In April, 2015, Chaz Bear, then known as Chazwick Bundick, was backstage at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival when he met his first A-list fan. Until that spring, Bear—who has several monikers but releases music primarily as Toro y Moi—had enjoyed comfortable mid-level popularity as a darling of indie blogs like Pitchfork and discerning festivals like Coachella. But that afternoon Sean (Diddy) Combs approached him, and praised his work while dancing to the Toro y Moi track “Rose Quartz,” which played from a portable speaker that was hanging from his neck. “That was the trippiest time,” Bear recalled recently. “My reality was completely fucked up.” Combs asked Bear to work on his upcoming record, and months later, after their first studio session together, Bear found himself off the Miami coast, bouncing off the froth on a speedboat with the multiplatinum hitmaker and entrepreneur, surrounded by rap producers. Combs “was playing the best disco I’d ever heard—from the seventies, all seventies stuff. And he really knows his shit.”
It’s not entirely surprising that Combs, a proud record nerd who built his career on samples of David Bowie, Diana Ross, and the Jackson 5, heard what many hear in Toro y Moi, beneath the sheets of reverb and guitar: informed, gripping, refreshing twists on classic disco, funk, and R. & B. As Toro y Moi and bands such as Washed Out and Memory Tapes gained popularity in 2009, critics started calling their sound “chillwave,” pointing to the nostalgic, soft focus that filters their material. Theirs was new music meant to sound old, with old keyboards used in new ways—imagine if “Treasure” by Bruno Mars were warped through cassette-tape fuzz. Asked about his influences, Bear, whose father is black and whose mother is Filipina, likes to cite both the Beach Boys and the late hip-hop producer J. Dilla, but his output is even more wide-ranging than those inspirations suggest. Since 2010, Bear has released seven albums as Toro y Moi, an electronic-dance E.P. as Les Sins, and a jazz album with the Mattson 2, as well as a concert film set in the Mojave Desert, which spanned his catalogue to date. If there is any constant through his oeuvre, it’s his distant affect and a tendency to prioritize output over precision. As a denizen of D.I.Y. music, he prioritizes the “D.I.” as urgently as the “Y.”
Unlike firebrand truth-tellers such as Kendrick Lamar or M.I.A., Bear has rarely explicitly addressed polarizing cultural issues or engaged with bummer news headlines. This is part of his appeal: by escaping any neat categorization, musically or culturally, he can be comfortably claimed by rap and rock fans alike. When I met Bear, who is thirty, this past summer, in the garden of the Ludlow Hotel, he was wearing a tangerine T-shirt under a chambray button-down, and a thick gray beanie that sat just above his hairline, as it does on the cover of his latest album, “Boo Boo.” He was in town for a day-long d.j. set at the Well, a hipster bar in East Williamsburg, and was sneaking in a few recording sessions with a crew of bratty young rappers from Philadelphia. As one of the few black indie musicians at work today—“It’s just me and Dev [Hynes],” he said—Bear is aware that his ability to fit in to such diverse scenes is rare. He is also aware that he tends to inspire a particular response from fans. “To most people, I’m like this cute Teddy bear,” he told me at one point.
In fact, growing up “in a white culture in South Carolina in the suburbs, skateboarding and listening to the Misfits,” he often felt “alienated” from his classmates, he said. “Because I didn’t talk with Ebonics, or even with a Southern accent, I guess people thought I was putting on a façade. But it’s not; it’s just the way I talk.” Bear’s parents met in New York before moving to Columbia, where they both worked in finance. As a teen-ager, he listened to the music that his parents played—English new wave, Madonna, the Specials, and Michael Jackson—and started a band that covered Weezer and the Pixies. At home, he engaged with black culture through his father’s Public Enemy tapes, Richard Pryor specials, and the occasional cookout at his grandmother’s. These parallel influences informed not just his music but his malleable sense of identity. “We can turn the blackness on and off,” he told me when I asked him where he feels his music falls in the lineage of black artists. “I have Ebonics in me, I talk like that at home with my family. But that’s just not me all the time.”
Bear studied design in college, and began producing his own music, cold-e-mailing MP3s to music bloggers, before signing with Carpark Records, in 2009. From the start, his image—effortlessly fashionable, suavely detached, always keeping “an eye on what would be ironic and what would be expected”—was part of his music-making. Bear’s 2013 album, “Anything in Return,” came closer to traditional pop and R. & B. than anything he’d released before; “Rose Quartz,” Diddy’s favorite, included a sample of the early Whitney Houston hit “How Will I Know.” He describes the album not just as a musical progression but as a personal reinvention that helped expand his reach beyond indie addicts and beat nerds to fans of more mainstream sounds. “I immediately knew, Oh, yeah, I got the R. & B. crowd now—sweet,” he told me. “It was in me the whole time. I made it a year prior to that. I was bumping it a year before. I was, like, I guess I’m ready to show my black side. And a lot of people liked it.”
As discussion about race in America has intensified, Bear has begun mining his own biography in ways he hadn’t thought to before. It was only around five years ago, Bear explained, that he “started to think, Oh, shit, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. And it was a lot of stuff I hadn’t even thought about, honestly, until I was put in the spotlight.” He was particularly shaken by the murders of nine black churchgoers by Dylann Roof, in June, 2015, in his home state of South Carolina, as well as the shooting of five police officers in downtown Dallas, a year later. It struck him that he and his father had never before spoken about their experiences as black men. “He’s as alienated in a white world as I am—except he’s just in banking,” he said. Such self-examination can be difficult to work through with an audience. This past March, Bear offered public thoughts on race for what might’ve been the first time. “Can’t we all just be racist together?” he posted to his Twitter account. “We’re all a lil racist. racism isn’t the issue. violence is. stop the violence.” Later, he added, “I feel like us mixed race ppl have a better view of the world” and “We never fit in with anyone.” The tweets provoked outrage, and he apologized, specifically for his use of the word “better.” But Bear also thinks the experience was useful for showing fans a different, more emotional side of himself. “I’m kind of going crazy in my head,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep it together. I’m constantly trying to relate to other people, as much as they are trying to relate to other people.”
Bear has found a better forum for self-exploration in “Boo Boo,” which arrived this past July. “What is wrong with this world? It’s got me thinking too much,” he sings on “W.I.W.W.T.W.,” before a police siren swells into prominence, drowning out the distant chirping of songbirds. In “No Show,” he refers to his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, from whom he separated last year: “My baby got fed up with my ego,” Bear sings. “Wasn’t even thinking we were going worldwide, figured it was better than the Southern life.” There are flashes of humor, and even something resembling a rap verse, on the album’s first single, “Girl Like You.” But Bear has largely returned to the unique sound of eighties-era R. & B. and humid ambient synths that he does best. The music’s cloudiness evokes his own aura; Bear is still most comfortable as an enigma, leaving fans to fill in the gaps where influence and intent part.
“The stuff that really stands the test of time are those catchy songs that never really become hits but they’re always in movies,” he said. “That’s the level that I try to stay at, or I strive for. I’m not striving for the best. I’m just striving for good.” It’s a peculiar sentiment, but one that chameleonic artists such as David Byrne have also expressed. “Good” leaves room for improvement while relieving the pressure of perfection. It allows you to change, and to grow, and, sometimes, to be wrong. A common adage says that, in order to succeed in America, people of color have to be twice as good as their white counterparts—that they have to strive to be the best. But Bear insists upon the human right to be good, and that keeping twice as cool may be just as effective.