Marc Rebillet , known to hundreds of thousands of fans as "Loop Daddy," is an electro-soul artist whose career took off when he began livestreaming performances from his bedroom, living room, and even a few hotel rooms, too.- Since then, Rebillet has toured the world performing IRL, as well as online.
- Inspired by the likes of Reggie Watts and Nina Simone, Rebillet combines sensual crooning with live looping and playful, improvised lyrics to create original works of sonic genius.
- Last week, Rebillet announced a drive-in concert tour that will start in June, in lieu of the summer tour and festival circuit shows Rebillet was scheduled to play prior to the pandemic.
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Wiry, mustached, and bespectacled, "Loop Daddy" Marc Rebillet might not look like a traditional sex symbol. But when this 31-year-old, self-professed "
"If you're joining me for the first time, welcome," Rebillet opened a recent broadcast. "I'm very glad to have you here. I'm Marc Rebillet. I like to make stupid sh*t up off the top of my head. I have no idea what's going on. Neither do you. And that's kind of the thrill of it — just making sh*t up from scratch."
Equipped with little more than a mic, a keyboard, and a Boss RC-505 loop station, Rebillet's self-effacing description of his work belies its complexity. Live-looping, his characteristic musical technique, requires a high level of precision, as the artist records, layers, and overdubs different riffs in real-time to create a cohesive new song. For an added challenge, Rebillet improvises the lyrics, too, using a hotline to gather ideas and inspiration from fans in far-flung places. When he picks up, they're uniformly shocked (and elated) to have finally gotten their chance to make an on-air request.
Previous suggestions have included "losing your Juul," "the magic of boobies," "rekindling friendship," "FaceTime sex," and "Baby Gap jorts." Rebillet has yet to be stumped by a topic, although he's open about the "universal anxiety" of feeling creatively blocked. His online catalog is so vast that he often worries about inadvertently repeating old material.
"I'm having to think very hard about doing justice to the topic," he admitted. "But then I'm also having to think about creating something that's musically interesting and unique from what I have already done."
Aesthetic worlds collide in Rebillet's work.
Rebillet counts the high priestess of soul, Nina Simone, among his greatest inspirations (along with Reggie Watts, Madlib, and James Blake). But he's very much an artist of his time. A true "child of the internet," who "spent his formative years on AOL and AIM and MSN Messenger," Rebillet's sense of humor is extremely online, often leaning so far toward the crass or absurd that it becomes unexpectedly insightful. Once, a 39-year-old fan named Keith — a "pack-a-day" smoker who was, at that very moment, enjoying a cigarette on his porch — called in and asked Rebillet to compose a song that would help him kick the habit for good. Rebillet obliged, turning the phrase "Keith's about to quit, baby" into a refrain.
"You know what Keith? No one gives a f-ck, okay?" Rebillet intoned over the beat. "Only person who should give a f-ck about that is you. So swallow it, breathe in, and motherfuckin' quit baby."
There is some extremely and uniquely online about his interactive one-man act.
In a sense, live looping mimics the way art is made and shared online, where, almost immediately, it will be critiqued, modified, built upon, and retooled until it either dies or becomes canon. As writer Robert Cohen once observed of Rebillet's music, "his meme-like beats endlessly recycle, fuse, and explode genres," just as the internet does "with ideas, beliefs, and languages."
Last month, during one of his "quaranstreams" organized to lift spirits and raise money for coronavirus relief, he took a call-in request from a woman who'd just been through a costly divorce and career change. But now that the world is collectively in crisis, she continued, her bills and problems no longer feel so personal and all-consuming.
"Okay, so we're going to do two types of beats," he explained to viewers, after hanging up. "We're gonna do one type and then we're gonna go double time."
Rebillet created the song's foundational loop by recording (and re-recording) himself singing the phrase "everything sucks" until it sounded like an angry crowd's chant. Then, he tapped a myriad of synth-y beats into his existence on his keyboard, saving each one on top of the first loop to create an underlying structure for the song. Above the hum, he rhapsodized freely about feeling like Sisyphus, forever rolling a boulder up a mountain.
As soon as one riff went stale, he threw in another, allowing the song to bounce between tempos and genres. A few minutes in, he did a theatrical interlude by pitching his voice down to a growl.
"This just in, news headline: A new virus has spread all throughout the world. Stop everything you're doing. All your problems that mean something now? They're not shit compared to what's about to go down. The entire world is in turmoil....Well, now my problems are — my problems are fine, my problems cause it's the end of the world. Oh that's the end of my worries."
Like memes take on life online, Rebillet's music takes shape as cultural references, his own artistry, and crowdsourced suggestions are remixed into something new.
"It was sort of on the internet where I was able to just figure the thing out," Rebillet said. "Like, figure the performance out in a very basic way... All of those little fundamental things got figured out on the internet."
Like all the best internet personalities, Rebillet knows how to lean into his shtick, while keeping things fresh.
The robe has been Rebillet's signature look for years. He owns about a dozen of them now, including silk and satin kimono-style numbers; a black Versace Barocco print stunner; and a vibrant yellow replica of the "Hotel Chevalier" robe Jason Schwartzman wore in "The Darjeeling Limited."And, somewhere along the way, fans started wearing them to his live shows, too.
"Especially now in, in quarantine, it's just the greatest piece of homewear you can throw on," Rebillet said. "It's very low-effort. It covers you like a blanket and you can just lounge around and look half-stylish while you do it. It's the best."
"And a robe, you know, when you're on stage, it's begging to be taken off," he continued. "There's a belt that you — all you have to do is pull on it, and the whole thing comes off. It's really engineered to be taken off."
And Rebillet does, indeed, disrobe during almost every live show. Often, someone in the comments will timestamp the moment to save future viewers the time and effort of looking for it. But lately, Rebillet has been thinking it might be time to swap the robe for something more elegant.
"Once I can get back out on the road and play in front of people, I'm probably gonna change the uniform up," he mused. "I'm thinking suits. I'd love to do, like, really well-tailored suits. Just come out f***ing business, you know?"
It may be months before Rebillet can connect with fans in person again.
The rise of COVID-19 forced Rebillet to postpone his summer tour dates and festival circuit shows in favor of getting back to his roots: performing via live stream from his apartment and doing one-take, pre-recorded songs like the perpetual fan favorite "One More Time," or the anthem he recently wrote for essential workers.
But in June, he could be coming to a drive-in movie theatre near you. Last week, Rebillet announced a drive-in live concert tour, in which he'll play shows via live broadcast to cars full of fans in places like Charlotte, North Carolina and Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's a perfect encapsulation of the "odd gray space" Rebillet occupies between internet fame and conventional celebrity.
"I think the vast majority of online creators probably will never meet their fanbase, because what they do is strictly online," he said. "If you're, if you're a tech YouTuber, if you're a lifestyle blogger or whatever, maybe you'll have a meet-up every once in a while. But you're pretty much relegated to being an online personality. But I spent well over half of last year on the road. I was supposed to spend well over half of this year being on the road. And it is every bit as important, if not more important to me than my online presence...This whole interpersonal relationship that I have with the people that come to my shows is crucial."
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