At Home With: The Illustrious Blacks in Brooklyn (DJ Mag)

Anyone who’s caught The Illustrious Blacks knows they’re the epitome of high-powered resplendence. Impeccably styled in a manner somewhere within the nexus of club kid, Afrofuturist and intergalactic glamazon, they are a sight to behold. Their hybrid DJ-performance live sets align with their look — the uplifting sound, generally in a house mode that’s both old school and high concept, tends towards a kind of flamboyant exuberance. So it’s a bit of a surprise to find that their home, located on a quiet street in the working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood of Little Haiti, is cosy, sedate and practically conventional.

Walking up the front steps of their row house, the New York version of a terraced house, DJ Mag is greeted by a welcoming coo before we even ring the doorbell. “I sensed you were out there!” The voice belongs to Black!, who until recently went by the moniker Manchildblack. His partner in art and life, Monstah Black — they’ve been married for years — is seated in the kitchen, filtered light streaming in from the back garden. (Both prefer to keep the names that they were given at birth under wraps.) The plant-filled house feels calm, and is warm and cosy even in the midst of a frigid winter. There are only a few touches of eccentricity — like a bedroom partially covered in foil — to punctuate the seeming normality of the pair’s domestic bliss.

Another deviation from the conventional is their attire. Even sitting at home, Black! and Monstah are dressed to the nines, clad in flowing robes and magnificent footwear and headgear, before changing into black-and-white animal-print pants and tops emblazoned with ‘Suck My Disco’, which not so coincidently happens to be the name of one of their releases. Their dress style is an integral part of their overall aesthetic, which they tend to describe in hyphenated terms like “Afro-Electro-Disco-Space-Punk”. The fact that they are adhering to that mode even in the privacy of their own home is, of course, possibly due to the presence of a photographer — but the pair seem to be so comfortable that one can imagine that they dress this way all the time.

In prosaic terms, an Illustrious Blacks set is easy to describe. Stripped down to barest essentials, it’s a hybrid live-DJ affair consisting of Black! on the decks and Monstah on the mic. Their own description begins to fill in the blanks. “The Illustrious Blacks are a musical duo who incorporate elements of dance, aspects of DJ culture, performance art, fashion, theatricality… all of it finds its way into our work,” Black! says, reciting the ‘official bio’ line. “Monstah Black comes from a world of performance art, experimental dance, choreography and music, punk and funk.”

“Punk-funk,” Monstah chimes in. (As opposed to their live sets, it’s Black! who does most of the talking, at least while they’re in interview mode.) “And I come from the world of theatre, which is my first love,” Black! continues. “And also music — mostly soul, and also funk. When we decided to work together, we just threw everything in and put it in the pot. And that has made this partnership, outside of our personal partnership, very fulfilling and fun.”

Eventually, he zeroes in on specifics. “We perform our original music, we do spoken word, we do chants, readings, storytelling…” “There are all kinds of theatrical craziness,” Monstah breaks in to say of their operating mode, which tends to see them in constant motion. “It’s taking people on a sonic journey, because the way in which Black! sets up the set allows me the space to theatrically create an arc from beginning to end that tells a story along with the music.”

The Illustrious Blacks are fun to the max, and their releases align with their DJ sets — full of energy and uplifting spirit. Recent track ‘Mind Expansion’, a collaboration with the South African-born, Berlin-based artist Floyd Lavine, is a case in point. It’s a squiggly disco and funk-tinged houser, equal parts slinky and chugging, with the IBs harmonising on lyrics informing us that “the time is now for a change”. Just what that change entails isn’t made explicitly clear, really — but we can be sure that it entails a healthy dose of positivity.

Black! was born in NYC, had stints in Maryland and Washington, DC, and attended the historically Black Howard University, where he studied musical theatre. He moved back to the city in the mid-’90s to pursue acting and theatre. Monstah, on the other hand, hails from just outside of Williamsburg, Virginia, best known as the setting of Colonial Williamsburg, a “living-history museum” full of restored 17th-century structures, re-enactments of old-timey trades (shoemaking, woodworking, blacksmithing etc), and a plethora of tourist shops.

Despite the unlikely setting, it was close enough to the larger cities of Richmond, Norfolk and Virginia Beach to enable them to find their people. “I developed my alternative wings there,” they say. At Virginia Commonwealth University, they earned a BFA in choreography and performance, followed by an MFA in New Media Art and Performance from Long Island University.

The two met while in DC — fittingly enough, at a dance club. The night’s DJ was the late Sam ‘The Man’ Burns, a fabled figure within the local house scene. Both were there with friends, but at some point found themselves alone. “I was dancing by myself,” Black! recalls. “And I was off the dancefloor, because I have this tendency to be in doorways or hallways or whatever, where people aren’t generally dancing,” Monstah says. But as the night wore on, the two were gravitating closer. “We ended up dancing together, and we danced right up until the lights came on in the club,” Black! recalls. “I went to find my friend, and she was like, ‘So who was that guy you were dancing with?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea’. And she said, ‘You didn’t get their name, you didn’t get their number? What’s wrong with you?’ I was very shy, but I thought, okay, maybe I should. But before I could go find Monstah, Monstah was coming toward us.” “Which was completely out of character for me,” Monstah adds. “I was super shy, but something told me that I should meet him.”

When they had their first real date, Black! met Monstah at their apartment. While Monstah readied themselves, Black! browsed some photo albums that had been left out for his perusal. “Those photos were Monstah in various states of dress-up — like ’90s club-kid dress-up,” Black! says. “Big cardboard eyelashes, stacks, big hair, makeup, multiple piercings — I mean, all of it. I was like, okay, this person is testing me to see how I’m going to respond to this. They wanted to see if I would run out the door. But this person doesn’t know that this ain’t nothing new to me, and was something that I had a great love and fondness and respect for, even though I wasn’t presenting that way. And that was a great start, because we started the conversation there, and it lasted all day into the next day, because we had so much to talk about.”

They discovered countless commonalities: Grace Jones, Barry Manilow, Stevie Wonder, Prince, the new wave of their childhoods, and the director John Waters. “John Waters is a really significant element because of the absurdity,” Monstah says. Despite the auspicious start, the dating morphed into something more akin to friendship, a connection that continued after Black! moved back north to New York to pursue acting and theatre, while spending nights dancing to house music. Eventually, though, he fell out of love with the club scene. “One Labor Day weekend, Monstah got in touch and said, ‘I’ve moved to New York’, Black! recalls. “I was living in a very tiny studio in Harlem. I said, ‘Oh, come visit! I would love to see you’. Well, that was it. Monstah came to visit me in Harlem and never left. And they came with a new energy, wanting to go out here, there and everywhere.”

Those nights out on the town, at parties ranging from the alt-clubbing institution Jackie 60 to the soul- drenched Body & Soul, rekindled the love of clubbing that Black! had lost; he soon began promoting parties himself, while taking up DJing as a hobby. Eventually, he got burned out on the promoting end of things — but happily, DJing began to pick up the slack, and the work began to snowball. Black! and Monstah were bequeathed with the Illustrious Blacks moniker well before the formation of their musical act took its final shape.

“We would be everywhere together,” Black! explains, “and I don’t know what it was, but something about us being together would bring a lot of attention. We’d get these very powerful comments, like ‘You guys are wonderful,’ or ‘Your auras are amazing’. One night, we were entering a party, and a friend of ours was there, and she At Home With said, ‘There they go, the illustrious blacks.’ We were like, ‘Hey, that sounds like something!’”

The Illustrious Blacks as we know them today took form slowly, bit by bit. Both of them were in bands — “politically-driven bands,” Monstah specifies — but they had the idea of joining forces as a kind of pop act. “We were like, ‘Well, let’s just come up with some flippant pop songs. We did a night called Chocolate Factory, where I was playing around with an MC-505 Groovebox sequencer, and I was on the microphone, singing and dancing around.”

“And I was the DJ,” Black! adds. “It was fun, but it didn’t feel authentic to who we were, and it wasn’t so fulfilling because we weren’t really saying anything. It was just nonsensical. So we decided to change it up and do something that felt a little bit more authentic to who we are as artists. And so that’s how the first single, ‘Black Like Jesus’, came about.”

‘Black Like Jesus’ was a track off of the IBs’ debut EP, ‘Neo Afro Futuristic Psychedelic Surrealistic Hippy’, released in 2016 on Concierge Records. The supremely catchy stormer has a vaguely electroclash feel, but with none of that genre’s intentional vapidity. “Words they say we need to communicate,” they sing on the track. “Take a moment to swallow some of these: colonial, Victorian, superior, entitled, African, Cuban, indigenous.” “The thread that Monstah and I have always had creatively is that our work is always about liberation,” Black! says. “That is the through- line of what we do — and that’s really the through-line of what house music is, right? It’s about liberation. It’s about freedom and coming together.”

Whether it was the message, the music itself or the accompanying music video — a remarkably polished affair which saw the duo, resplendent as always in their white suits, performing the song to a spirited crowd of dancers — the release began to shine a spotlight on the pair. “It’s not like it became a global mainstream thing,” Black! says, “but that is when people started saying, ‘Oh, I like that’, or, ‘Oh, come here and perform’.”

They haven’t stopped performing, or releasing equally evocative and infectious records, in the years since. One of their stated goals throughout has been to spread the idea of what they call “radical joy”. “In the times that we’re currently living in, the sense of joy itself is activism,” Monstah explains, “because everything that is thrown at us feels like it’s meant to push us down and keep us downtrodden and sad. So any chance we can get to dance to good music in a communal setting, where everyone’s lifting their vibrations higher, that is radical joy — and if we can get more people to come together for that radical joy, maybe we can express the importance of humanity over just the one percent.”

A little more than a year ago, the Illustrious Blacks played in midtown Manhattan at the queer house party UltraMaroon. In the run-up to the gathering, the duo granted an interview to the organisers in which Black! described his guiding principle as a DJ, while alluding to others who are working in a similar territory. “Let them know that there’s hope and joy out there for them to feel,” he said. “We’ve got to raise those vibrations. There are so many wonderful Black DJs doing just that. Honey Dijon, Kevin Aviance, Rimarkable, Tedd Patterson.” Patterson, a venerated statesman of the house music circuit, collaborated with the Illustrious Blacks on the cut ‘Let The Music Set You Free’, which had its premiere on DJ Mag’s website in 2024.

The peak-time track, its chanted vocals proclaiming the joys of the dancefloor, is in many ways a quintessential Illustrious Blacks tune, brimming with near-delirious euphoria. Before working on the tune, Patterson had been familiar with the duo, but it was during lockdown that, watching their online live clips and videos, he “fell in love with them”, as he puts it. “The more I watched them, the more I knew I wanted to be a part of what they were doing,” Patterson says. “I loved the grassroots-ness of it. I loved how raw it was. I loved how real it was. And I’m fascinated with how much they loved doing what they do. That’s not an act. These guys are authentic. And there are very few artists that do it that way right now, when everybody and everything seems curated and handed to you in a way that that’s easy to digest.

“And live, the motherfuckers are fierce,” Tedd adds. “I just love who they are in the world. They own their fabulousness, they own their Blackness, they own their illustriousness. It’s unapologetic — and it doesn’t owe any apologies, because it brings love and it brings togetherness. It promotes good vibes. It promotes joy.” The Illustrious Blacks have been in their current digs for nearly four years, after moving from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood a few miles to the north. It’s taken a while, but Little Haiti is finally feeling like home.

“It took a while getting used to because we had a lot of friends in Bed-Stuy. But in this neighbourhood… I’d say we’re slowly making friends,” Black! says. “When we first appeared here, people were like, ‘Okay…’ when they saw us. But by now, people on the block have seen us walking around, and they know us.” Sure enough, when we leave the comfort of the kitchen to have a quick wander down their street, a neighbour parking their car shouts a fist- pumping hello — though that may have simply been in appreciation of their sartorial splendour.

Having a back garden in the property, a rarity for the non-wealthy in New York, is a definite bonus. “It gets super lush back there,” Black! says. “We couldn’t even get back there last summer. And the neighbourhood cats can come to the door to see our cats, so they have little visitors. That’s so cute to see. We also have raccoons in this area, and our friends down the way have a cat that has made friends with the neighbourhood raccoons.” “They opened their door one night,” Monstah adds, “and saw their cat kind of leading these other three baby raccoons across the fence, like teaching them how to walk across the fence.”

It sounds positively bucolic, but that doesn’t mean that life and art are slowing down for Black! and Monstah anytime soon. There’s a full slate of world-spanning live gigs, of course — and those are higher profile than ever. The pair have been Glitterbox regulars for a few years now, for instance, plying their trade at Hï Ibiza. “That was one of those places we dreamed of playing once things started taking off for us as a DJ duo,” Black! says, “so that was next level for us. The audience in Ibiza really knows and loves the music. Everyone knew the words, and they were singing along. They’re getting their life. I mean, a lot more seasoned DJs will say it’s not the Ibiza it used to be. But of course, we don’t know that! We’re there with our eyes wide open — just taking it all in and really enjoying it.”

There are more releases on the way, too, like the about-to-drop ‘Wake Up’ on Soul Clap Records, produced by Taylor Bense and with remixes from Patterson and Dan Azzo. And the pair just finished up a tour opening up for one of their idols, Grace Jones, in Australia. The main thing for Black! and Monstah, though, isn’t the size of their gigs — it’s that they are doing this at all. “At first, it was like, oh, we’re gonna make some music, play a few gigs, and just see how it goes,” Black! says. “We didn’t have much of an expectation. Maybe that’s the secret — just trust your instincts and do what comes naturally.”

But even more than their success, it’s the importance they’ve had to others that makes this all worthwhile. “The emotional thing about it is that some people will DM us and say how much what we have done, just by us being a Black queer couple and seeing us together, has touched them in some way,” he continues. “When we are in these spaces where we can share our experiences, that’s how we share the radical joy that we’ve experienced over the course of our lives.”

And there’s so much more radical joy that they want to share, not all of it confined to the club. They’ll be performing at Lincoln Center this summer, for instance — and a full-length off-Broadway show titled Beyond The Stardust is slated for this September at The Flea, a downtown theatre that’s long put a focus on experimental theatre by Black, brown, and queer artists. “It’s a fusion of nightlife culture and theatre and performance art, an immersive show based around our original music,” Black! says. “We’re doing some precursor stuff as we move toward that, too, like at [performance space] Joe’s Pub with a band in April, and something at Lincoln Center in the summer related to Beyond The Stardust. So this is an important year for us, because we really want to push ourselves in other directions, other than just being known as a DJ duo.”

One of the Illustrious Blacks’ early releases, 2018’s stomping ‘Revolutionary Love’, serves to some degree as a personal blueprint for everything that the Illustrious Blacks do, both in their art and their relationship to the world. “Revolutionary love / we live the hype life / with every flash of the strobe light / we are stars / get out the way / can’t dim our shine,” the lyrics proclaim, with Black! and Monstah singing in full- throated unison. The pair’s radiance is stronger than ever — and the way things are going, they’ll keep shining on for years to come.