“Artists are often encouraged to build a world with their music, but I’d rather create music that can exist in any context or environment,” Blake Ortiz-Goldberg, also known as Blaketheman1000, tells me over a basket of fries at Fanelli in Lower Manhattan. He recently returned from Los Angeles, where he shot the Sarah Ritter-directed video for his new bicoastal single “Traffic”, cruising down the 405. After a whirlwind year, in which Blake released three singles and played over 15 shows in New York alone, the pop musician is recalibrating his idea of success and evaluating his next move. “I want my songs to be objects of utility. You choose to listen to certain songs because they empower you to be yourself, or to fully realize a specific version of yourself. I want my songs to do that,” he says. “When I write music, I’m considering the experience the listener is going to have, especially in a live setting.”
The 26-year-old artist already has a reputation for his spirited performances: he once played in the outdoor dining hut of Ming’s Cafe on the Lower East Side, and last summer he closed out a poetry reading with a performance at East Village’s KGB Bar while standing on a diner chair, his impromptu stage. For Blake, live shows have been a vital part of his trajectory as a musician — he’s become somewhat of a local sensation and has yet to release an album (though he’s contemplating his first record deal). “I think that’s a commonality among artists in this particular scene. A lot of us don’t actually sound alike, but we are very intentional in considering music’s social function,” he says. “The real headline of our shows is the hangout.”
Over the last two years, a new cohort of emerging artists such as Grace Ives, Julian Ribeiro and Isabella Lovestory have come up among a larger subset of downtown creatives spanning the worlds of fashion, art and media. Blake references designer Anna Bolina, gallery owner and artist Jamian Juliano-Villani and Wet Brain podcast hosts Walter Pierce and Honor Levy as key figures in the scene. In the age of being hyper-online, it should come as no surprise that there’s a subculture of social media-savvy talent growing their careers faster than any prior generation of performing artists. “Everyone’s banding together to make things that can be popular outside of New York,” he says.
Before beginning his career as a musician, Blaketheman1000 was just Blake. He grew up in Huntington Beach, California, where his grandfather, a member of popular 60s band Thee Counts, taught him to play the guitar and sing. While his earliest musical influences ran the gamut from Lou Reed (on “Greta Van Fleet,” he sings, “I’m wearin’ leather with my tight cut jeans / I’m like Greta Van Fleet but for fans of Lou Reed”) to Linkin Park, his first-ever CD collection, which included Usher’s Confessions, Green Day’s Dookie and Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane, is perhaps most representative of the music he makes today. “The genre I create within is a combination of everything I’ve been into: EDM, indie, emo, hip-hop, country and top 40. It’s a mash of writing and production styles,” he says.
In 2018, Blake moved to New York which was the catalyst for finding his sonic niche. That same year he wrote and released “Ibuprofen”; it’s a catchy single with an electronic sound and lyrics that, despite making little sense (“Green like Gatorade / Crunchy like a fry / If somebody told you different, that’s a lie / Drop the songs when I die”), are bound to get stuck in your head. “After recording that song, which I did on a Zoom recorder, I knew I wanted to keep making this type of music,” Blake says. “It felt like that song took all the experimenting from the last two years and blended it into one cohesive thing.”
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Since, he’s dropped six additional singles, including two songs that he co-produced with hyperpop band Frost Children, (the ironically upbeat “Goth” and incel-inspired tune “Where’s My Frost Children?”, a remix of Blake’s 2021 single, “Where’s My Hug?”). By dropping songs manufactured specifically for live shows, he’s been able to maintain a steady rhythm of online hype via shared footage and reposts. Though some of the online and IRL excitement can be attributed to an eager, post-pandemic audience craving connection, the artist’s come-up thus far has been nothing short of strategic.
“There’s this moment happening that’s similar to the blog era,” he says, referring to the years 2006-2011, where music discovery was rife online and albums like Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City were released in zip file form. “Some people call it the indie sleaze revival and that is partly true. A lot of current artists evoke nostalgia for certain acts of that time. But it’s not just about the music — there’s a boom of independent voices that have ascended through TikTok or YouTube or podcasts. And I’ve tried to make the most of that.”
The “Downtown Dimes Square Diamond”, as he refers to himself on “Dean Kissick”, has also used social media to create one big collaborative network of like-minded artists. “I met Blake on Instagram, through mutual friends of Lulu, my sibling,” Angel, one-half of Frost Children, shares. Just over a year ago, Blake DM’d Angel about an article she had written for The Drunken Canal, a local, independent newspaper. “The three of us started hanging out, and a few months later, Blake opened for us at our release show for our album, SPIRAL.” Now, Blake co-manages the band — they have weekly meetings at Ming’s Cafe and are often on set together for various photoshoots. “The best part of the last two years is any moment where I’m connecting with people,” he says. “I’ve met so many people who are on the same wavelength in such a short period of time.”
Harrison Patrick Smith of The Dare, another friend and local electropop musician who’s largely inspired by The Rapture, Peaches and New York club music, agrees. “Whatever is going on in downtown Manhattan is fluid,” he explains. “It’s a mixing of art and ideas and cliques. The ideas people are having are in service of fun, being creative for creativity’s sake and collaborating with new friends.” Blake and Harrison met at a show just before the pandemic hit, and now, the two are in each other’s fan clubs. “Blake is immune to cringe, and that’s one of his biggest strengths. 99.9% of musicians are trying to come across as cool and serious. Blake is just trying to have fun and make people feel things. I think that’s the key to understanding him,” Harrison says.
In the chorus of Blaketheman1000’s newest song, “Traffic,” he sings, “I’m like Cardi B / I don’t cook, I don’t clean / I don’t do anything / I do what I want / I gotta be cool / I gotta be punk.” The bridge in “Blake 2” (which, at every show, his audience yells alongside him) goes like this: “Fuck with the vision / Fuck with the vibe / Fuck with my beautiful face or I fuck with you not.” The angsty, tongue-in-cheek lines that are laced throughout his songs make you play them back again and again, not only because they’re catchy, but to make sure you heard him correctly. Fueled by a sense of humor, a handful of the lyrics referencing the city’s culture and a dire need to be punk, offer his audience an opportunity to be in on a joke with him. After all, can you still be a New York punk in 2022?
As Blake shares his thoughts on the role he wants his music to play for his listener, he lands on one final thought: “I love the music. But the reason it succeeds isn’t because of the music. It’s because of its function.” In making songs that offer a specific flavor of downtown culture, Blaketheman1000 is offering a sense of connection in our post-pandemic world, and reviving the city’s creative scene in the process. His modus-operandi might be to create music that can exist in any world, but Blake’s already at work building his own: “I know the next thing I want to do is make an album and go on tour. I’m taking it one step at a time, but I didn’t think I’d get this far.”
Credits
Photography Stephen Velastegui