How Does It Feel To Be Famous?

I profiled Corbin in Rolling Stone

One summer day over a decade ago, I got an email from an editor at The FADER magazine, asking if I wanted to write about a new band called Thestand4rd for their upcoming fall issue. The editor had read something I wrote about them on the blog Passion of the Weiss before many writers had caught wind of them. I was thrilled to accept the assignment. 500 words and $250 later, I had my first ever clip, in the print issue of my favorite music magazine.

As a writer from Minneapolis covering the Twin Cities music scene, I knew the members of the band when they were solo artists, Allan Kingdom, Bobby Raps and Psymun. But the main draw of the story, the type to interest an editor at a national music magazine, was a member of the band who went by the (soon to change) name Spooky Black. He’d gone viral on a level that I hadn’t quite witnessed before, for a song and music video that was simultaneously enchanting and befuddling. He was just 16, but he was on a meteoric rise, coveted by the proverbial cigar-chomping major record label executives and fêted by authorities like New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica. Kylie Jenner was posting his lyrics. You get the idea. Everyone wanted a piece of him.

Ten years later, Corbin didn’t go down the superstar path that was laid out for him. I mostly stopped writing about music (which is why if you’re a subscriber you’re probably confused, maybe wondering if this is the right blog). As an observer from the very beginning, I often quipped that Corbin tried to do everything he could to not become famous. I wondered about the tension between artistic integrity and commercial success. I wondered how an admittedly misanthropic teenager had his mind warped by what was, essentially, the child star experience as social media was still nascent.

This past December, I ran into Corbin and Bobby Raps at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, as we both waited to board our flights home from holiday break. They were going to back to Los Angeles. I was going back to San Francisco. By that time, Corbin was prepping a new album Crisis Kid, and I thought that moment of serendipity was as good excuse as any to spend a weekend in LA in April exploring questions I’ve wanted to ask for years.

You can read my profile of Corbin in Rolling Stone here.