For Kalifa (born Khalif Diouf), the wait has been more than eight years since his last proper project, an album released in 2015, when he was known as the rapper Le1f. That’s a long hiatus in a pop music career, especially as social media algorithms whittle down Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes into smaller increments of fame. So while Diouf is a step ahead of musicians just getting in the game, he knows not to take for granted any fans waiting for the return of the artist formerly known as Le1f.
“I know that a lot of them were not looking for an up-tempo song with a synth guitar in it,” he admits with a laugh over Zoom.
What those listeners were probably expecting sounded more like “Wut,” his signature track as Le1f, and one that blasted the musician onto the upper echelons of the underground music world in the previous decade. The song, with its sparse horn samples and sub-bass production, introduced the world to a rapper-producer equally adept at shrugged-off sneers and double-time, multisyllabic attacks.
Perhaps most notably, amid still-resonant couplets (“Toss my gems up, raise the bar, Yung Phenomenon / I make a neo-Nazi kamikaze wanna firebomb”) were the kind of out-and-proud come-ons that are still extremely rare in mainstream rap: “The fever in his eyes, he wanna suckle on my muscle / He wanna burst my bubble and see what’s up in my jungle.”
“Wut” quickly became part of the legacy of queer music. But it also led to press coverage that pigeonholed Le1f as a “queer rapper” — not just a rapper — alongside peers such as Cakes da Killa, Mykki Blanco and Zebra Katz. In retrospect, he’s able to see both negative and positive. Defining Le1f and his peers in terms of a social identity rather than a musical one might have blocked them from mainstream conversations, but it also provided a service for a nascent culture.
“I have like 100 daughters and Cakes has 100 daughters,” he says of his musical descendants. “It is a legacy of freedom and a path that was given to a lot of younger queer artists.”
Diouf spent a few years building buzz and releasing a steady stream of music, culminating with a debut album, “Riot Boi,” released via XL Recordings and Terrible Records. Then it all stopped, and while he says it was “fun while it lasted,” his experience as Le1f was disheartening.
“Working with a major label at the time was a bit tricky for me,” he says. “My hype train dwindled before I was able to really navigate and understand all the back-end business and set my team up properly.”
As his buzz evaporated, Diouf hoped to step back, regroup and come back more prepared, possibly rebranding under a moniker closer to his birth name. Then, in a now familiar twist, the onset of the pandemic put those plans on hold. Not all was lost: He was able to use the socially distanced time to learn about music theory and composition. Diouf’s research into a range of musical topics helped him understand his own intentions as a musician, and how the music he makes relates to everything from prehistoric sub-Saharan instruments to Little Richard.
“Having this wealth of material and inspiration has really fueled me to make exactly what I want to make, how I want to make it and shoot for the stars,” he says.
In the period between Le1f and Kalifa, Diouf found it challenging to access the mental and physical space he needed to execute his vision. He worked with both operatic and R&B vocal trainers to sharpen his skills, and is now more comfortable experimenting and executing as a vocalist (even if he finds calling himself a singer “a little cringe”).
In the past few years, he has been able to trace his music back to its inspiration points, accumulating songs for cohesive records that pay tribute to the genres of mainstream music with Black roots, such as rock and disco. He knows what he wants to do for the next “three and a half albums,” and — after the long hiatus — he knows he has to get started ASAP.
“The material that I’ve been making is so much better than anything I’ve ever put out before. … It’s so much more relatable and refined than anything I’ve ever released,” he says. “When I listen to them side by side, it’s just night and day.”
