James Massiah wants you to become your own god

James Massiah joins the Zoom call on a bike, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. Fragments of London flash by, jagged, disjointed, buzzing in grey – reminding me of the texture of Massiah’s music. He cuts through the streets with a deliberate momentum, an urgency wrapped in ease, like it’s just another verse in his stream-of-consciousness sermon.

Poet and musical artist, Massiah is both a descendant and a propeller of the London sound. His latest project, Bounty Law, elevates that lineage — not by polishing it up, but by leaning into its rawness. Think synthpop, dancehall, grime, and acid, all spiked with video game distortion and numb melancholia. Lyrics spiral through sex, race, and spirituality, all while sounding like they were recorded in the back of a night bus. His work unfolds through layers of seriousness and unseriousness, the sacred and the profane. Yet the mission is clear: bringing people together. Whether through universal lyrics — revisiting libidinal confusion on Dobermann, or that dreaded moment when your ex returns quoting bell hooks at you on Pop Down — or through Adult Entertainment, his event series celebrating pleasure, poetry, and community, Massiah makes space for desire, delusion, and everything in between.

Listening to Massiah’s music feels like recalling a deep conversation in the smoking area (or what you thought was one). It’s like pressing your ear to London’s underbelly and hearing it hum back, dirty, lawless, and divine. Extended through his aliases and collaborators of DJ Escrow or Dean Blunt’s Babyfather, Massiah distills the ecstatic confusion of being alive into throbbing, unpredictable sonic echoes. While striving for connection, he’s not interested in being palatable. In fact, he’d prefer it if you weren’t either. As the city fumes in the background, we talk about the tie between egoism and empathy, shedding of religious dogmas, and the importance of understanding and being understood. 

Lovely to speak to you! It’s been quite an intense weekend for you with the release. How are you feeling?
I’m really happy. The feedback has been great, and I’m proud of the music anyway. The speed with which we put it out was also important, all the ideas still feel very fresh. We put it together in a few weeks’ time. But I also realised that a lot of people still haven’t heard it. So, I’m on a campaign to spread the gospel now so that everyone gets to hear it. I hope to do more local shows with free entry as well where myself and a few friends play back-to-back. 

Everyone has to hear it now! Tell me more about the album – what inspired the Tarantino reference? [Bounty Law is a fictional TV show within ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’].
I always reference Tarantino in my record names. Bounty has multiple meanings. In London, that’s slang for a black person who doesn’t embody or contravenes the characteristics and ideas of blackness. And there’s a few tracks where I comment on race or class in a subtle way. Then it became about bounty as in the thing that you want in life. Is it love? Is it money? Drugs? What’s your bounty? And then I remembered Tarantino’s Bounty Law. I also started thinking about Bounty Killer, who’s one of my favourite artists. A bounty hunter is someone who’s living their life in search of the bounty, by any means necessary. If that means that I lose my relationships, so be it, I need to get what I want out of life. And I need to enjoy it. So, it’s a hedonistic thing, as much as a more sociopolitical thing as well.

Is that what you live by?
Yeah, that’s me. I’m a hedonist, really. But my hedonism has been tempered by the facts of life and the realities of living in this city. Like, taxes. And just societal pressure. There’s a cap on my hedonism. I think in many ways, I idealise this lone wolf type archetype, who is a cowboy and a gunslinger, he just kind of goes about doing what he wants to do. Even the artwork indicates that a little bit. This guy is on his own mission, amongst crowds of people or potential lovers. You don’t see their face. It’s just the direction of travel. 

Would you say this attitude has progressed throughout your artistic career, or life in general?
I think now ideas about fatherhood and familial responsibility are creeping in a bit. You have tracks like Baby that allude to the fact that it has been one big reckless search for the bounty. And maybe now, it has to slow down. There’s other records as well where I talk about my life. Maybe True Romance does it best, as far as detailing a particular relationship. Being fast-living, fast-loving, and then coming to a crash.

And what hedonism means to you, has that also been evolving?
It’s still very much the effects of drugs, dancing, music – that’s what I look for. I love people. I guess at the heart of my hedonistic pursuits, it is all about people, meeting people, learning about people, hearing their stories, seeing how they operate. I’m trying to understand myself, and I do that best through the lens of other human beings. Life gets hard sometimes, and except for any kind of release you can have physically, there’s also the emotional release, and that comes from community and intimacy.

So much of what you’re telling me now is obviously about other people – as well as so much of your poetry, and the events you put on, and the kinds of conversations you start is about bringing people together. I find it interesting that simultaneously you still resonate with this lone wolf archetype.
Lone wolf is probably the wrong description. Maybe a lone ranger? Like a stranger who comes into town, you see them in police or medical dramas. They come into a situation with this deep empathy and care for people, and they’re able to solve the situation and bring the community back together. And then once that’s done, you find that they still have their own issues. Columbo, for example – you never get to see Columbo’s wife. You don’t know his personal life. I come, I host, I entertain, and while I don’t have any secrets, I do still have my own internal monologue, dialogue, and internal life that people won’t see. And in that sense, it does feel like, maybe, Doctor Who?.. I’m trying to think of better references. Maybe The Stranger by Camus, these basic heroic archetypes.

Yeah, I see. And how does this tie in with your philosophy of amoral egoism?
Amoral egoism is the lens through which I view the world. I was talking to someone the other day about giving it a rebrand. Amoral egoism should be about absolute empathy. It’s about the ability to understand everyone’s motivations. Everyone’s trying to do their own thing. And so there is no moral basis for anything. It’s all value judgments, and value judgments are determined by people’s experiences. And then, I guess, it encourages me to think about what my values are, and to find people who share those values, and form communities and live in harmony with them. 

I feel like as soon as we hear anything related to ‘ego’ or ‘egoism’, it is assumed to be entirely negative and detrimental to those outside of said ‘ego’. But there are so many possible implications to what self-interest can mean.
Yeah, ego is just your self. Everyone has a self. And maybe there’s religious dogma that’s told us that our selves are bad or evil, but I don’t believe I’m evil. I don’t believe that anyone’s inherently evil. Someone’s actions or values may differ from mine, and in that sense, they might be an evil to what I want to achieve. That was important for me to learn at a certain point, when I was leaving church. And I guess even in my own periods of loneliness or depression, it often would come down to the sense of not being good enough for any sphere that I was in. It’s like, well, no, I am good. My friends would get down about how they got fired from this job or their partner left them. But they decided that you weren’t good for them, and that doesn’t make you a bad person. Your worth is still there to be validated by you, and maybe by me as your friend. 

It’s definitely nuanced – while formal religion has practically collapsed, it still holds a lot of implicit influence. I think a lot of young people have felt a bit lost in terms of finding sources of self-worth in this space.
How do you live in a world where there is no right and no wrong, where there’s no God to define what you should or shouldn’t be doing? It’s like, well, you are your own God. And if that’s the case, then whatever you deem to be right or wrong is up to you, and you can live how you want to live. That’s maybe at the heart of all of my music and writing. It’s encouraging people to become gods almost. To become God is that thing of the bounty hunter. It’s your law.

That’s a beautiful perspective. I do feel like this philosophy gets misinterpreted at times though – like the classic male manipulator pipeline of a guy who reads Camus once and absolves himself of any interpersonal responsibility or care.
Yeah, but this is just an encouragement to anyone who’s on my side, any of my people. My partners, my friends, my collaborators. I’m saying that we should do what’s good for us. And then it’s like, well, how do you expand that? Is it then England? Is it London? Is it Dalston? Is it the queer community? The black community? Who are you defending? If you’re the sheriff of the town, what’s your town? But people know who I am, and they know who my people are. My values are music, enjoyment, pleasure. Safety and consent go without saying – to me, they’re inherently a part of this enjoyment. There’s no pleasure in any harm being done to the people around me. They have to be enjoying it too. We’re all born alone, we all die alone. But while we’re here, we have to share and barter and exchange and accept. Even on the Pop Down song, you hear me arguing with a lover “No, you’re dead wrong // No, you’re dead right.” And just that willingness to realise that what I want can perhaps better be achieved through conversation and collaboration. It’s like someone else offering you a better route to what you want.

And, ultimately, what you want is often just connection. In which case empathy and egoism are intertwined.
Exactly. The two are not exclusive to me. Empathy is the vehicle to what my ego wants.

Yeah, interesting. It’s good to question our relationship to our ego while not falling into deep shame or excessive selfishness.
It’s our self, but it’s also not independent of others. It’s important to not diminish the self. But it’s a sliding scale of too much order, too much chaos. Like, when does tyranny happen? I used to hate the word sustainability, but now I love it, because it’s about how can I get the most pleasure for the longest amount of time? And it comes from looking after yourself and the people around you. 

Pleasure is another word we learnt to associate with shame so much. How has your religious upbringing influenced your philosophy now?
This is definitely an ex-Christian figuring it all out. I was very, very, very religious. I was raised in a certain Adventist church, which is, you know, not a cult [emphasis on the air quotes]. And then I got into this thing called Holiness, which is quite a strange reading of the Bible and the Old Testament. And then I got into Islam as well. And then I just crashed and burned and became an atheist. Like a really hardcore atheist. And then I tried to just relax. And then I got into left-wing politics stuff, I started going to demos and getting involved in direct action. Maybe I live by the extremes. I think the extreme I’m committed to now is music, writing poetry, art, broadly speaking. That feels good, because – and I hate to say it – our society values productivity. When my energy is channeled into a project or a product that people can consume, I get rewarded for it. And it’s a more sustainable reward than I would get from a dopamine hit or an orgasm. 

I also want to talk about your relationship with language. I’ve personally always found words quite limiting in a way they can translate a thought or a feeling – like they impose form and linearity on things that extend beyond that. Have you ever felt that way, and if so, how do you overcome that?
I’ve always enjoyed words. When I’m abroad, I really enjoy the way that English is spoken. I write my poems in a way that a non-native English speaker might use the language. Maybe people argue it’s less beautiful. But I think there’s a beauty in that directness and efficiency that allows for less deception. I’ve been accused of being difficult to understand, but I aim to be really simple. I’m just on a mission to be understood and to understand, across all spheres. I’ve got a theory that when you ask someone how they feel about something and they say they don’t know, it’s not true. I think you always know. You might have a concern about what will happen when you express it, but you know. I encourage everyone I talk to to speak directly. 

I agree! But for me, the ‘not knowing’ is a part of being limited by language. I think in addition to social pressure, we’re also not really taught to put our opinions into words.
The encouragement then would be to talk it out. There’s a scene in Sopranos where Doctor Murphy is encouraging Tony to talk about his dreams. He gets all frustrated because he doesn’t see the point or the meaning of his dreams, but she guides him through that, and he derives the meaning from the conversation. You get to that point of knowing by talking. And when I say I don’t know, I buy myself time to come up with a palatable response. But if me and you are on the same team, we don’t have to worry about being palatable or agreeable. It’s not like talking to the police or the press.

Grouping me with the police, ouch.
Ha-ha. But you know, talking to a friend or a lover. I’m not Piers Morgan. Let’s talk it out. 

I suppose this is the point of any language-based art. You get exposed to different verbal formulations of feelings. We all go through similar things, so it’s important to see how people process that.
Exactly!

On this note, let’s talk Adult Entertainment! It’s such a needed space, what has your experience running it been like?
Ex-church boy and all that, this was my way to recreate the atmosphere of YBT, which stands for Youth Bible Time. We used to have it every Friday evening. We’d get together, pray, sing a song or two, read a poem or two. But we also laughed and talked about our lives, struggles, temptations. It was really special and important. So I wanted to recreate that in a tongue-in-cheek way. People don’t always get it, and think it’s a sex party or something. It’s a bit of a private joke because it’s just a poetry night, but people are like, oh, is it poems about sex? It’s like, no, it’s just poems. Channel 4 had this channel called More 4, and their tagline was Adult Entertainment. For a long time, I thought that was them launching like a porn channel. But they were just doing a channel for more highbrow content. Highbrow, lowbrow…  You thought you were going to see something naughty and it’s just a bunch of old poems.

Would you ever consider making it a sex party or?..
I know lots of people have hooked up and found romance at the shows or at the parties and I take great pride in that. Whether or not it will be formally organised as a sex party remains to be seen. 

We’ll keep our eyes out… What is your relationship to London as a city? It’s hard to pin it down, but it just feels like you distill the sound of London so well.
I had a few people say that it was a London sound. I wasn’t quite sure what they meant, but I think it’s about the way it encapsulates a garage, grime and dancehall feel. And even the slang, and the stories about Stratford to Dalston, a taxi or a bike from here to there, the speed of London as well. It’s definitely my city, but I’ve enjoyed other cities as well. I think of myself as the Prince of the Eurostar, always going to Paris, Brussels, back to London. I enjoyed performing in Armenia, that was a random one. And in Romania as well. I feel like an ambassador for London. Maybe even London’s underworld. I do really like this era of London, and I’d like to think that I document it well. 

What would you say this underworld is defined by right now?
A certain lawlessness. There are these parties that we have on the Thames that my friend organises. You think of venues like MOT or all-night parties at Fold. They all deviate from what might be regarded as socially acceptable. There’s no malice, it’s just a desire to exist more purely in a way that mainstream society doesn’t allow for some people. It’s that sense of lawlessness that allows for people who are not included within the law to live more freely.

On a final note (and I know you don’t talk about it a lot), what do you channel through your different aliases?
Anything I do or say is being done or said by me. So in one way or another it’s a reflection of me. A side of me. Exaggerated or obscured or corrupted or enhanced, but always a part of me.