Amorphous was the winner of 2020 — and he wasn’t even trying
Through mashups and mixes, a young, Black, gay boy from Philly became the hottest name in all of music. But it wasn’t planned.
Nothing we planned for happened in 2020.
Maybe some of us did plan for chaos to ensue. But, not like this. We did not plan to have to protest several murders due to police brutality, for months, during a deadly viral pandemic, that was itself killing hundreds of thousands, while the entire world was supposed to stay home as much as possible, but most in America had to fend for themselves while their government did close to nothing for them.
On top of all of that, we were expected to live.
Amorphous, like us, did not plan for 2020 to happen. In August, he had no idea where to go. “Um… I really don’t know,” he uttered when I asked him back then what was “next” for him, laughing it off. “let me stop playing — I’m such an impromptu, impulsive person that… I can’t really say exactly what I’m going to do tomorrow.”
Who could blame him? Back in that period, we were reeling from the unimaginable loss of a beloved cultural icon in Chadwick Boseman. We were stuck with days of unbearable political theater in the form of political party conventions. We watched as Twitter allowed a month of unconscionable, targeted harassment of one Black woman by Talib Kweli, a once-million dollar earning entertainer, and his sphere of influence. Somehow, designing bots to buy and resell Telfar products had became a thing. Doomscrolling was the word of the month (shoutout, Karen K. Ho). The United States Postal Service literally needed a public support campaign to keep its doors open. Half of the damn world was on fire.
If you, like his own backup SoundCloud address asks, are wondering “Who TF is Amorphous?” — prepare to have your life changed.
In August, I would have expected you to ask that question. Now, really, you’d have to be out of touch to really not know who Amorphous is. He’s truly, honestly, the only person that we should universally agree won from — no, in spite of — 2020.
When Amorphous sat and talked to me for an interview (that transformed into hours of conversation) four months ago, I didn’t have the slightest premonition that he would become one of the most influential figures on the internet in a matter of weeks, if not days.
But at the time, you could say he was just another online sensation. Amorphous is recognizable for a few things — crafting the soundtrack to the documentary KIKI, a Sundance Film Festival official selection; creating a very controversial documentary on Aaliyah; releasing a less-controversial, and in-fact-watched-by-the-subject documentary on Rihanna — but the area where he was becoming renown in, and has made a seismic-sized impact in, is the art of the music mashup.
“Actually producing music from scratch, that’s the real stuff in my eyes — but mashups are a fun exercise, almost, for me to do. I kind of work in the way that, if I’m really bored, I need to create something,” he told me.
“So my mind will just start running with different song ideas, and I’ll be listening to a song and I can hear similarities. So, I go, ‘I should put that together and see how it sounds.’ So that’s what I did a lot, really, when I was growing up and then studying at Full Sail.”
The mashups became a consistent thing for the then-teen to do.
“It’s really crazy because, ten years ago, I made the list of people I want to work with or the people that I really looked up to that I wanted to be in business with one day… Obviously, I’m not there yet.”
It was, however, clear at the time that Amorphous — known otherwise as Jimir Reece Davis — was talented and powerful. He knew that, too. Everyone else was slowly starting to figure it out.
At his core, Amorphous is still the gay, Black kid from Philadelphia. “My big three music inspirations were always Aaliyah, Beyoncé, Rihanna. As a kid, and as an adult, always. That’s the music that my brother grew me up on.”
After creating the soundtrack to KIKI and taking part in its trip through the festival circuit, all at age 18, he would soon take his talents to Full Sail University. He moved to live on campus in Orlando, Florida where he studied in the school’s unique two-year Bachelor’s of Fine Arts program for Film. Like many creatives in their early work, he started chasing the allure of his favorite entertainer — Aaliyah.
“There was also Destiny’s Child, Brandy, Usher… but I always gravitated to Aaliyah, when I was young, and obviously — I’m 22 — but she passed away before I could experience her fully as a fan. There’s videos of me as a kid, beatboxing to her songs, so there was an intangible love for her artistry there, as a kid.”
And from there came Amorphous Presents: AALIYAH — The Inside Look, a 105-minute he released in August 2017, at the age of 19 (his birthday falls on New Year’s Eve).
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“It was an impromptu thing I did in film school. I was in lecture, and I think Aaliyah had been trending or something, and [the tweets] were just not true. I’m not a gatekeeper — do I know everything about her? No — but I figured, it would be cool to do an actual Aaliyah documentary on her career…”
He emphasizes that he didn’t want to get “too much of her [personal] life, because that’s not my story to tell. That’s for her family, loved ones, to tell. But I wanted to show people that loved Aaliyah but didn’t know who she was, or were just getting to know who she was, or much about her career accomplishments.”
Even then, Amorphous had already gained recognition for his music. i-D Magazine noted how well he was at “tinkering with his favorite tracks” in mashups when interviewing him about AALIYAH — The Inside Look. He tells me that he did “like, four years of it, in two days.”
“Also, it was just a fun exercise,” he admits. “I was like, ‘I’m tired of sitting in school and not creating anything. For real.’ I’m an editor at heart, so I love to edit. So I thought it was a cute exercise. See if I could sit down, edit a full length documentary, narrate it, and do everything practically on my own.”
He did, with remarkable success. This “exercise” spurred his first interaction with Jimmy Jam, half of the famed producer duo Jam & Lewis.
“He was like, ‘yo, you’re doing an Aaliyah documentary?’ I was like, ‘yeah, just a fun thing I’m doing.’ He said, ‘that’s really, really, dope. Can I help out with one little thing?’ and I said, ‘sure.’ The audio from that interview was really hard to work with, my transcript was all wrong…
“And so, he helped out with transcribing it what he said, and he remembered much of what he said, and told me, ‘looking forward to seeing it,’” Amorphous recalls.
The success did not come without controversy, however. At first, fans were mad at the teen for “being late” with delivering the promised film. He recalls thinking, “I want to make sure it looks good. I still have school!” Then, people who weren’t so much fans took issue with his decisions with the film’s narrative, such as visiting the mausoleum where her remains are.
“You can say, it was — I wouldn’t say it was wrong for me to do it, I don’t think anything that was bad — but I know a lot of people were wondering why I was doing it, saying, ‘you’re a fan, you’re not here to tell her story, why are you doing this and that?’” he recalls, cautiously, not wanting to “ruffle any feathers” again.
“I was trying to show people that the other stuff wasn’t what this documentary was about. I was trying to show other people that, I wasn’t trying to cover any of the drama. Any of that stuff, that’s not what this was about. It wasn’t, for me. It was strictly presenting her career, things she’s done, how she’s impacted me, and how she impacted all these other artists years later.”
Other than online commentators, others apparently close to the late icon took issue as well. “People saying I should’ve reached out to ‘us’ first — my dad was very upset about that. He had some… really interesting conversations with people that were working on her music at the time, and…he got involved by himself, saying, ‘we’re going to call and talk to these people right now, because people love this project,’ and I was like, ‘Dad, please.’”
Still, the problems that came with the attention shortly blew over, although the topic still haunts his memory of the momentous film release. “It became weirdly personal,” Amorphous recalls. “I was like, ‘how?’ I didn’t — you know, I said one line about her uncle, but, I wasn’t even talking about anything really, which made it crazy — and at the end of the day, and that’s not my… personal story, so I was legitimately confused about what the issue was.”
“ It was crazy — I got messages from people from friends and family from other people on the plane [when Aaliyah and seven others died], thanking me for taking the time to talk about those people,” he says. People that worked with Aaliyah also reached out, with someone even noting that it looked “too professional,” but others complimenting that he had “knocked this out of the park.”
From there, Amorphous finished school and made another documentary, ROBYN, which was just as acclaimed as his first film, and while it had its critiques, it did not come with the controversial backlash. “Who’s better to do a documentary on than Rihanna? And it was the same thing I wanted to cover, just her career and accomplishments, because her life is not my story to tell — don’t mess with Bad Gal Riri.”
In fact, “Rihanna and her team sat and watched it… and then she followed me (on Twitter),” he says. “I was like, ‘oh, my goodness.’ That was the craziest, craziest notification. I literally threw my phone.”
My natural follow up was asking if he’d ever mustered up the courage to message or speak to her directly. Naturally, he had not.
“Oh — I’m too afraid. She hasn’t reached out to me directly, but I’ve heard from… mutual connections what she’s said about it. If she DMs me, I’ll go, ‘hey, girl, what’s up?’”
Amorphous admits that with his rising profile, “I… I can’t have those butterflies anymore, when it comes to dealing with those people.” Still, he’s star-struck by the impact and reach his work has had.
“…producing music from scratch, that’s the real stuff in my eyes — but mashups are a fun exercise, almost, for me to do.”
In August, the ‘seismic’ impact was becoming too much for the then-22 year old. In fact, he hinted that he would have to give up making them. “I’m having technical issues anyway, so I’m not making a ton of mashups anytime soon, anyway.”
Trying to remain hopeful, he recovers by adding, “but I do have a lot of other mashups that I’ve done that are just on my computer, that my subscribers on YouTube and SoundCloud want to hear. They’re asking me to not let this prevent me from putting stuff out, so that… means a lot.”
Well, technical issues wouldn’t stop him for long. This month, a random stranger decided on her own to just gift him a new MacBook. Her name is Oprah Winfrey.
That barely does justice in encapsulating just how Amorphous’ profile has skyrocketed in the last month. Seriously, I couldn’t try if I wanted to. Now, the likes of Fat Joe and Sophia Bush casually drop into his comments. Lena Waithe and Complex tap him for gigs. Matthew A. Cherry and Missy Elliott are his biggest fans, or at least among them.
Becoming that big, needless to say, was hoped for. But it was definitely not expected to come into fruition in such short time. The majority of our talk was about his more down-to-earth aspirations. At the time, that consisted of not upsetting labels or music artists with his off-the-cuff, genius mixes. He spoke cautiously following the mention of almost any artist or industry-relevant entity came up, even ones that have reached out to him, such as Jimmy Jam or MikeQ.
Make no mistake, Amorphous was being careful, but not entirely out of fear. More, out of understanding that the lack of social nuance that is caused by interacting via the internet can bring trouble in someone’s career, if not life. By this point, he had already brushed up against that trouble.
“It’s very hard to understand someone’s intentions over social media. I don’t want to be looked as someone trying to ‘capitalize’ on anything — but all I know is, hey, I believe that I did everything in good faith — and I put my hands up,” Amorphous said.
He was speaking about the aftermath of his account being taken down on Bandcamp, which spurred the conversation. After the mashup project Beyoncé x KAYTRANADA became the number-one “selling” project on the music platform, his account was forced down, giving him only a matter of hours to ensure he had all of his music, official and unofficial, available elsewhere. Still, he has nothing but kind words for the popular home for indie artists, shying away from challenging their unexplained decision.
“I put every single mashup, original track or whatever, going back to 2016, on Bandcamp. So, that includes everything… It was recommended to me from a couple of DJ friends, actually — because for a lot of us, Bandcamp was almost like a free zone for us? They didn’t have a name for snatching stuff down,” he recalls.
That’s changed as the service has grown in popularity and needs to stop those making money from copywritten work or stolen content for its bottom line. Beyoncé x KAYTRANADA didn’t exactly fit either.
The 10-track combination of songs by the two eponymous high profile entertainers was available for free, like all of Amorphous’ mashups or mixes — although a Bandcamp-supported option to donate directly when downloading was possible. Still, Beyoncé music becoming the hottest item on the site, when the singer herself wasn’t on there, likely raised alarms. Thus, Amorphous’ four years-long home for offering his work directly to fans was put down.
The tenets of our capitalistic society — copyright, corporate power, prioritizing monetary concerns — are not designed to allow for nuance in situations like these. (Just like, often, people trying to communicate clearly on the internet.) Using commercially-available artistic work for non-commercial purposes is not only allowed, but necessary for creatives. As I point out to Amorphous (a Full Sail University-graduated filmmaker of his own), filmmakers are often expected to use previously-published material when making remakes or trailers, to show their abilities; same with writers parroting previously-used pieces, or singers covering popular songs.
Taking two or more available songs, mixing them together and sharing them is the literal foundation of hip hop — if a DJ can’t do that (for free, in the case of a recording of such mixes), how would they become DJs? What’s the legal difference between playing a mix allowed, in front of a crowd, and playing it on a computer file?
“I wanted to talk to Bandcamp and I wanted to see if it was because of the donations or because of the free downloads? I had no idea. I could see if it was the donations or whatever, it would tip them off. They obviously don’t know who I am, if they see ‘best selling, Beyoncé’, we don’t have Beyoncé, who is this kid doing all this stuff? So, I never really got to talk to Bandcamp about this stuff.”
Amorphous stressed, in case the artists or their teams had caught wind of it, that he made the mashups as a fan, with the intention of supporting their artistry. “Obviously, it does get a little muddy when it gets to copyright and all that stuff. I know my intentions are pure, I know my heart and my intentions aren’t to piss anybody off or to, you know, cause me or anyone issues. I’m making them, showing my creativity as a fan,” he points out.
“That’s all I can say.”
At least one of the artists involved — KAYTRANADA — publicly acknowledged the project, without objecting, by liking tweets about it, and no one else directly made their objections known, in terms of those with claims to the music’s copyright.
As fresh as the issue was then, Amorphous was not. “I had been using Bandcamp for a very long time, and Bandcamp was very good to me. Even with my account being taken down, I make it very clear, I understand why,” he said. “They felt it was an issue… I don’t really have a leg to stand on. Even to this day, it’s a service — for users, and even in some ways, DJs… but I’d tell them to be careful.”
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Sincerely wanting to shy away from seeming like he was solely driven by money by making mashups, he ensured that every single person (“to my knowledge”, he says, as the money never transferred over to him from Bandcamp’s hand) that donated via his account received a refund, and said he even turned down further donations — as someone who made ends meet solely as a freelancer, in the midst of a pandemic — related to the project.
“I had some people messaging me, telling me that they got a refund, and asking, ‘can I send this to you another way?’ I was like, nuh-uh. No, girl, I wouldn’t feel good, just keep it. I wasn’t expecting it.”
While he understandably had anxiety over the quick, public, and muddy situation, Amorphous admitted it was over with on his end: “I haven’t gotten any cease and desist orders, so it’s not that serious, it is what it is.”
Still, he doesn’t want to trek into this kind of situation again.
“So, I want to make sure my bases are covered, but make sure my intentions are clear again. Any of those artists, I am not trying to pull money away from y’all, I promise you that. I’m a fan, I respect y’all — so I’ll just have to make that clear going forward if I release more.”
At that point, though, Amorphous’ power was well outside of the grasp of just one platform or entity, even one the size of Bandcamp — which averages 35 million visitors a month.
“Honestly, they could have taken every single — all of my social media accounts down — YouTube, SoundCloud, whatever — I knew I would have bounced back. I don’t care about them. I would’ve bounced back,” Amorphous strongly states. “The people, that was who mattered.”
The universal acclaim of his mashups has already translated into ‘legitimate’ work, if you think there’s a difference between the two. Last year, Amorphous was contacted by Nineteen85, one-half of the R&B duo dvsn. That led to him adding production to the song “Between Us” (featuring Snoh Aalegra), based on a mashup he had did from dvsn’s previous song “In Between” combined with Usher’s hit “Nice & Slow.” In April, the song made it to dvsn’s third album, A Muse In Her Feelings.
Being on an album released by the OVO Sound imprint “was one of my dreams, genuinely,” Amorphous gleamed. “Me and my best friend used to talk about working with OVO or just having something to do with OVO. So when the opportunity came about, I was kind of like, wow, that’s just crazy — the power of truly believing in yourself and being consistent — um, it’s a wonderful opportunity.”
As overwhelming as the attention he’s gotten was at the time, he still didn’t see it as representative of the full breadth of his ability. “It’s really crazy because, ten years ago, I made the list of people I want to work with or the people that I really looked up to that I wanted to be in business with one day,” he explains to me at one point.
“Obviously, I’m not there yet — but just to be able to get the support from those kind of people, it means a lot.”
He’s certain — “definitely, 100%” — certain that he’ll continue working with dvsn. “You know, you hear a lot of people in the industry can be fickle or not have your best interests — but I know that Nineteen is a really good dude,” he said, “he has talked to me about some really personal ideas of mine. So I’m very grateful.”
But in a way that I didn’t even realize at the time, or immediately after, Amorphous showed what made him an easy person to root for: his genuine concern about others before himself. Yes, he wanted to avoid negative associations with his brand, like any public-facing figure — but he differentiates himself by giving people whatever he can to make a moment just somewhat easier for any and everyone.
The mashups, the various lengths to make them available for all, the reluctance and at times rejection of money that he undoubtedly deserved for his work and expertise — all symptoms of his underlying, natural condition:
Amorphous is giving the people what they want — maybe, what they unknowingly need — and that may be the key to his success all along, that has now translated into people doing the things for him that he wants, and maybe, unknowingly needs.
“Tomorrow, I could say, ‘you know what, I’m gonna make a Beyoncé documentary.’ Am I really going to do that? I don’t think so. I’m not trying to sit down and start anything! But that’s just how my mind generally works. Things come out of nowhere.”
Further Reading: “More from Amorphous: Our interview & track-by-track review with the winner of 2020”
