Our podcast sound this week has a bit more echo than usual. Please forgive me.
While pulling together the stuff of this Zeloszelos Marchandt podcast episode, rap superstar Lil Uzi Vert’s hella queer Coachella performance and their subsequent pronouns update has foregrounded Black male queerness in the culture.
I’m so glad that kid got freed. Kendrick Lamar stablemate Isaiah Rashid hasn’t rebounded from the fan crisis that resulted from his 2022 fellatio tapes leak.
But I don’t wish Lil Uzi Vert just freer than Isaiah Rashid. Not simply hip hop free—a stunted adolescent American male freedom. He deserves to be as free as my friend Marchandt.
It’s not a Nas X kind of freedom either, but that seems in the ballpark.
When I first met Marchandt, he was running news at Portland’s dominant indie radio station and had yet to transition. Marchandt came down from Oregon to LA the weekend before having top surgery. I think that’s given us a bond.
Zeloszelos Marchandt, in Marrakesh earlier this week.
My inclination is to think of him as a Washington County cat, in part because he ran to represent Beaverton in Salem a few years ago. Having said that, the stuff that Marchandt has done in Portland—specifically Ten Tiny Talks—makes this artist an undeniable Pacific Northwest urbanite.
Art watchers away from The West got a look at today’s guest when highly-respected Hyperallergic cited Marchandt’s work in divine imagery. And then there’s his work in the circus. Black circus, that is.
I sometimes call Marchandt a writer and director, but I have yet to quantify his talent. All I can tell you for certain is that they’re free.
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