Unsafe Cex

"I'm not doing any work right now, but I got to soon, 'cause I'm really broke," says Cex, a twenty-one-year-old white-boy rapper. Cex, who's currently considering work as a doorman or a record-store clerk, blew his album royalties and tour money supporting his party-hearty lifestyle. "It's not like I'm a prissy dude," he says. "But I'm not about fucking on the floor every night. I like hotels, and I like to get a big thing of salmon once a day. I like doing dumb shit, letting the debit card work its magic."

Even if Cex is having trouble living it up like a rap star, he's at least come a long way from his roots. Growing up in Baltimore, Cex (real name: Rjyan Kidwell) was a gangly kid who never got drunk until he was out of his teens. His first album, released while he was a freshman at Johns Hopkins, was a down-tempo electronic work full of glitchy beats and far-out soundscapes. After a series of overly mellow gigs that found him chilling behind his laptop, Cex dedicated himself to becoming "the world's number-one entertainer." He says, "I was like, 'What else could I do?' So I began taking off my clothes, playing outside of clubs, doing singalongs. If it's uncomfortable and if it makes people feel weird and shocks them, then great."

With the self-produced Tall, Dark and Handcuffed, a fun-loving party record, Cex drew on both the hip-hop he'd grown up on and his own goofball sense of humor. He released the album on Tigerbeat 6 Records, a label owned by electro hero Kid606. Cex comes off like a geeky, suburban Eminem, cooking up old-school hip-hop beats and rhyming about dodgeball and girl troubles. Still, he is mostly known as an outlandish performer, and for good reason. "In Detroit I played at an art museum, and I took the entire audience outside to a vacant lot, and I had everyone sing 'Jeremy,' by Pearl Jam," he says. "That moment, I was like, 'Wow, you can do anything you want onstage and people will buy it.' "

CHRISTIAN HOARD
(February 11, 2003)