Ken Carson Lives His Punk-Rock Dream at a Green Day Show in Atlanta

“Dude, are those Alpinestars?”

“Nah—they’re supposed to be. They’re Balenciagas. I got a bunch of Alpines at home, though.”

The rock stars are talking in a language we don’t speak. Mike Dirnt, the 52-year-old bassist for the legendary East Bay punk outfit Green Day, is discussing the merits of chic leather pants and recreational dirt bike riding with a 24-year-old fan, Kenyatta Lee Frazier Jr.—better known as Ken Carson—at a meet and greet in a clubhouse in the stadium where the Braves play, in a suburb of Ken’s native Atlanta. It’s August 2024, Green Day has spent the past six months on tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of Dookie and the 20th anniversary of American Idiot, and in about an hour they will perform a 140-minute show for 30,000 people.

Dirnt looks every bit the distinguished-gentleman punk—bleached muttonchops, open rockabilly button-down. Ken is wearing unzipped platform leather boots, the aforementioned pants and a hoodie—all black, all Balenciaga. His two-tone Monokuma dreads are tied back in pigtails on either side of his head. He looks goth. He looks like he moonlights as a crime-fighting vigilante when he’s not making music. He looks fucking cool. But he's also affable, full of questions, and receptive to answers—not quite starstruck, but visibly excited to be in this room with his heroes. Ken has said that Green Day is his favorite band, and they've impacted his music, including one of his biggest singles, “Jennifer’s Body,” whose hesitant start-stop opening pays tribute to the stuttered intro to “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”.

When the hang is over, Green Day drummer Tré Cool sneaks us down to a subterranean batting cage the band’s been using as a rehearsal space, so that Ken can smoke weed in peace. He’s still thinking about leather pants and their deeper meaning—the Alpinestars, made for motocross, and the Balenciagas made in homage to them. “That’s, like, two different eras meeting each other,” Carson says. He shakes his head in disbelief and hits a joint the size of an adult man’s index finger.

Danaer Mensah

It’s been yet another surreal couple of hours at the outset of a surreal and extraordinary life. Carson is still soaring off the momentum of A Great Chaos, the breakthrough album The Washington Post called the third best album of 2023, and its deluxe rollout earlier this summer. He’s at the end of a successful US tour and heads to Europe in two weeks. His hotly anticipated new album is coming sometime in the next few months.

“I just met fucking Green Day!” he says, then grins. “What would I say if I could tell my 12 year old self?”

For a moment, imagine it’s the '90s, and you’re composing the score for a dystopian film set in 2024, and you have to concoct music that the teenagers of thirty years hence—the youth of a crumbled society at the beginning of the end of the world—will be tweaking out to with their eyes rolled back in their heads. There’s a good chance the music you’d come up with would sound something like Ken Carson’s.

On the mic, Ken keeps the Autotune cranked so his nasal yap is near-digitized to match his fractured production, turning him into a pixelated rapper who has emerged from a Capcom cutscene. His generic lyrics about drugs, money and women are alternately old-Kanye flavored goofy/brilliant and achingly po-faced, and largely besides the point. His nearly sample-free production sounds like you’re playing an NES mod while your mom runs a vacuum cleaner on the square of carpet directly next to you, and toggles tonally from a 2-D side-scroll swim through the Mushroom Kingdom, to a dungeon in Hyrule, to a candlelit great hall in Castlevania.

As Carson has developed as a rapper, the sound he forged has grown, both in terms of sheer volume and the number of producers laying hands on his beats, which live on the bleeding edge of rap and 8-bit deep house and noise. On his breakout third project A Great Chaos, from 2023, the tracks have evolved into heavily layered walls of sound, squalls of sound featuring dueling pluggy arpeggios laid under droning liquid-metallic bass lines and soft, gorgeous Kraftwerk melodies accented with text message notifications and Ralph Fiennes banging on a trash can and slot machines jackpotting and projectile shells striking Mario Karts. These beats have increased in density and EF Scale, as more and more producers (A Great Chaos credits over a dozen) have joined the next-gen Dungeon Family-like cabal that puts Ken’s massive 20+ song projects together.

Ken's entry into the game was through the Atlanta producer TM88’s nephew, Lil88, who he was tangentially linked to by middle school girlfriends and streaming video games. TM explains how Ken assembled this family and pioneered this sound: “He loves working with producers that are fresh in the game because they're not doing things the technical way.” You feel that garage ethos in the work. TM continues, “Once you get into your artistry and you start finding things that fit you as an artist, you're like, ‘Oh, man, I love the sounds that be crunchy and out there that's just tearing my ears out’. When I started out, it was like, I'm going to make this beat. I don't care if it's loud. I don't care if it's not mixed properly. Now I know ‘better’—but that’s not what Ken is looking for.”

It’s hard to know how exactly to define what this music has become. TM88 struggles himself: “I used to call it hyper pop music but I don't even know if that was the right name for it. Is it Rage? No. Do they Rage at the shows? Yeah. So I don’t know what to call it.” Ken says, “It’s chaos music.”

Rap has long grappled with how to mine punk and its break-shit nihilism to produce something more than lazy and awkward hybrids of white “culture”—to cultivate a strain of chaos music organically descended from hip-hop. It happened in fleeting moments in Memphis and Atlanta in the 90s and 2000s, and now the Opium gang are the inheritors of this legacy. The music that inspired this aggression was more overt in those bygone eras, at least in the headphones. There’s a stomp, a guttural intensity that you can easily imagine as sonic outlets/catalysts for aggression in a group setting. Ken’s unwieldy noise doesn’t necessarily present as aligned with this tradition, but he has always viewed himself this way, and has picked up a fanbase that comes to his shows, and celebrates his music in this spirit. They headbang, they mob, they mosh. It’s a quality the Red Hot Chili Peppers recognized and tapped into when they invited Ken to open for them on a few dates.

I met Ken for the first time at the Universal offices in midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in August, a few hours before the second show of a three-night run in New York. I asked him if he could explain the link that connects his music to a tradition defined by thrashing guitars. I was ready for some vague, flippant answer containing the word “vibe," but Ken immediately responded, “It’s the 808s. It's different, being inspired by rather than copying. You can still get the same feeling without using the same tools.” Which makes sense—Ken's sound is another evolutionary link for the 808, an atomic weapon once wielded by 3-6 Mafia and TM88’s 808 Mafia partner Lex Luger, in his productions for Waka Flocka Flame.

That night in Hell’s Kitchen, I’m on a second story balcony with other press watching the quaking mass of bodies below. Ken doesn’t perform his songs as much as he punctuates them, shouting over them like he’s throwing ad-libs over his own vocal track in the studio. He’s amping the crowd, coaching them over his own shit while far below everyone is losing their fucking minds. In the room, I got what Ken was saying about the 808s. I’d seen Sexyy Red at Terminal 5 several months earlier, but could swear that the soundsystem, augmented by Ken’s production, was three times as powerful at this show. The bass clutches your chest and reverberates through you, and jostles everything inside you.

The notorious venue is a grubby coliseum for gladiators who like to fight dirty, and they’ve reached full froth as Ken hits the stage. I see a racially diverse sea of dudes. Young dudes crowd surfing, dudes in bejeweled goalie masks, dudes with pacifiers, dudes taking off and throwing their Nike Killshots like beachballs, ripped dudes wearing nothing but gym shorts and cooked white on whites, dudes in day Glo sheisties, dudes with “open the pit” flags they lay on the ground of a mobbed space that somehow everyone recognizes and respects, dudes who might’ve been doing this at a Fugazi show generations ago.

Ken looms over the proceedings, and I mean that literally. He’s on a two-level set, a piece of scaffolding recessed from the front of the stage that looks like nothing but galvanized steel pipes and plywood. He spends most of his time on the second level, which puts him nearly eye level with me, 20-30 feet above the crowd. In addition, powerful fog machines billow incessantly as he performs, so he’s a figure draped in black, enshrouded in smoke, lit by neon light shot through the dark. Afterwards he explains he was inspired by Brandon Lee in 1994’s The Crow, and one particular shot of the deadly goth apparition looming over a city from the ledge of a building (“I’m a silhouette, I’m a shadow, it’s a cinematic event.”), and he’s created a respectable facsimile of that indelible image.

Something I couldn’t understand before the show is why all the footage I found of Ken’s shows, all the Instagram stories and Tiktoks, are of the crowd. When you are actually there, you get it, because you can barely see Ken, and the opaque wall of fog directs your eye to the mob. This too is by design. Ken says, “I make my fans a part of the show. You can become lit just by being a fan.” And you can imagine the right IG post of the pit at a Ken show could potentially lead to a particularly athletic or colorful mosher picking up a few thousand followers if caught in a viral moment. He, as the host, erases the line between audience and crowd. It’s the equivalent of mounting a giant mirror on stage. It’s egalitarian. It’s punk. It’s chaos.

In Atlanta, we’re driven through the Truist Park campus to hang out with Green Day on a stretch golf cart, carving through herds of grandparents and their grandchildren, all in Green Day merch, walking to the stadium. Billie Joe is shockingly small, even with a several-inch pompadour. Tré is blue-haired and incredibly regular. The punks and the rapper share stories about fucking up hotel rooms in Atlanta. The trio is warm and polite and don’t really know what to make of Ken, who is using the meet and greet as an interview to ask pressing, ambitious questions about their crowd sizes, the small shows they started with and how they worked their way up to this, how they have the stamina for two plus hour performances. Ken ends up annoyed with himself afterwards for not trying to secure them for a feature.

Danaer Mensah

The stadium staff point us in the direction of “The Dugout," which I mistake as a euphemism for a press/VIP area but turns out, in fact, to be the actual visitors' dugout off the diamond’s third base line, where we emerge through a tunnel and up the steps onto an infield that’s closed off to everyone else. Out in center field, where the stage is, Green Day’s opener The Smashing Pumpkins play “Cherub Rock.” You can feel Ken soaking in the enormity of the moment, high off more than weed (but also weed). He’s never been in the actual crowd at a concert before, and he’s never been to a baseball game.

We’re led to a roped-off section perhaps a hundred feet away from center stage. The sun has set and Ken is lowkey, only rolling with me, his body man, his security guard, and his publicist, but he’s still occasionally recognized by venue security, by fans both in the section and passing by who apparently have caught wind that their hometown hero is here. He’s friendly and patient with everyone, shakes every hand and poses for every selfie.

Green Day comes out and starts playing. They’re seasoned pros, DIY regional NorCal rockers turned national arena thoroughbreds with a pyrotechnic, immaculately designed and run multi-media stage show that is clearly worth millions in production value. Ken waves water bottles, fist pumps, jumps around, takes videos on his phone, never looks bored or unengaged. At one point I ask him what he’d do with a crowd of this size and with a grin, he tells me, “Wall of Death” which I have to Google and am alternately charmed and terrified by. The highlight is when they play his favorite song, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and he genuinely freaks out, occasionally singing along with their nine minute epic.

As Ken rages, I’m watching Billie Joe Armstrong as he’s ripping power chords for this moshing Sarlacc pit—slightly different in demographic than the crowd at Terminal 5, but not so different in energy and temperament. His posture would look familiar to anyone who grew up watching MTV in the 90s and 2000s—hunched over his guitar, all jutting knees and jugular veins, his body forming a lapidary crusted inward-curl that looks less like a 52-year-old punk holding a guitar than like an electric guitar that has grown a 52-year-old punk it drags across the ocean floor and uses as shelter and protection from predators.

And Billie Joe is screaming at the crowd and the crowd is screaming back at him, a naked, aching wail—for our exes and the random partners and substances and money and dumb shit we try to replace them with, and all the rage and joy these placebos provoke—that unites Ken Carson and Billie Joe Armstrong and Anthony Keidis and Kathleen Hanna and Billy Corgan and Lil Uzi Vert and Davey Havok in a primal sound beyond words. It reminds me of a moment earlier, hanging on the lip of the dugout, when I ask Ken what he has learned from Green Day, how their music impacts his. He says, “Their attitude made it easier for me to be myself. They were already on some ‘fuck the world’ shit. I feel like I'm the same.”