Well, I make music full-time, I also do modeling on the side, that's a recent thing. But yeah, just music for the most part is really what I eat, sleep and breathe. You know what I'm saying? just actually finished my EP, hella excited about that, I finished it last night. Did like 12 hours in the studio yesterday. It's been a really weird process just because of like coronavirus and all that. It's just so much it's stress in the air literally and I'm in LA right now you can cut the tension with a fucking knife, bro. It's insane.
That's a good question. I haven't even thought about that. Honestly this is going to sound like kind of a cop out answer, but I really feel like I'm just a mixing pot of a bunch of shit. If I can name my top influences as far as an aesthetic, off the top of my head, it would be like River Phoenix, Kid Cudie, Jimmy Hendrix, Kurt, those are the ones at the top of my head I can name. Definitely River Phoenix over everything, he just looked like he didn't try, you know what I'm saying? I think that's very important. People try to over simplify the idea of fashion nowadays and I think of everything kind of how I think of my music. I freestyle everything, so I'm going off emotion all the time. That's why I feel like my look is so fluid. I think honestly, to bring Kurt back up, I'm pretty sure the first time I ever wore nail polish, it was like probably the summer after fifth grade and I'm 18 now. But it was probably the summer after fifth grade and I was like, around that time I was super into fucking pop punk bands around at the time, Panic at the Disco, Paramore, Green Day all those huge bands and then when I first got into nirvana around that time and I was watching Kurt and watching interviews and shit. I just noticed how much he embraced the idea of self-expression and I didn't have lots at the time and I didn't really have much money to afford any cool clothes. So the only thing I could think of was to like get some flashy colors on myself, at the time I would run into my mom's room, put on some nail polish… I got a weird response at first but my mom was pretty open to it. So I'm thankful for that one. I'm glad, like I'm not much of a gatekeeper for really anything. So it's like I know there's people who are like, ah, they wearing nail polish, like they're like totally ruining the culture, I like that bigger people with more of a reach are doing it because I mean, I think it should just be a normal thing. The fact that we have to even sit here, you and me right now and explain the reasons why we do something is beyond me, honestly. But that's why I'm honestly, I'm happy to be sharing this experience with you.
The one good part about me being a musician and if you start to notice, in like late eighties, early nineties, the outliers of culture who had a strong voice, weren't so much the black musicians, even though they were definitely the stronghold at the time, I felt like it was definitely people like just the whole art Renaissance in the early nineties and the late eighties, definitely push for the non-performance ideals of a thinking. And I like the fact that now in music, these people are at the forefront of idol worship. However you want to put it, we put these people on a pedestal, you know what I'm saying? I can speak for kids my age and a little bit younger it's like we look at the rappers we lost in the past couple of years, we've got Juice World, we've got XXXtentacion, we got Lil Peep, they all painted their nails and a lot of kids looked up to them. That kind of stuff opens the door for these things to happen with young kids. I see it all the time, I see kids younger than me putting on nail polish and wearing crop tops and it's like the little me is dope. Masculinity is now being turned into something that's not outwardly portrayed with vision and more something that means you're secure with yourself.
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I just feel like a bad bitch, it just makes me feel cool, it makes me feel like a rockstar. It makes me feel very, I don't know, if you could see my username, but it's babybowie, so it's like, I really, all those kinds of, I like colors. I'm rocking the blue right now. I'm actually, weird thing about me wearing nail Polish, I'm color blind. So I have a hard time, I really, it's really what I'm feeling at the time. I don't really care about what color it is., honestly. I'd probably wear any color.
Yup.
A shit ton.
Well, yeah, I'm a firm believer of a; that's a good way to put it, that's facts. I'm a firm believer of a reincarnation and just the transference of energy and shit like that. My artist name is Tony Sinatra because me and Frank Sinatra have the same birthday. I also go by Baby Bowie just because I feel like my self-expression is somewhere in his and he makes me do wild, outrageous shit. I'm always calling myself Tony Phoenix because of River Phoenix.
I have a lot of these people in my life who I look up to, who just kind of inspired different parts of my personality and I just feel like David Bowie was just good at exaggerating his personality because a lot of people can make it sound like, oh, these entertainers are puppets. They're not really these people and especially when you create a character like David Bowie has, it's hard to believe that it's that person. But honestly you can really tell when you look at his interviews or read any of his momentos. It's like, these are all just exaggerations of his personality and also just him with the Ziggy Stardust idea and like being an alien from another planet, my next single is called spaceship love and it's just about feeling out of this planet and basically viewing the whole earth from a different microscope than humans.
So I just feel like his representation of being an outsider resonated the most with me because a lot of ideas about being an outsider come from like these very punk, like post-modernist, the queen is dead ideas and it's like, I don't even feel close enough with the rest of the population to be in that kind of spectrum of thinking. So it's like, I'm always talking like I'm an alien. I don't really mean any of that, but it's like that's what it feels like.
They'll never love you until your reign is over, bro.
I've tried like eyeliner and eye shadow and stuff like that. As far as like foundation, stuff like that, I never really saw much of a use for it just because I'm kind of lazy and also it's just like, I just don't, I wouldn't know where to start. Nail polish is just super, it's very hit or miss, you can do it by yourself, you can have your homie do it. You can always have someone to do it for you. So it's like, it's really easy, it's not that much of a thought process, but I've done eyeliner and eye shadow and stuff like that for like some of my photo shoots and stuff and it always makes me feel just feisty. So it's a vibe.
Who cares? Do it, bro. The worst comes to worse, you don't fuck with it, you can take it off, but that's how you got to view anything in life, man, who cares? If you want to do something, do it like, honestly, at the end of the day, you're probably going to regret that you didn't do something more than if you did do something. So just go for it, bro. It'll probably look dope. It's a couple of flicks and the girls will like it. So do it man.
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