Babymorocco/Photo: Maya Surrenti
“Plastic never dies and tonight we are not going to die,” Babymorocco yelled in Schubas Tavern on August 14. Ecstasy ensued.
With Babymorocco, you are never really getting one thing—and thank God for that.
Clayton Pettet, the Moroccan, London-based performance artist behind Babymorocco, possesses a complex and thoughtful creativity of the kaleidoscope variety diffusing, fragmenting, reflecting his artistic project in many directions.
Once you dive into Babymorocco and his characters, such as hedonistic Frenchman Jean Paul from the 2024 album “Amour” or Rocco Tropico from the August 14 EP “The Summer Fables,” you stumble upon a Russian nesting doll situation. Rocco Tropico, Pettet’s newest character in his psychedelic era, is nested in Babymorocco, Babymorocco nested in Pettet.
I watched Babymorocco morph from Babymorocco to Rocco Tropico and Jean Paul, each character loosely distinguished by an ethos, an outfit and of course, their songs. The whirlwind of characters adds to the vibrant, fun, whimsical aspect of his performance. However, start to think about the personas and you’ll find yourself like me, dancing my little heart out while simultaneously wondering if Jean Paul’s Frenchness reflects Pettet’s Moroccan roots.
“It’s a way of being like ‘fuck you, I’m going to do it,’” Pettet tells me after the show through laughter. Speaking on Europe’s colonization of Morocco, he adds: “like why do my cousins speak French?” To create music both invigoratingly hedonistic and philosophically stimulating is hard to come by. In his own words, no one is doing it like him, at least not since David Bowie’s Thin White Duke.
With Rocco Tropico and “The Summer Fables,” Pettet marks a shift in Babymorocco’s attitude. He began Babymorocco with the “kind of mindless” character Big Rocco, an outlet for his writing without the burden of over intention. Certainly his earlier music reveled in the hedonistic, always fueled by an addicting lyricism. “SXC,” a major hit of Babymorocco’s in collaboration with Frost Children, pulses “I love it when it’s hot in here, bass in ear, got no fear”—a perfect glimmer of euphoric club entrancement.
Babymorocco/Photo: Maya Surrenti
Now, Pettet is shifting toward all the stuff he was obsessed with when he was a kid. “The Summer Fables” circles back to his love for fairy tales and Greek and Roman mythology. “It’s a bit of a pretentious answer,” he says, “I do just love writing, and I wanted to write with a bit more intention.” “Fable” is the cornerstone word for his artistic venture on his EP, which, in my mind pairs perfectly with summer, promising the fairytale of golden, sun-kissed months.
The EP’s trip hop-leaning sound encapsulates his kaleidoscopic abilities and poetic inclinations. Announcing the EP, Pettet writes “this mixtape, it’s a microcosm of the worlds I’m creating for you.”
“And this mixtape is called ‘The Summer Fables’ / I’m changing you, I’m ripping off all your cables,” sing-talks Rocco Tropico on “Welcome 2 My Garden,” the opening track. Ditching the “thoughtless” shroud, Babymorocco playfully but intentionally pulls his audience into his musical world.
Babymorocco, “ripping off [our] cables,” keeps his art’s point of origin in constant motion. Sfumato-like, his characters blur together in concert, changing from one song to another, addressing the crowd in different accents, old characters awoken and then put to sleep.
This is Jean Paul’s outfit, he announces to his thrilled audience. Seductive Jean Paul comes to life with a French accent. He sports a suit jacket, shirtless, announcing “I don’t give a fuck about Babymorocco!” Pettet, the puppet master of his characters, tells me that he always kills off Jean Paul after bringing him back. The audience chants “Jean Paul,” unknowingly extinguishing the character. The name echoes through the venue as Pettet morphs back into Rocco Tropico, replacing his signature kitschy wedding veil.
Babymorocco/Photo: Maya Surrenti
Curious about how he solves the problem of reviving characters previously dramatically killed off—Jean Paul’s death included vast amounts of fake blood in New York City’s Elsewhere—he explains, “I realized I have to bring [Jean Paul] back to life sometimes because there’s quite a few songs that people love. I think for me it’s fun to create a character, kill them off and bring them back to life as performances. People don’t perform the play, but those characters still exist but they are dead, kind of, brought back when a different director is in charge of it. I’m a different director every time a character comes back from the dead.”
“Right now I’m in the more psychedelic era, but I’m bringing Jean Paul back from the dead in the context of the psychedelic era,” Pettet clarifies, adding a Sartrean and Derridean layer to his music. Babymorocco through his characters—perhaps intentionally, perhaps subconsciously—introduces the theme of identity’s malleability. Pettet’s constantly morphing alter egos poke holes in the idea that the self is fixed.
The garden that Pettet welcomes us into on “The Summer Fables” is a garden divorced from structure, free floating in a psychedelic freedom where we can see his musical acting’s generative nature clearly. No thing is one thing with Babymorocco because concrete definitions limit creativity. The color-inside-the-lines world we live in is a fable. Pettet wants us to wake up, face the music and dance alongside it. His creative liberation is exactly what gives his concerts and music their contagious, enrapturing quality.
If Pettet’s high-energy music provokes such philosophical meditations, I’m on the edge of my seat for “It Gets Worse,” the A24-produced series coming out in October. Pettet is taking a quick Babymorocco break to focus on acting, but Muchacha (“he’s a little Spanish because they colonized Morocco”) awaits us on the album “California Hustler Santa Monica.” Who knows what this puppet master has in store?
