Malkam and His Plandemic
Now-local to the Lower East Side of New York City, that boy grew up to be Malkam with the occasional presence of an alter ego named Badman Babyboy. He has been making music for more than 10 years at this point. Curious as to what prompted this extrovert and lover of “the greater good” to start, he let us in on two specific moments.
“I've always been a huge fan of music and dancing but never thought of the idea of recording my voice until I heard Eminem’s “The Warning,”’ he tells us. “In a moment, I was like, I want to rap. Note, I had no idea how to rap and had no idea how to go about it... but shit I would just bump that song everyday on my way to school.”
Malkam continues, “I actually really started making music because my homie in high school thought he was a label executive and came up to me and was like, ‘Yo, Malkam you wanna sign to my label?’ And I was like, ‘Oh word! I need a rap name then.’ We ended up creating a rap group in the 10th grade, and we used to go to his nice ass crib on 5th Ave and record music after school. Shoutout Josh Galanter! That's his name. Truthfully he's the reason why I started making music. Yeah, man.”
One thing about Malkam is that he’s an artist who gives other artists their due credit. With deep respect for his home country and family, he’s brought it upon himself to use music as one of his tools to help people appreciate the beauty in “the jungle” he’s from. “People need my art because everyone is stealing it subconsciously,” he explains. “Not my work specifically but the culture, everything that's jumping, involves Jamaicans, involves our lingo, style, our attitude, just the way we act. It's a lifestyle that can only come from a Jamaican. But it seems like they are afraid to give us our credit.”
Confident and cool in his stature, the baddest bloodclaat breaks down the title and reasoning of Plandemic: “My new project is called Plandemic because dem-plan-it and now dem-a-panic... hahaha, but all jokes aside I want everyone to know the name of the EP has nothing to do with anything political".
He went on to explain, "Fire pon babylon. The name Plandemic describes how I went about this project. I had a blueprint and I executed it. Every aspect about this project was planned for the greater good, meaning every step and idea I had for it was carefully calculated".
"I don't want to explain it too in depth and give the sauce away," he teased, "but let me give you an example—I have a song and video called ‘Who You’ on this project." The video was shot in an empty Time Square during the pandemic, Malkham tells us. "Have you ever seen Time Square absolutely empty? Exactly. Only time I’ve ever seen an empty Time Square was in that movie Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise and they spent millions to get Times Square empty for like 2 hours. I paid free.99. My video for ‘Who You’ doesn't need to do numbers now for me to know it’s going to do numbers one day.”
The happy-go-lucky character within Malkam is obvious not just in the way he moves throughout his videos, but in the day-to-day. The honesty protruding from his deep tone comes from the struggles he is personally faced with. “I am trying to stay cozy at all times and observe human behaviours, so basically I have a nonchalant attitude to the world right now." Musing, he adds, "I don't think anyone knows what's going on, and the best guesses are lies".
The other day, Malkam tells us, he went on Instagram and saw a video of people firing automatic weapons at his mother in Jamaica. "Thank god she survived it, but now she has a brain tumor because of the trauma, so you can have an idea of what my attitude is right now during this pandemic. I don't care about anything really at this moment except my situation at hand. Everyone is afraid of Corona, I'm afraid of losing my mom, I'm afraid of getting killed by the police, I'm afraid of getting deported, it's getting to the point now where I'm afraid of living. The bad thing is I don't talk about this stuff, I'm always smiling and trying to make other people laugh.”
The fact that dance comes out so effortlessly, with the context of these horrific experiences, makes Plandemic that much more important. Important for the youth, the present, and the future. Expect Malkam to never stop.
