We have not evolved since gladiator arenas of watching people being torn apart by lions.” It doesn’t come naturally to me to deal with that amount of attention, especially negative attention. “It was not good for me to be relatively unknown and then lose that anonymity in the span of a month. “The internet is a cruel place and it’s especially cruel to women and femmes,” Casey says. We haven't evolved since gladiator arenas, watching people be torn apart by lions “I don’t owe anyone an explanation about the inner workings of my mind.” The internet, they say, quickly calcified into a loop of negative feedback once Stupid took off, quickly becoming the second most popular song at the time on TikTok with 1.3m video uses, including some by fan Miley Cyrus. “It felt very invasive and still feels invasive, so I keep a lot of things private,” they say. Shortly after the release of Demidevil there was speculation around their sexuality and gender identity, resulting in them tweeting: “To clarify i am pansexual and genderfluid i just didn’t feel ready to tell the internet yet.” It’s a side to fame they hadn’t accounted for when they started pursuing music as a 15-year-old. I wanted to take the reins a little bit and be like, ‘No, I want to make my fairy music.’ It’s got to resonate in a deep part of my heart.”ĭeeply online, having discovered Tumblr as an isolated teenager and got their break via TikTok, Casey has also applied this new mindset to interacting with social media. “I was writing music people wanted to hear and now I write music that I want to hear. “I listen to some of those songs and I cringe pretty hard,” they say. Around the time of 2021’s mixtape Demidevil, which featured guests Princess Nokia and Grimes, as well as the sex-positive anthem Clitoris! The Musical, Casey found that sudden success meant music had become a chore. The Weedkiller era marks a turning point in the 27-year-old’s mindset: gone are the days of people-pleasing and living up to expectations. Having just arrived in LA before heading to San Diego for Comic-Con, where they will be signing copies of their own Weedkiller-affiliated DC comic, they seem distant at first, not helped by the Zoom camera being turned off. Today, however, Casey seems miles away from the blue-haired, Y2K-obsessed cyberpunk-meets-goblin anime comic-book hero they present as Ashnikko, a character creation they see as becoming “closer and closer to who I am as the years go on”. That creativity bubbles like lava through Ashnikko’s discography: the pummelling recent single You Make Me Sick! 2019’s braggadocious breakthrough Stupid, complete with its screamed hook “Wet! Wet! Wet! Wet!” or 2020’s haunted trap banger Daisy, a rape revenge fantasy that landed in the UK Top 30. “I feel so much more connected to the Earth, and my creativity flows a bit more easily when I feel that way.” I don’t owe anyone an explanation about the inner workings my mind “Taking magic mushrooms is a spiritual practice as well as something that massively aids my mental health journey,” Casey explains of their chosen holiday must-have. “It’s a magic fairy paradise.” As befits Ashnikko’s desire to push the envelope, be it musically or vis-a-vis enjoying the natural world, there was an additional element of escapism. “I love Wales so much it’s my favourite place on Earth,” Casey says from LA. So Casey did what any of us would do and hopped over to west Wales to stare at trees. The artist, who uses they/them pronouns, had been working hard to finish their brain-frying debut album Weedkiller – a climate crisis-evoking conceptual opus about a tribe of fairies under attack from the titular killing machine – and there were tour rehearsals to start and world-building videos to shoot. A few months ago, Ashton Casey, AKA the US rapper, singer and purveyor of industrial-strength agit-pop Ashnikko, escaped from the real world.
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