‘It’s more productive than doomscrolling’: film-maker Ben Wheatley on his secret life as musician Dave Welder

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While playing with nine-figure Hollywood budgets, the Kill List and Meg 2 director has become a prolific music producer. Next up is his experimental film, Bulk Dave Welder may just be the most prolific musician you’ve never heard of. In a little more than a year, he has released a staggering 26 records spanning electronica, dub, ambient, kosmische and drone. One of these albums, Thunderdrone, is more than four hours long. Based in Brighton and Hove and described as “a rotating group of musicians and artists”, in reality “Dave Welder” is largely the work of one man who, until now, has been operating in secret: film director Ben Wheatley. “I’ve always wanted to make music,” says Wheatley, whose films include the independent movies High-Rise, Kill List and Sightseers, along with big-budget Hollywood flicks such as the shark thriller Meg 2: The Trench. “I wanted to do it for my films but there was a dissonance. Of all the art forms, I couldn’t really understand it. I would dream that I c...
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‘It has become a sort of silver bullet’: why are rap lyrics being put on trial?

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In compelling documentary As We Speak, a controversial legal practice that uses rap lyrics to secure convictions is explored

In September 2001, McKinley Phipps Jr, also known as the rapper Mac, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It had been a year and a half since gunfire erupted outside a club where he was slated to perform in Slidell, Louisiana, resulting in the death of 19-year-old Barron Victor Jr. Phipps, then 22, maintained his innocence, and the case against him was weak – there was no gun linking him to the crime, several witnesses recanted their testimony and another person confessed to pulling the trigger. And yet, prosecutors had their trump card: Mac, a former New Orleans rap prodigy who began releasing music at the age of 13, had rapped about murder.

“Murder, murder, kill, kill”, Phipps recites in As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a new documentary on the criminalization of rap lyrics. Prosecutors spliced that line with one from a different song – “Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head” – to create the portrait of a killer; Mac’s art was the evidence that DNA, solid confessions, or a missing weapon couldn’t provide. An all-white jury bought it. Phipps served over 21 years in prison before being granted clemency in 2021.

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