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- Duckwrth wears PLAN C suit, MARC JACOBS boots, and BVLGARI jewelry. close
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- Duckwrth wears PLAN C suit, MARC JACOBS boots, and BVLGARI jewelry.
It’s nearly 5:30 pm on a Wednesday in late October and the rapper Duckwrth is on a short break during a photo shoot. He bobs his head to a jaunty funk ditty from the 1960s while scooping a blue tortilla chip into a container of Trader Joe’s guacamole. He eats it.
It’s nearing the fourth hour of the shoot, which is for this magazine and this article, part of the promo work Duckwrth is doing to promote his upcoming album, All American F*ckBoy. He pops a few more guacamole-chips into his mouth. When you don’t eat meat, you’ve got to prioritize your protein intake.
Duckwrth’s wearing a plaid top with suspenders holding up jeans that fail to conceal his white boxer shorts underneath. He’s done a lot of outfit changes today already and can’t remember what number look this one is.
Between his ears that sparkle with silver jewelry, on either sides of his eyes, are the black stars the makeup artist painted on his face – what he calls “hornstars,” his signature look for the past year. He’s at the Moon Room, a cocktail bar on Melrose Avenue, a newer addition to the block with a checkered floor, a baby grand piano, mirrored walls, and lots of natural light. The bar presents differently during the day. Less sultry, less moody, but oozing with potential as a shooting location. The photographer looks at the time and suggests Duckwrth – or “Duck” as he calls him – go outside, onto the balcony, so he can take advantage of this golden hour for light.
The balcony is narrow, safeguarded with a stucco railing, and sounds of the city during rush hour float upwards to the second story. Duckwrth is outside alone. The photographer is still inside, in the Moon Room, trying something new, he says, trying to see if he can capture his subject from within the venue, a pane of glass between them. Duckwrth is open to this idea. He is a champion of thinking creatively, of trying different ways to do something old.
The photographer is directing Duckwrth or at least trying to. Between the sounds of kids laughing on a school yard, crows cawing at each other, and a minivan honking rhythmically at the intersection, neither the recording artist nor the photographer can hear the other.
A phone is delivered to Duckwrth, his phone, the one that had been playing the tunes earlier, and now he can hit the poses being suggested to him. Halloween is just a day away and there are flecks of blood on the window between them, one of the Moon Room’s few holiday decorations.
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- Duckwrth wears KAPITAL Jacket, UNCUFFED harness, and CARTIER jewelry.
“Nice,” the photographer says, a smile stretching over his face as his stomach growls and he remembers with relief that he has Doordash on the way with an order of tacos for the two of them. They should be here any minute now.
“Fuck yeah, that shit looks tight,” the photographer moans. “Look over at the light. Chin up. Yes!”
A few more snaps, and then it’s time to review the shots. A neon clock on the building behind them is permanently stopped at 9 o’clock. The corners of the sky are starting to peel into pink and the endless whirr of traffic hugs the air around them, as they click through the photos.
“I look very warm,” Duckwrth says, peering at the screen of the camera. “I look welcoming, even with the fake blood near my face.”
A TMZ celebrity tour bus glides along Melrose and stops at the red light below them. A tour guide’s muffled voice can be heard, possibly sharing lore about the restaurant below the Moon Room, the Benjamin, recently opened by the co-founder of the streetwear brand, The Hundreds.
The light turns green and the TMZ bus lumbers down the road, the swiveling necks of curious tourists fading out of view.
Little did those tourists know they’d been right beside a real life, flesh-and-blood celebrity. That just a handful of yards away, on the other side of that railing, had been Duckwrth, a 35-year-old recording artist from the City of Angels preparing to drop his third studio album, one that ushers in a new phase for him, and alerts the world to the end of his villain era.
Duckwrth’s memory is really bad. In fact, it’s terrible.
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- Duckwrth wears NIKITA KARIZMA Jacket, MARNI pants, and SHAY Fine jewelry.
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- Duckwrth wears NIKITA KARIZMA Jacket, MARNI pants, and SHAY Fine jewelry.
He forgets easy stuff all the time, he says. He thinks it’s because that’s just how his brain is wired. He’s always thinking about the future and onto what’s next, like a sponge continually soaking up water and then squeezing itself dry to make way for the next soak.
He’s working on it though. He doesn’t want to hold onto the past, but at the same time he recognizes that being able to reflect and recall is a steppingstone to self-change.
“It’s important to remember certain things. Maybe not what I wore on Wednesday, but definitely other more essential things, like matters of the heart, especially if it’s about hurting someone else,” he says.
In many ways, that’s what All American F*ckboy is about and it’s why he wrote this album. Themes of love, loss, jealousy, and infidelity. Though he is vague about exactly what happened and who he wronged, themes of love, loss, jealousy, and infidelity ring loudly throughout this project.
The album also ruminates on his other regrets and bad behaviors from the last few years. Namely, drinking too much, doing drugs, staying up too late, and keeping the party going long after it should have stopped.
Duckwrth will never be able to travel back in time and have a redo. He knows this. But he’s started to make amends and change. In fact, that’s how All American F*ckBoy is designed: to show that in the end, Duckwrth has grown and is continuing to evolve into his next higher self.
For one, Duckwrth is now sober. He doesn’t drink or partake in illicit substances. He approaches his relationships differently as well. He’s more cognizant of the impacts his actions can have on others and the self-destructive patterns that led him to repeat those mistakes.
“We all go through stuff and there’s usually two choices we can make,” he says. “We can let whatever we’re going through take us down the wrong path and let it just fully wreck us. Or we can take that negativity, that transgression, whatever it may be, and transmute it to something better. We can learn to shut the fuck up and just listen. To understand our wrongdoing in it. To admit we were wrong. To take accountability and not do it again. ”
Hence the new album. It’s an aural reminder, if you will, of blunders Duckwrth doesn’t want to repeat packaged in album-form, communicated in lyrics and bars, and broadcast to the world so that the masses can hold him accountable. It’s his attempt to not only right his wrongs, but maybe even teach others not to go astray as well.
Duckwrth is a believer that things happen for a reason. It’s the only way he can explain his past womanizing. He needed to go down that road if only to accumulate material and inspiration for this album. Without his real-life transgressions and subsequent regrets, there would have been no “hero’s journey” for him to relay in the album. Because while the first 65% of the album charts his villainy and reign of chaos and selfishness, by the end of it, we see a glimmer of hope. We see the beginning of his transformation and a suggestion that others, too, can change like he has.
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- Duckwrth wears NAMILIA jacket, RHUDE shorts, and DAVID YURMAN jewelry.
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- Duckwrth wears NIKITA KARIZMA Jacket, MARNI pants, and SHAY Fine jewelry.
Of course, the Duckwrth of today is not entirely unlike the Duckwrth of yesteryear. Yes, he no longer drinks, and he doesn’t party as hard and he’s more thoughtful of the other person in his relationships. But he’s still a fuckboy – kind of. A “recovering fuckboy,” as he puts it.
The new and improved Duckwrth is more aware now and can see the driving forces that led to his downward spiral. He’s better equipped at recognizing negative behaviors and more capable of re-routing himself from responding in the same ways he used to. He says he has more control over his mind and the decisions he makes. Cutting out all that distracting behavior has freed up a lot of his time, too, helping him pursue more projects and think more creatively.
Still, it’s baby steps from here. You can’t change overnight, but maybe by the time he’s done touring for this album he’ll be in remission.
Until then, he hopes this album will help other womanizers recognize that redemption can be worth the sacrifice. In fact, if there was one person he thinks should listen to this album to find spiritual transformation, he’d pick Donald Trump.
“Trump is a fuckboy,” Duckwrth points out, “and America is his victim.”
In fact, he’s worse than a fuckboy. Trump “the King of Fuckboys.”
“Fuckboys are good with their words, good at convincing and manipulating others,” Duckwrth says. “And that’s what Trump does. He’s totally in his villain era and the people love it. The worse he is, the more they love him.”
Duckwrth had tried to steer the election results in the other direction. He tried, really for the first time since he’s become a public figure, to use his proverbial soapbox (aka his social media accounts) to encourage his fans to go out and vote, reminding them of the important role they play in influencing the course of U.S. history.
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- Duckwrth wears KAPITAL Jacket, UNCUFFED harness, and CARTIER jewelry.
But of course, things unfurled differently than how he’d expected. He’s pretty numb, if you ask him, but he’s staying strong. He hasn’t turned to drink to cope – not even on election night which saw him staying up late until the official results were announced.
So yeah, Duckwrth did his part. And he has to be happy with that. He’s not going to look backwards and let himself regret not doing this or that to sway the election. It is what it is.
But there’s one tiny hope left that he could hold onto. What if Donald Trump were to listen to his new album? What if Donald Trump were to play through all 21 tracks, making it to “Temporary Pleasures,” the very last song of the album? And what if Donald Trump were to vibe to that song so hard that he listened to it all the way through – all the way through to the very last line, which goes:
“I had to fuck around and find out what loving you is all about.”
And what if that line – those last 14 words on the 53-minute album – made Donald Trump pause, just for a moment, to question how mistakes he made in his last term could be transmuted into learning experiences for his next term. One can hope.
