Bladee’s “Apple”

Reichwald has a strange relationship to Bladee.¹

Much of Reichwald’s work centers his relationship to his own stardom: a complicated dynamic that sees him vacillate between acceptance of his fated significance as Special Teacher (codified through the symbol of Rain), and acceptance of his fated insignificance as a self-fashioned “King Nothing” (codified through the symbol of Trash).

The result of this simultaneous and equivalently-forceful tug between Stardom and Normalcy, Arrogance and Humility, and Everything and Nothing is a kind of existential agony, a yearning for one’s proper position in the world’s grand cosmic story.

Bladee’s “Apple” demonstrates how Reichwald feels he discovered his persona Bladee, and with it, an unearned, miraculous role in this story—how, like a stray garden kitten, it chose him. In the accompanying music video, 53 seconds elapse before we hear a single sound from the track.

Instead, we hear heavy rain, and watch as Reichwald, over-exposed and -illuminated, happens upon a pile of trash. He removes a “Trash Island” pendant, clips it to his neck, and after a flash “transition” that holds the camera on the pendant, the song begins.

In finding and donning the pendant, Reichwald, the nobody, becomes Bladee, the somebody, and Bladee, activated, transitioned into the Star-dimension through the flash, sipping his fun-house-mirror version of Lean (Listerine), can deliver his opening salvo, a meditation on his transformation: “What can I say? Everything just happened to play out this way.”

As fellow dwellers of the present moment, and outsiders looking in, this comment disturbs our intuited notions of free will: life doesn’t just “play out,” we are free actors in a world at least partially of our own making. We’re convinced Reichwald made, and makes, countless decisions to become and renew the minorly-famous celebrity known as Bladee—surely, we tell ourselves, Reichwald chooses the Bladee. And we’d be right, at least partially. But when one looks at one’s life backwards and forwards, when one stands athwart the present moment, when one sees one’s life with the eyes of God, one detects a star-crossed inevitability, a Fortune-blessed golden thread. One detects, in other words, a story. All it takes is to see the world’s grand cosmic story through the eyes of the Storyteller.²

Paying $300 for fake Xanax in Miami, or wearing fake Prada—when experienced and discussed linearly—are terminuses, end-points. And, afterwards, one can tell “the story” of that wild trip to Miami during the nascency of one’s fame. But experienced outside of time, or charted upon a fifth dimension, looked at through the eyes of a Grand Storyteller, these moments transform, concatenate, lengthen: they become set-ups, call-backs, stepping-stones. No longer stories in and of themselves, they become the woven threads of a larger story.

But how exactly do those remembered moments of vacation cringe and disaster connect with this present “Apple” moment of performed celebrity? Bladee suggests that’s not for us to determine—our too-human sense-making won’t let us see the connection. We can’t say. But we can intuit that everything happened to play out this way for a reason. We can intuit that “then” is as important to “now” as “now” is to itself. “Then” and “now,” for the Storyteller, are one and the same—both circular threads on the woven world-story He speaks into existence. Much of Bladee’s spiritual project endeavors to inhabit the vision of this Storyteller—and this Storyteller sees all. The Storyteller sees how time folds in, how the gyre widens ad infinitum: how humans actually dwell in one ever-deepening ever-present. How fake Prada turns to real Prada turns to fake Prada, and back again, and back again, and back again.

And when faced with this awesome, fate-filled, consequential Story granted by inhabiting the Storyteller’s backwards-forwards-glance, really, what can one say? How did Reichwald become Bladee, really? Because he just did. It is what it is, or, as Thaiboy ingeniously amplifies this didactic koan, it is what it really is. Bladee happened upon the pendant—it chose him. Loss and gain really are the same—they led you here, to this constantly-evolving backwards-forwards present. It used to be two, now it’s three. In a moment, it will be four. It may even be two again. In the end it’s all dreams. The beginning may be dreams, too. That’s for our Storyteller to know and us to find out.

Perhaps the only appropriate word to use when confronted with these awesome and counter-intuitively simple truths is one of Bladee’s favorite’s: crazy. And Bladee does, just about everywhere, gloriously bask in the craziness of life’s story—especially so when the Speaker of your life story has, somehow, made you famous, spoken you into Stardom. Examine Bladee’s verse on Sickboyrari’s “Famous”:

The fast life, it's crazy
Trash Island, we goin' crazy
Sicko Gang, we so famous
Sad Boys, we goin' crazy
Famous
Sick Gang, we so famous
Trash Star, we so famous
Sick Gang, we so famous (Ayy, ayy)

Stunned at the concatenating set-ups and call-backs of one’s life story—what Bladee will later call his Drain Story—what else can one report except a dull list of self-identifications and slack-jawed notions of disbelief? Really—what else is there to say? We famous, and it’s crazy. It really is.

Later on “Apple,” we get two of Bladee’s most iconic and complex lines, the final two of the track:

I used to be you now it’s me
That Apple fell far from the tree

Here, Reichwald suggests that he used to be one of us, that is, the non-famous nothing-havers, the outsiders looking in, but somehow, he’s now Bladee, “me,” a pendant wearing rapper whose song we’re listening to right now. An apple falling far from a tree connotes a sense of deep, unexpected difference, especially of inheritance, and thus its typical usage occurs in familial settings—humble sheep-shearers with a precocious ethno-musicology-PhD child, for instance.

Here, Bladee uses it to show how he could have been like us, inheritors of minor characterhood in the world’s cosmic play-story—he should have been like us, but the apple happened to fall far from the tree. Everything, actually, just happened to play out this way. The crucial grammatical construction here is the causeless, past-tense, and unchangeable “apple fell”—Bladee’s stardom was something that occurred to him, not something he sought or manifested himself. He didn’t even create or discover the iconography of his Stardom, the numerical symbol “333,”—no, those numbers simply “fell from the rain.”

“Rain” is another one of Reichwald’s favorite and most consistent concept-symbols, typically deployed to symbolize a fateful, cosmic life-manna—a fate unexpected, unchangeable, inevitable. A fate that drops from the heavens. We have no control over the weather, when it rains, it rains—just as, Bladee suggests on “Apple,” we have no control over the stories of our lives. The 53 seconds of Rain leads him to that pile of Trash. It compels him forward.

“Apple” leads to Rain, leads to Trash, leads to Reichwald happening upon the persona Bladee, leads to that persona’s attendant symbology, leads to “Apple.”³

What can he say? Everything just happened to play out this way.

Footnotes

1. Relevant here are Reichwald’s comments from 2019, in response to the question “Is Bladee different from Ben?”:

“Of course, at some level, but it’s also me. Have you ever seen “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”? Bladee is like my Stand. It’s my soul, how I want the world to be — an extreme version of myself. Bladee definitely is me, but not on this plane. It’s me on a higher dimension. But it’s still me in some way, you know? I created Bladee first as a character, and then I grew into it and found how to be the truest version of myself.”

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure wiki expounds: “A Stand is an entity psychically generated by its owner, referred to as a Stand User (スタンド使い Sutando Tsukai). It generally presents itself as a figure hovering over or near the user and possesses abilities beyond that of an ordinary human, which, depending on the Stand User, can be wielded for good or evil.”

“Bladee” may be Ben on “a higher dimension,” but the other side of this coin is the bitter reality of celebrity, which tarnishes Ben’s interactions with others and the world around him. Hold that thought.

2. On “I think…”, Bladee explains the substance of this Storyteller-God. The cosmic story this God sings into existence is also the fabric of its own composition: “Pure love only, baby. Always is. Always was.” On “I think…”, unsure whether or not Bladee himself is a “nothing,” or “God”—“the duality of life, uh-huh, that’s it”— Bladee at least knows what this God is made of: “God is love.” Always is. Always was.

3. This isn’t the only place Bladee demonstrates bewilderment at his own ascendancy to stardom. On “Icarus 3reestyle,” Bladee sings “Guess they like how I talk on the songs, turn it to a art,” as if he discovered that he could do this “Bladee” character for a living (on his 8th studio album, no less). I also just adore when Bladee improperly uses “a” when “an” is actually the accurate article. “A art”—one of the last remaining hangovers from Reichwald’s learning of English as a second language. Endearing, of course, but these grammar errors also, paradoxically, amplify his spiritual teaching for native English speakers, the subtle message being that these truths are so grand they cannot be contained by the too-human system that tries to express it. They outsize the grammatical snare that tries to contain their truth. See, for instance, the way Bladee switches between “loss and gain is the same,” which appears as such when verbalized in songs like “1:1,” and “loss and gain are the same,” which appears as such on the Good Luck album cover. The message is too grand, too epic—it doesn’t matter, not one bit, how it’s grammatically captured. They is, they is, they is.

CHAPTER 3

On Bladee

Bladee’s “Apple”