On today’s edition of “not The Onion,” long-running experimental band Xiu Xiu took to Instagram to characterize African Imperial Wizard, a provocatively named tribal/industrial project, as actually being a “middle-aged white man” under his – ahem – Klan-patterned hoodie.
“African Imperial Wizard is a middle-aged white male,” the group wrote in their Instagram post. “We had the extreme displeasure of playing with him last night without knowing who he was until he came backstage and, to our surprise, took off his hood. The Imperial Wizard (which is a term for a leader of the Ku Klux Klan) obscures his white identity to the extent that he even wears gloves to cover his hands while projecting a pastiche of black African ‘tribal’ images onto the screen.”
“He also claims to be part of an imaginary pan-African armed struggle and calls on his African brothers to unite to play on his records,” Xiu Xiu continued. “These records are actually only made with samples from Ableton. In the great and horrible tradition of Western music, he takes black art and lives and wildly perverts them for his own bizarre edification and profit. This is extreme blackface and a profound level of racist appropriation.”
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Woof – there’s a lot to unpack here.
Xiu Xiu’s comments follow their appearance at the Hradby Samoty festival in Bratislava, Slovakia, where African Imperial Wizard also performed. Although African Imperial Wizard’s Instagram page has since gone private, evidence of their bizarre façade can still be found on their Bandcamp page, their Spotify page, and elsewhere.
In addition to featuring album art depicting what appears to be an African tribe in facial makeup, the artist’s Bandcamp page offers an example of the “pastiche” mentioned by Xiu Xiu in the form of an 86-second promotional video. Elsewhere on the page is a biography that contains gems like “This jam is a major tribute to CharweNyakasikana, the svikiro who served as the ultimate link between the living and the spirits during the freedom struggle of our ancestors; » “Despite the pressure of the oppressor, we steadfastly refused to convert to Christianity, abandon our faith or abandon our mystical mission; and “We, African Imperial Wizard, want to warmly greet our comrades who traveled across Africa to join our recording sessions.”
At the time of writing this article, their — excuse me — her The Spotify page is also full of images of armed African tribesmen. One main photo comes from photographer Brent Stirton (and is also available on Getty Images), while another goes back to iStock, another image library.
Although they claim to be from Angola, those known to be involved with the African Imperial Wizard are all from Europe. The project is signed to Tesco Records, a German label, and one of the few names associated with the act is Andrew Claristidge, a French electronic music producer. It is not yet clear whether Claristidge is a “middle-aged white man” or simply a close associate.
“I’m just tired of having to think about it for the past two days,” says Angela Seo of Xiu Xiu. Consequence in an exclusive statement. “I was hesitant to even talk about it because I knew I would have to deal with people who would make excuses, defend it, and then that would somehow be my problem, that we would get hateful messages and comments and be trolled for bringing [it] up. I would be the sensitive snowflake who destroyed someone’s art and career by overreacting.
Prior to the post on Xiu Xiu’s main Instagram page, Seo posted similar sentiments on her personal Instagram Story. See screenshots of his posts below.
“There’s an extra layer when you’re probably the only person of color at the festival,” Seo adds. “It goes beyond ‘Damn, that’s not right. Maybe he should just stop doing that,’ to more trolling and nastiness online that harms everyone. Our responses, the way we engage online, it’s all so disorienting.”
“I also want to say that I don’t believe in cancel culture. We all make mistakes. And I believe we should be allowed to make mistakes, to learn, to grow. We can ‘undo’ and reject certain actions, thoughts, and practices that aren’t right, people don’t. But when someone does something that isn’t right and hides behind anonymity, I should be able to say it’s not cool without being slammed with unhinged comments.”
Seo and Xiu Xiu are not the first to notice and take umbrage with the image of the African imperial magician. A Reddit user posted a similar outing on the r/industrialmusic subreddit earlier this year, and with the law existing in one form or another since at least 2019, these two accounts probably weren’t the first to notice something strange was afoot.
The middle-aged white man did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
