Smith and Giulia Bandioli. Tailor: Michelle Warner.