When I ask Thundercat what his life was like before music, he shrugs. “There is nothing prior to music,” the funk virtuoso tells me. Fair enough.
Thundercat, born Stephen Lee Bruner, is a Grammy-award winning bassist was raised in Compton in a household full of drummers—his father was a drummer for some of Motown’s finest acts, and his mother was also a percussionist and flautist. His brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., has played for Kamasi Washington, Snoop Dogg, and Kendrick Lamar; both Bruner brothers appeared on To Pimp a Butterfly. So, why did Thundercat gravitate towards the bass? “That’s a million-dollar question,” he quips. “I don’t know, maybe I just didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing in the house.”
After some years of studio work playing for others, Thundercat blossomed into a solo artist, releasing his debut studio album, The Golden Age of Apocalypse, in 2011. His music is complex, funky, challenging yet accessible, and owes its sound to his myriad influences taken from the historically rich tones of black music: jazz, hip-hop, funk, and everything in between. Regardless of their subject matter, there’s always a touch of humor and absurdity to be found in his lyrics.
Now, Bruner is back with his fifth studio album, Distracted, out April 3. It’s also the first album he’s released without his longstanding collaborator, Flying Lotus, though the duo is still tight: “Flying Lotus has been one of my favorite collaborators throughout the years,” Thundercat says. “Our work together has always been a bit bigger than us.”
Most relevant to this column, though, is Thundercat’s appreciation for fashion. “I was there at the Pharrell concert in LA that dawned the Bape shoes,” he proudly tells me chuckling. He is a genuine fan of some of the world’s best designers. I compare his own reverence to that which his fans probably feel about him. “Man, oh man, that’s one of those real things for me,” he replies, smiling.
Here, Thundercat talks about recording Distracted, his first mind-melting clothing purchase in Japan, meeting Rick Owens for the first time, and more.
Christopher Fenimore
GQ: Do you have a first fashion or style memory?
Thundercat: Absolutely. It was the day Kamasi Washington said I should wear a suit [for a performance] when we were kids—about 13 or 14. It was the audacity of somebody telling me what to wear. It almost felt like, “How dare you?” When we were doing a formal gig, Mr. Andrews, my music teacher, said, “It’s a black-tie event.” It made me want to throw something. At a black-tie event, the musicians, the house band, we have to blend into the background. We’re not here. We’re just providing the environment. Those things used to mess with me when I was younger. Kamasi joked about it—you couldn’t find a matching suit in my wardrobe. There weren’t pants that matched a jacket. Because there’s a part of me that just was like, “You don’t get to tell me what to wear.”