Zack Fox Thought DJ’ing Would Keep Him Off the Internet—Viral Fame Found Him Anyway

For W’s annual The Originals portfolio, we asked stars of film, fashion, art, music, and more to share their insights on staying true to themselves. See this year’s full class of creatives here.

You’re known for your role on Abbott Elementary, your stand-up comedy, DJ’ing and making music with Kenny Beats and Flying Lotus, and your role in the psychedelic body-horror movie Kuso. This year you appeared in Boiler Room alongside Rico Nasty, and your “Elevator Music” DJ set went viral four months later. Did that feel like a turning point?

It’s definitely unexpected. I have a pretty terminally online audience, and I don’t say that in a disparaging way. I’m a very online person, but DJ’ing was originally my plan to stay out of the algorithm. Now I’m trying not to get into a headspace of “this is too quick” and to just enjoy the swell.

Some people might not know that you got your start as an illustrator, before you began making jokes on Twitter under the alias Bootymath. How’d you take up drawing?

I was always drawing. When I was a kid, my mom wanted me to go to art school. Growing up with a single mom, I think she saw that as my way out of the ’hood. Every single mom has one: “My baby’s going to be a ballplayer.” “My baby’s going to be” this or that. But my mom was like, “My baby can be whatever he wants.”

Did you end up going to art school?

I went to SCAD in Atlanta, but I dropped out because my professors there were like, “Look, dude, this place is for people who want to get a desk job at DreamWorks.” I had this erroneous thinking about what college was going to provide for me. But all that was only going to come from being outside, being in the streets, and helping people make art.

You started doing that around 2014, when you were emceeing for the creative collective Awful Records.

They were the first people to believe in me and say, “Whatever you want to do, however you want to help, just do it.” The time that I spent in school didn’t equal the value of just being around Awful and letting them empower me. I should have been paying them!

Was there a particular moment when you realized, Wait a minute, I’m funny. I should do something with this?

It was right after dropping out of SCAD. I had a really, really bad shroom trip when I was 20 that stripped away years and years of lying to myself and trauma. It just made me care a little bit less about how I was presenting myself to people and how people perceived me. I used to hate when people would laugh at shit that I would do. I was a goofy teenager, but I wasn’t living in it yet. I got comfortable with it when I was on Twitter just being stupid, trying to make my 10 closest friends laugh.

Who was the first person to make you realize you could break the rules?

I wouldn’t say my mom, because she loves law and order. When I dropped out, I remember her being pretty shattered. She was successful through her 40s, and then she and I were in a pretty bad way circa 2010. I was couch-surfing, and she had to live in a shelter. I was living with a drug dealer at the time. I couldn’t be a drug dealer because I’m a fucking nerd, but the options were readily available—I was around those people. But I was just like, No, I got to figure something out. The first people to be like, “Yo, you can do it in a different, new way” was really the people in Awful Records. They weren’t directly telling me that, but they were showing me: Creatively, there’s a way out of this. Seeing people actively break the rules, I was like, I don’t really have anything to lose.

You released your first rap album, Shut the Fuck Up Talking to Me, in 2021. Now you’re working on the next record, which is a real departure from that.

The more I started digging deeper into Ghettotech and raw electronic sound—stuff that I already knew about because I grew up listening to Atlanta bass—it made me reassess music making. I started digging back into stuff I made when I was younger. I was like, I could get really serious about rapping, and people would probably appreciate that. But at a certain point, I realized, who am I doing this to impress? Once I started making shit that was more house-y and more electro, I felt myself having more fun.

You’ve cited your upbringing in Atlanta as being a huge source of inspiration. The city in the early 2000s was such a wellspring of creativity, especially for music.

I think if you gave me a million dollars to be an adolescent anywhere else in the world, I would turn it down. I would just be bored.

Grooming by Nathaniel Dezan for Miche Beauty at OPUS Beauty; Production Coordinator: Jack Fish; Photo Assistant: Khalilah Pianta; Styling Assistant: Antonio Soto; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, inc.