| B-SIDES | ▼ Music On a Loop Marc Rebillet left Dallas and became “Loop Daddy” for the whole internet. BY ALEX GONZALEZ W hether you know him by name or not, you’ve definitely seen Marc Rebillet’s videos. Armed with a keyboard, loop machine and production equipment, the North Texas native has become omni- present in the digital realm, charming view- ers with his improvised rhymes and his ability to construct a track in real time. Rebillet often appears in his Instagram, Twitter or YouTube livestreams wearing one of the over 100 draping robes he claims to own. His lyrics, which are often nonsensi- cal, range from quirky to crass. And his con- stant online presence has made him a household name in the past few years, so much so that he appeared in a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year. His ardently invested followers look for- ward to seeing him stream online — when- ever he feels like it. Rebillet’s streams have caught the atten- tion of several musicians and artists, includ- ing Ice-T, who met up with him shortly after coming across one of his streams on Twitter. “This MF is Badass,” wrote Ice after wit- nessing Rebillet’s craft in action. Fans can now see him combine his musi- cal talents with his popping personality on We’ve Got Company, a biweekly web series on Amazon Music’s Twitch channel. Rebillet first honed his freestyling skills when he began rapping with his friends as a teenager. With more than 1.7 million Instagram fol- lowers, 2 million YouTube subscribers and multiple EPs and albums under his belt, it’s safe to say that Rebillet has improved with age. Once a mainstay at Twilite Lounge in Deep Ellum, the self-proclaimed “Loop Daddy” recalls the first time he went viral in the mid-to-late 2010s for his loops. “When I moved to New York, a couple months into me being there, I was playing lo- cal bars, doing the same thing I was doing in Dallas,” Rebillet says, “And then, sort of out of nowhere, my videos were going viral. It felt bizarre. It was a bizarre sensation. To know that people were not only consuming it, but then sharing it around. I just sort of freaked and didn’t really know quite what to do.” Rebillet continues to livestream via You- Tube, Instagram and Facebook, and while the viral fame felt strange at first, he now radiates with confidence. Rebillet often performs in a robe, or even just his underwear. His wild, fun-loving presence and ability to whip up a magnificent work of art in minutes make him the perfect host for We’ve Got Company. Jesse Lirola Marc Rebillet’s upcoming album is nothing like we’d expect. On the Amazon show, which streams live every other Wednesday, fans see Rebillet combine his humor and musical talent to host what he describes as a sitcom within a talk show. Like his music, the dialogue on the show is improvised. “It’s all entirely made up on the spot,” Re- billet says, “which is why sometimes it’s a little sloppy, because we’re thinking about what to say. We have certain beats and seg- ments that we move from and to, and they’ll cue me, like, ‘OK, it’s time to go be with the guests now.’ But any dialogue, or anything like that, it’s completely improvised.” In its first season, We’ve Got Company has already seen several notable guests, in- cluding Wyclef Jean, Tokimonsta, Alison Wonderland and Reggie Watts. Just this week, Tenacious D announced they’d be joining musical comedy forces with Rebillet. The first season also saw Rebillet making music with fellow Dallasite Erykah Badu. The two first met in 2020 when Badu sur- prised Rebillet during one of his COVID-safe sets at Coyote Drive-In Theatre in Fort Worth. Since then, they have remained friends. “I hadn’t seen anything like that,” Badu said during her appearance on We’ve Got Company about Rebillet’s drive-in shows. “You the onliest one!” “And it wasn’t even my idea” Rebillet added. “It was my lovely agent’s” Also during her appearance, Badu told Rebillet that she is a doula, acting as a “wel- coming committee” for babies as they are born, and a homeopathic practitioner, mean- ing she is “someone who practices homeo- pathic or holistic remedies, as opposed to ... ” “Going to the doctor?” Rebillet asked. As the rest of us, Rebillet is clearly in- trigued by the many hats Badu wears; weeks after her appearance, he says that simply basking in her aura makes for a transforma- tive experience. “I think what I’ve learned from her is not necessarily something she has said to me, but more so being in a space with her, and around her energy,” Rebillet says. “It’s in- tense because it’s so assured and in control, but in reality, the energy itself that she ex- udes is very calm and very calming. And oc- 3 casionally silly. She just has this assuredness and control over her herself that is very re- laxing and inspiring. It makes you jealous that you can’t be that way, all the time. She just knows herself very well. And she sits in that so comfortably and it makes you want to do that for yourself. Just her being herself is very inspirational.” Though there’s no corner of the internet that’s a stranger to Marc Rebillet, he main- tains that YouTube is the most instrumental platform in his career. He makes a concerted effort to reach fans across several platforms and says that maintaining an active social media presence is “exhausting as fuck.” “That’s one of the reasons why I’m not on it as much anymore,” Rebillet says. “Every- thing has a different format. With Insta- gram, it depends. Are you doing reels? Are you doing like a longer upload? That’s [a video format of] 16 x 9. TikTok needs to be 9 x 16. They’re all individual beasts that needs to be uploaded and treated differently. All the captions need to be different, because they show up differently.” When he feels overwhelmed by the inter- net, Rebillet likes to ride his electric unicycle around Manhattan and take pictures using one of his several film cameras. He also en- joys taking a weed edible and “wheeling around high as fuck.” In between his random livestreams and We’ve Got Company, Rebillet is also in the middle of working on a new album. Straying from his signature freestyling and improvi- sational approach, Rebillet says he has been writing and planning out the music for the album ahead of time “Over the the course of these 12 studio ses- sions that we just did, we worked through a few ideas that I’ve had for a long time,” he says. Rebillet says he’ll soon be going to meet his producer, The Kount, in Toronto, “and together we will flesh out the songs into more fully formed tracks.” “And we’ll really do the detail work and retract some of the instruments and track my full stacked harmonies and vocals,” he says. “But yeah, in a nutshell, it’s absolutely written, composed and rehearsed. It’s very different from what I normally do.” ▼ INTERVIEW A PERFECT CIRCUS M MAYNARD SORT OF WANTS TO BREAK HARRY STYLES’ LEGS AND DEFINITELY SMASH YOUR PHONE. BY VINCENT ARRIETA aynard James Keenan is scheduled to make his return to North Texas. This time, he’ll be fronting experimental rock band Puscifer at the McFarlin Audito- rium on Thursday, June 16, with special guests Moodie Black. This is Keenan’s third visit to DFW in the last four years, but his first with Puscifer since 2015. For the other two stops, he was with his other bands — Tool and A Perfect Circle. You might know them. Given Keenan’s reputation as semi-reclu- sive and media-shy with a razor-sharp and pitch-black sense of humor (i.e. Puscifer’s more tongue-in-cheek material, his contri- butions to the Bob Odenkirk/David Cross sketch comedy institution Mr. Show), the ex- pectation for a light conversation with the artist seems like dust in the wind. Musical pleasantries are not on Keenan’s mind at the moment. Life is. Puscifer’s latest record, 2020’s Existential Reckoning, is the band’s least vaudevillian, opting for more con- templative and subdued songs. Despite a foggy sense of dread that wafts in and out of the songs’ noirish soundscapes, Keenan still makes room (on the album’s closing track “Bedlamite”) to chant “It’s gonna be all right, everything will be all right.” “Everything is a pendulum right now,” Keenan says from his vineyard in Jerome, Ari- zona. “I think it’s swinging as far right and left as it can swing. But eventually it’ll find its mid- dle. That is the dilemma of being in the middle of the encroachment of a hurricane or a tor- nado: You know, there is calm in the center, and then as it passes there’s going to be more destruction. It’s going to pass like a hurricane, but at least eventually it will find a balance. It’s those edges that we’re going through.” Keenan says taking such a stance is ac- ceptable in an age of harsh public opinion; it’s the only sensible way to maintain sanity. “For a person to be so stubborn in their be- liefs that there is no wiggle room at all, that’s not life. That’s not how it works. New infor- mation should be a new approach. When you get new information, change your mind. “ Keenan says that the notion of one-sen- tence opinions, headlines, and soundbites can be harmful to those attempting to reckon with issues in the world, especially in an age of comment-section wars of words. “Conversations are where you really get anything done,” he says. “Listening is a key factor. Listening and being open to new ideas when you know who you are, know what you believe and know what you want, what you think is best for not just you, but your neighbors and your extended family. But if you just ... if you’re addicted to dopa- mine and the charge you get from an argu- ment, then I can’t help you.” The inclination to be open to learning was instilled in Keenan from a young age. His mother, father and paternal aunts were all educators. “I grew up in that setting and understand the value of a good, solid, foundational edu- cation and not necessarily trigonometry and calculus, but the ability to learn how >> p20 19 1 dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUT |ZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JUNE 16-22, 2022 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014
