I see three pairs of hands. Considered individually, each position is “true,” in as much as it’s a valid interpretation of the painting, but the stunning effect occurs when one realizes it’s not that there are three pairs of hands here (though there are), but rather that it forces the viewer to apprehend and encounter the painting three times.

So, too, with Bladee’s phantom-lyrics: they resist the primacy of a singular encounter. They require re-listening and re-apprehending. If you listen closely enough, you may just hear exactly what you need to.⁴ Why else would he, in that same song, “Reality Surf,” sing: “Take a word and change the meaning/ Only you”? 

So—is it Bladee or Blade-y?

It’s both. This is why he tells Narduwar: “I say Bladee. But you can say Blade-y, too.”

Take a word and change the meaning—only you.⁵

…But why the extra e? Why not simply “Blade”? 

First, the extra e simulates internet-modified language, like saying “heyyyy” over text or “hii(:”. It subtly communicates the “online,” hyperized, faux-artificial nature of Reichwald’s art.

But there’s a deeper reason. Consider a normal “blade,” a knife used for chopping vegetables. This object is of the utmost human origin—some historians believe it to be humanity’s first tool. We’re talking prehistory: someone or something once used a blade to kill and eat an animal for which we do not have a name. This is an ancient, primordial object, of wood, rock, flint, bronze, iron, and steel. 

The name “Bladee” suggests that this world can be endlessly remixed, that it may not be the only world, that blades may have begun with prehistory and may last into posthistory, but that they can be plucked from that human timeline and examined with the Sableye-esque eyes of ahistory, until they become a non-object, a fiery sword, a fiery word, spinning around in one’s hands like a CS:GO F-inspect performed from a cold heaven.

The extra “e” extends this deeply human object, capable of cutting, damaging, and restructuring material, into the immaterial realm. It challenges and resists the concrete, the visible world where knives slice bread and dictionaries define “blade” as “the flat cutting edge of a knife, saw, or other tool or weapon.” What kind of material would a “bladee” cut? Anti-matter, clouds, shadows, ghosts, phantoms, hauntings. The name “Bladee” suggests that this world can be endlessly remixed, that it may not be the only world, that blades may have begun with prehistory and may last into posthistory, but that they can be plucked from that human timeline and examined with the Sableye-esque eyes of ahistory, until they become a non-object, a fiery sword, a fiery word, spinning around in one’s hands like a CS:GO F-inspect performed from a cold heaven. Take a word and change the meaning—only you.

Footnotes

1. It’s worth identifying, here, I think, the tension between Reichwald’s art and the manifold supporting acts that buoy it. I’m of the opinion that Reichwald would be far less compelling a figure were it not for the production of Whitearmor, Güd, Woesum, Varg, Mechatok, etc. That, however, is another study by itself. While I discuss, obliquely, the “beats” and instrumentals of Bladee’s work, I cannot do service to the musicological dimensions of Reichwald’s project. My dim sense is that the producers behind Bladee deserve far more credit than they receive, and are in fact deeply responsible for many of the philosophical achievements of Reichwald’s work. For now, let the reader understand that this study’s failure to adequately treat the musicological dimensions does not imply inadequate admiration or intuited importance.

This is one of Reichwald’s perennial pursuits as an artist: to effectively communicate and transfer an experience of dislocatory transcendence.

However, it’s also worth mentioning here what I see to be the animus behind many of Whitearmor/ Güd/ Woesum/ Mechatok/ Working on Dying’s beats: a desire to de-realize the instrumental from a human origin. By this I mean these producers go great lengths to computerize, technify, etherealize, divinize, or demonize their sounds—the opposite, say, of a lone acoustic guitar recorded in a field. It seems, for Bladee, the more successful the beat, the less it sounds human-made. The song “Rainbow,” and its accompanying graphics, convey this point nicely in lyrics, instrumental, and visuals. All three work to subtly convey to the listener and viewer an experience of dislocation and transcendence. The graphics are a hodge-podge of computerized ephemera—like a GPU-malfunctioning slot machine on crack. We’re asked to take a “Rainbow Road” and “put the world on hold,” amidst a beat that sounds like an alien sporting team’s theme song. These three channels combine into one great triune, triumphant effect: to transport one to a non-human dimension so one can more adequately receive Reichwald’s didactic koans. Mechatok’s “Rainbow” instrumental asks us to inhabit an alien plane, to shuffle off our mortal coil, to don the correctly tinted glasses so we can then read Reichwald’s message. As I’ll argue later, this is one of Reichwald’s perennial pursuits as an artist: to effectively communicate and transfer an experience of dislocatory transcendence.°

This is not to say that there are other types of Bladee-beats (it’s always fun to YouTube “Bladee type beat”), and it’s a particular joy when Bladee goes hard on a more Chief-Keef-esque track (“Cover Up” comes to mind). But I’m more interested in what I see to be Reichwald’s finely and intentionally orchestrated musical effect: a dislocated transcendence in order to better prepare his listener to adequately receive his spiritual-philosophical teaching, encoded as it is between meme and a performed, knowingly ironic Rapper/Celebrity icon materialism.

°And isn’t this what you want? When you lay awake at night, just before you fall asleep, when a cold wind passes through your window and across your face, doesn’t a sensation come over you, a deep ache, a yearning for something more, something that will explain or obliterate the husk of this existence? Surely there is something more for you, something more to this—to life—an experience of transcendence, ascension, a portal to a more charged world, a beyond-world, a spirit realm?

The essence of Reichwald’s music is this search for transcendence. Crucially, Reichwald does not limit this search for transcendence to the sense of going beyond—rather, the true experience of transcendence is actually, truthfully, authentically encountering something that’s really real. For Reichwald, the search for transcendence and the search for reality are the same. This explains the slow decay of his materialist tendencies, so natural to a rapper—why he throws away his Moncler in the sacrifice. Material, Bladee learns throughout his albums—that’s not really real. God and Love, Reichwald’s newer art suggests, may be. And in fact they might be the same thing. 

But we’re here now. That Moncler may come in handy during that cold wind. And there’s another problem for the Anthropocene: we’ve never been surrounded with more unreality.

You ache, and you feel called to something more, something deeper, and so you see Reichwald in a similar position, anxiously trying to receive and decode messages from this special place, singing in joyful misery from the rungs of a ladder to a higher plane.

Think of yourself, for instance—you’ve dumped months of your life into video game characters, into mining mithril ore, sleuthing old flames’ new flames, trying to get Platinum in League of Legends, retweeting dumb shit you will forget about the second it is time to make dinner, etc, etc, et al, ad infinitum. None of it is real the way the sun is real, or that cold wind. Unless, of course, that’s unreal, too. Is there a place for you who find everything unreal? Even themselves?

If there is a place, could it even be of this world? Of this life? Surely not: it must be after, some fifth dimension, something beyond this, beyond hunger and anxiety and yearning:

And when one loses interest in life, what is one but a body, a husk, an insect? If we cannot transcend our mortal coil we are no better than the spiders in the rafters. 

Where are you? Who are you? 

You ache, and you feel called to something more, something deeper, and so you see Reichwald in a similar position, anxiously trying to receive and decode messages from this special place, singing in joyful misery from the rungs of a ladder to a higher plane.

 2. This is also why so many of Bladee’s attributed lyrics are incorrect. I’ve been foiled, many a time, by looking up the lyrics of a Bladee song only to be baffled by transcribed lines. To make matters worse for the lyric-hunter, there are very few Bladee songs on YouTube in which the lyrics exist within the description. This tiny absence entails enormous consequences for his work: without lyrics in the description, and without an accurate facsimile of lyrics elsewhere online, Bladee encourages the listener to create the lyrics for himself, to discover and draw his own truth. This same process occurs everywhere, all the time, when anyone tries to make sense of listened words, but Bladee seems to take special delight in the slipperiness of his lyrics. He certainly doesn’t make it easy on the listener to parse exactly what he’s saying, and he certainly won’t provide a transcription. He invites his listeners to do some sort of narrativizing themselves—to participate in his artistic craft. Granted, this is all happening at human speed, and not really consciously, but the phantom-like inscrutability of many of his lyrics engenders, I think, that strange intimacy of Bladee’s music, almost like he’s singing just for us, whispering into our own ear.° 

°It also creates a sort of shock, when his lyrics and sounds are clearly audible, and truly outrageous, a moment where one thinks to oneself: “did I catch that?” I’m thinking, here, of “30 in my khakis” and “I’m a dog on the roof like snoopy,” and the “boing” after “my girl said she need some shit too so I hit Dior” etc.

3. I’m aware that this is also simply a feature of online lyric transcription sites. I’m sure most of this work is done by AI—don’t honestly think there’s some guy who listens to Bladee’s songs and does his best to transcribe the lyrics. It’s notable to me, though, that Year0001, Bladee’s label, often doesn’t provide the lyrics. I’m willing to bet there’s an awareness there of the benefit of not simply just mystery but also lyrical mutability. And could it be that the songs sound better when we don’t know the words?

4. It’s all well and good to suggest that Bladee creates a special listener-artist relationship through slippery, word-cloud word deliveries which allow the listener to create their own personalized channel of meaning. But where does this come from? That is, why, and how, does Bladee do this? 

Part of this, I think, is intentional: Bladee wants to preserve linguistic mystery in order to imbue his listeners with agency and demand his listeners re-apprehend them the way one would a Picasso painting. However, I also believe part of this effect is achieved unintentionally, merely by virtue of his birthplace. 

Two linguistic phenomena of Bladee’s mother tongue amplify his word clouds: the Swedish “Viby-I,” caused by something known as “Advanced Tongue Root,” and a sort of natural-auto-tune Bladee’s vibratory voice contains, known as the Swedish Pitch Accent.  Listen to that same Narduwar interview again—listen to the way Bladee responds to Narduwar at 09:25. His voice already sounds as if it’s auto-tuned, as if there’s a natural reverb setting, as if he’s echoing, or pitching up and down between high and low pitches.

The Viby-I, or Lidingö-i is a sort of buzzing sound, caused by a low and forward position of the tongue with the tongue tip high and the blades of the tongue up. This mostly affects what in English we know as the “y”, but in Stockholm Swedish it also affect the “j” sounds. The best example occurs in Bladee’s “Som Jag,” at 0:14, when he sings:

Vackra ängar, fina lamm

Fylld av längtan, ständig väntan

Vänder mig, jag ser dig

Sena nätter, korta dagar

Bortom tiden, i för evigt

Min för alltid, din förundran

Skona mig, jag ber dig

Upplever men känner ingen

This natural auto-tune and Swedish lingustic characteristic affect Reichwald’s ability to perfectly articulate his words and cause more unintended word-clouds.