“The ambiguity can be confusing to a lot of people who want something very clear cut, but I just don't feel very clear cut at all,” Liam Dargaville (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, they/them) says.
The Tāmaki Makarau-based rapper, also known by the moniker Dbldbl, is referring to their gender identity: while they present as masculine, they don't identify with the terms male or female. Instead, they describe their gender identity as non-binary, and go by the pronouns they and them.
But Dargaville might as well be talking about a number of other things about themself too: the rap music they make doesn’t neatly fit within one genre, for example. The chronic pain they experience also doesn’t have a precise, black-and-white diagnosis.
Dargaville is ok with ambiguity. In fact, they embrace it, and they’ve found themselves at home in communities that embrace it too, such as the Karangahape Road music community in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Alternative radio stations like 95bFM were also immediate supporters when Dargaville first started making music as part of a duo called HEAVY (later known as Cool Tan) with fellow rapper Reem Nabhani.
“I think we fit right at home there [at 95bFM] with the misfits and the oddballs and everything beautiful about student radio,” Dargaville says.
It didn’t take very long for the duo to start to get noticed more widely. Dargaville says they’d only played a handful of times before receiving a “very spammy looking email” asking them to perform at Auckland’s Laneway Festival one year.
“We were like, ‘get outta here, you can’t be serious'," Dargaville says. "That led to an abundance of things, like Splore, and opening for our idols, like Earl Sweatshirt."
These days, Dargaville focuses more on the solo music work they make under the name Dbldbl.
They have big plans for the future, but living with chronic pain means Dargaville has to take things a day at a time.
A variety of muscular injuries over the years have caused long-lasting nerve damage to their body, Liam explains, which makes sitting down or standing up for long periods of time difficult.
“[The pain] is more or less everywhere,” Liam says. “I spent a lot of lockdown on my stomach lying down.”
A big part of Liam’s journey with chronic pain has been about acceptance: learning to live with it and manage it, as opposed to making it go away.
“I think the main thing is just being able to let go and be at peace with the idea that maybe I might be able to produce [music] for 30 minutes and then that's it for who knows when.”
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