I'm a big fan of Irish podcaster/rapper/author/overall avant garde performance artist Blindboy Boatclub. After having to cancel some live podcasting events, included some promotional events for his new short story collection, Blindboy has turned to Twitch to experiment with what he calls "an act of participatory art" — he improvises musicals on multiple instruments while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. And the results — like all of Blindboy's work — are strangely fascinating.
As he explained in a recent interview with The Face:
What I love about live streaming is it's so fucking cyberpunk. I'd grown up with the promise of Blade Runner in 2020, and my setup right here looks like a Voight-Kampff machine – all these weird pulleys, hostile monitors and mechanical arms. I can just imagine something being written in the 1960s about this: 'The year is 2020 and a global pandemic means that people can't leave the house – but a covert, guerilla broadcaster is using all this mad equipment and lights to get his message out.'
I suppose it's not the only way that Blindboy's been prescient. For the 10 or so years he's been performing publicly, he's always worn a plastic SuperValu bag over his face as a mask. And now, well, now it turns out masks are cool!
As mentioned above (and I think, as I've mentioned previously on this site), Blindboy also hosts a delightful podcast — one of Ireland's most popular cultural exports, in fact — where he goes on at length about a myriad of topics, always doing so with humor, empathy, and curiosity. I also enjoyed his first short story collection, The Gospel According to Blindboy, which is kind of like if Flann O'Brien had lived to see the world of Internet Trolls (I particularly enjoyed "The Arse Children").
If you want to watch more of this bizarre RDR2 musicals, check out The Blindboy Podcast on Twitch
