Chanel made a splash at Paris Fashion Week when it closed the show with Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” but here in Denver, we’re more focused on another designer’s song choice.
YSL marked designer Anthony Vaccarello’s tenth year at the helm, and the March 3 show opened with “I Will Carry You,” a 2021 collaboration between Safari Riot and local rapper Old Man Saxon, whom we recently named one of the state’s top hip-hop artists to watch this year. You can catch the show on the YSL website, and hear the dramatic opening lines of the song as an elegant model strides out in a moody location near the Eiffel Tower, wearing a look that signifies a return of the sleek power suit. The soundtrack was selected by French DJ and producer Sebastian, who has provided music for several YSL fashion shows since 2019.
Saxon was surprised, to say the least, when a friend sent him a message earlier this week with the news that his song had opened one of the high-fashion label’s biggest shows of the year. At first, he was under the impression that the opening model was Zendaya; it wasn’t, although that would’ve make the moment full circle: He wrote the song for the film Malcolm & Marie, a romance drama starring Zendaya that released on Netflix in 2021.
“I’m not a big fashion guy…and I never really thought about making music for fashion shows,” Saxon says. “But once I heard my song, which fits, I wanted to hear other people’s songs.”
With this fashion show under his belt, perhaps Saxon could tap into an entirely new market. Vaccarello had said the designs fell under the theme of “nocturnal elegance,” a tagline that “I Will Carry You” helped to underscore.
“Specifically, that song is very ‘nocturnal elegance,’” Saxon says. “Even when it was made for Malcolm & Marie, that whole movie is in black and white, so it gives that same feeling.”
Old Man Saxon Is Working to Change a Narrative in Hip-Hop
Saxon, who has seen massive success with millions of streams and more than 100K monthly listeners on Spotify alone, is readying the release an EP later this spring, and will be playing a show at Lion’s Lair on March 28. He’s intentional about his music, but has also amassed a following on social media for his hot takes on hip-hop, in which he unabashedly calls out an “imagination problem” in the genre. He says young rappers can feel the need to emulate the stories told by mainstreamers who pull — truthfully or not — from violent or traumatic backgrounds.
He, too, felt that need to conform in his early years, he admits: “I used to lie and say I got shot; that’s not a normal thing. Would you say it without the influence of me wanting to be a rapper and seeing what my idols and what the most successful rappers have been through? I grew up in a time where 50 Cent got shot nine times and then leveraged it to become a rap superstar, so then I feel like I’ve got to say I got shot — maybe it’ll make my music better. … I feel like people constantly undermine the influence and effect that music can have on you.”
Saxon wants to change that. He’s created a nonprofit, Three Things, and has become a speaker and hip-hop music instructor at schools, where he teaches students to use real-life experiences and personal musings in their music, rather than falling back on tropes. That’s what he does with his own music now, as well. “I’ve been really thinking about my music under the concept of kindness,” he says. “I’ve been really into teaching kids about hip-hop and the history and what’s going on right now. And I realized a lot of hip-hop is kind of hardened — it’s not necessarily about being kind. Even the song ‘I Will Carry You’ is based around kindness.”
He was “getting to a point where I was wanting to retire from hip-hop,” he adds. “So I did this music-advocacy cohort called Music to Life, a way to get musicians to find a project that they could promote advocacy through music. And I was sitting there like, ‘How can I make this work for hip-hop?’”
Saxon noticed a theme in some archetypal rap songs in which the artists seemed to put a limit on their lifespan: In Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day,” he raps, Thinkin’, “Will I live another 24?” and in Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the rapper muses on death and says, I’m 23 now but will I live to see 24?. Then there’s Kanye West’s “We Don’t Care,” in which the artist sings, We wasn’t supposed to make it past 25.
“It’s almost like an expiration date in hip-hop,” Saxon says. “I internalized that as a kid; when I turned 25, I was homeless for a year. It seemed to me like, there’s probably something that I can do to help kids see their future a little more.”
For his nonprofit’s pilot program, he went to Hallett Academy and asked kids what type of music they listened to, and what age they saw themselves living to. “Kids that listen to a more positive hip-hop, they saw themselves living to a normal age,” he says, “but then there was a group of kids who like King Von or XXXtentacion, these artists that died early on, and their maximum age of seeing themselves was like, 19, 20, 21.
“I feel like it’s a disruption in their regularly scheduled programs to be like, ‘Hey, what if we talk about our future in hip-hop?’” he continues. “So what I do most of these times we go into these schools, I teach them a little bit about the history of hip-hop, and then have them write songs specifically about their future, so that they have something to look forward to instead of their fear of the future.”
Saxon has more to look forward to himself. He received Sonic Guild Colorado’s tour support grant for an upcoming run of concerts and speaking engagements across Europe. “It was very nice of them,” he says. “I have a speaking engagement in May in the Netherlands talking about hip-hop’s imagination problem. It’s based around hip-hop being the opposite of spirituals, and what spirituals did to kind of help you think about a better future. And then we got into hip-hop and it’s, ‘Damn, I’m scared to see the next day, am I going to make it this long, I killed this many people, or I did that. It’s become the exact opposite of a form that helped us get out of a situation; hip-hop instead is trying to glorify and keep us in the situation.”
He has plenty of advice to share with aspiring rappers. “I think the main thing I wish I knew as a young rapper was to try to not try to be a rapper,” he says. “The idea of you trying to be a rapper makes you copy things you don’t know about. Instead, if I entered my rap career as, ‘I’m Saxon, and I’m rapping,’ then I bring my own stories into it. If you try to be a rapper, you’re now in a place where you’re being influenced by hip-hop, and that is hip-hop eating its own pill, right? You want to be influenced by the world, and in the world as your stories — not anyone else’s. Your lyrics should be your thoughts out loud. If you go in trying to write rap bars, we’ve heard it before. But the thing that makes you unique is your own thoughts, then you’re bringing something to the genre that no one else has heard. And that’s what makes you unique: Your thoughts.
“So it sounds cliche and corny as hell,” he says, “but the more you’re yourself in hip-hop, the better it is. The more specific your story, the more universal it is.”
His biggest song, “The Perils,” which has nearly 12 million streams on Spotify, is an example of that. “It’s literally just what I was doing, from the first verse about 6 a.m. waking up all alone — that’s just what was happening,” he says. “And you get people from all over the world being like, ‘Oh, I understand this. I get this.’”
He concludes, “That would be my advice. Just tell your story.”