Kenneth Blume has been prioritizing the art. After more than a decade in music, the five-time Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum record producer, musician, and songwriter—better known as Kenny Beats—had a realization: he needed to slow the fuck down. “All the richest people of this era have given us apps so that we ourselves can be Picasso, and show our art to the world,” Blume says. “I always thought that if I wasn’t up on Twitter, on YouTube, on Twitch with my music, that no one would hear it. That turned into a fever.” Blume’s name is synonymous not just with his own music and his beloved YouTube series The Cave, but also with acclaimed collaborations alongside Vince Staples, Toro y Moi, Rico Nasty, and others. But in an era that glorifies hustle and constant output, the digital treadmill was leaving him depleted. “Inevitably, your career will be hot and cold in any creative field. Cold years feel debilitating.”

So, he made a choice. He stopped doing anything that didn’t nourish him: no more shows, no merch drops, no filming. “Something hit me about a year ago where I just realized that my anxiety wasn’t quite serving me how it used to,” he noted. “I started to feel this need at this point in my life, my career, to hone in on my art and on the music first, rather than the business. This last year has been only about the art, and the art practice.” That doesn’t mean he’s been idle. Calling from his drive down the 101, Blume talks through what it looks like to live a life oriented around creative practice. Recently, he’s worked with bands like Geese and Fcukers, scored his first film, Lurker (directed by one of his closest friends, Alex Russell), developed music for an HBO series and quietly worked on a big surprise for The Cave fans, set to land later this year. “The music that I’ve made during this time period we’re talking about, it’s easily the best music I’ve ever made. And it’s easily the best art I’ve ever made.” —Shaquille Heath

What’s an artwork that made you raise your brows recently?
A graffiti wall off the 101.

What was happening when you saw it — and what made you stop and stare?
I used to work for one of the biggest graffiti websites on the internet called 12oz Prophet, where I was an intern for a year. I’ve always loved graffiti, but I specifically love New York graffiti. I grew up in Connecticut and spent all my time taking Metro-North to New York City and seeing tags as a kid. As a teenager, I started to care and keep track of who I was seeing.

Moving to California and being here for years now, I have so much respect for the great graffiti crews. But I’ve never been a fan of the LA style versus New York City, where there’s a kind of tradition of two-color, two-letter, or very simple throw ups. But, I love being in traffic on the 101 and seeing all the graffiti on my commute. Over the last year or so, they have been buffing this highway about once a week. And so every single time I get on it, there is either a new tag, or a tag erased, and this is in the hundreds at this point. There’s also about four or five really giant divider walls on the side of the highway. And there’s a few that are very sprawling, like 200-feet long, where you will literally see four to six foot tags all right next to each other, 70 of them, different writers from LA, different types of people, whatever. And it’s become this thing over the last year, whether during the fires, during the Dodgers winning, during ICE doing all the fucking terrible shit they’re doing, I’m seeing this kind of evolving art piece in front of me that’s talking about what’s happening in the city. It just feels to me like one of the most exciting moments in West Coast graffiti that I’ve been aware of in the last 12 years of living here. 

Did it change the way you look at your practice?
A thing about graffiti that a lot of people don’t realize is the risk—not only stealing paint but doing something that’s physically taxing, and maybe getting arrested. It’s not even your real name that you’re tagging. You’re not getting anything back from this, other than the feeling you get from that tag running for 10 years, in a spot that no one else could touch. These guys are out there, faceless, saying something every day with their art. Even when it gets buffed, they go back and they write the same thing the next day. Maybe one passerby, maybe a few, will see it and say “I guess, I should post something today. Maybe I should send 20 bucks to this art fund.” Art might not be able to change the world as fast as it used to, but it can definitely affect people. In these moments, my job isn’t just to produce or make beats. My job isn’t just to be a human and go help. I started to realize, both are my job. Making art isn’t a fool’s errand when tragedy is going on. Art is how I got all these people to pay attention to me in the first place.

Photo by Kimou Meyer