Like any second language, American Sign Language gets a little easier to communicate in when you're drunk. Or, more accurately, when you're a little drunk—as any undergrad minoring in Spanish or Italian or Mandarin can attest, get a certain number of drinks in you and the fluency bell curve nosedives right back down.
Which is why, two hours before he does sign-language interpretation for Chance the Rapper's headlining Lollapalooza show in Chicago's Grant Park, 29-year-old Matt Maxey has capped off his last recycled soft-drink bottle of the day, stashed it in his backpack, and switched to water before he heads backstage.
"I'm probably at about a six-and-a-half now," he says, laughing. Earlier in the day, out among the sunburned Lolla revelers, "I was probably at about a nine."
Maxey's certainly not the first Lollapalooza performer whose pre-show regimen consists of cognac and Jazz-flavor Black & Milds; we've all seen those leaked celebrity tour riders. And after all, the Atlanta-born Maxey is a bit of a celebrity himself. Even before he started attracting attention signing at Chance the Rapper's shows in July, deaf and hard-of-hearing hip-hop fans had already begun referring to him as "the deaf Kanye West."
Later on in this unseasonably mild August night, on Lolla's towering Grant Park stage, Chance the Rapper will pause during his anti-record-label anthem "No Problem" and let the audience finish his signature line: "Countin' Benjis while we meetin', make 'em shake my other hand." At that precise moment, though, Maxey's hands will be signing the phrases "counting money" and "meeting," then miming a left-handed handshake followed by an emphatic middle finger. Maxey's ASL interpretation is an explosive, code-switching mishmash of textbook American Sign Language, pantomime, and makeshift signs he's cobbled together for slang words native to hip-hop ("molly," for example, combines gestures for "pill" and "sex"); the way he signs is as worldly and wry and improvisational as he is.
And there's a reason for that: Although he's had profound hearing loss his whole life ("Whatever hearing is still left right before you're completely deaf, that's severely profound hearing loss," he explains) and is now one of the most visible people in his profession, Maxey didn't learn sign language until he was 18.
Matt Maxey was outfitted with hearing aids at the age of two, after his occupational-therapist grandmother noticed his hearing seemed off. Maxey learned to speak with the help of speech therapists, and at school, his teachers simply spoke into a microphone that transmitted directly into his two hearing aids. ("What they didn't know is that I was turning mine off," he says with a laugh.) So Maxey didn't begin learning to sign until he enrolled at Washington, D.C.'s, Gallaudet University, the world's only university for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
Which wasn't a positive experience at first. "I never really knew about deaf culture," Maxey says. "All I knew was talking. I never signed. And they would always get mad at me; I could talk and they couldn't. It became kind of a hostile environment." Growing up in Atlanta, Maxey was exposed from an early age to hip-hop. So at night in his dorm room, Maxey practiced his sign language along with the lyrics of his favorite musicians—like J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar—and in 2010, at the urging of a friend, he uploaded to YouTube a video of himself signing along to Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz's "One Night Stand."
("One-night stand," for what it's worth, comes out to something more like "one-night fuck" in sign language. "Signing 'stand' doesn't make sense. You're not standing up," Maxey explains, then chuckles. "Well, you may be standing up.")
Maxey later dropped out of Gallaudet. Over the next few years, he worked as a pizza-delivery driver, a mobile-car detailer, and a UPS unloader in Jacksonville, Florida, and attended a few classes at a community college. But his sink-or-swim immersion in deaf culture continued out of necessity: Around 2013, his hearing aids stopped working, and he remembers with a laugh that at the time he was too broke to fix them. He kept making videos, though, learning new song lyrics by turning the volume all the way up in his earbuds—and last summer, his ASL video for DMX's "How's It Goin' Down" went viral after it surfaced on Reddit.
Around the same time, Maxey reached out to Kelly Kurdi—a Houston-based hearing sign-language interpreter who'd also released some music-translation videos on YouTube—to ask if she'd like to do a music video together. Several videos and one new friendship later, Kurdi and Maxey founded DEAFinitely Dope, a performance group dedicated to helping deaf and hard-of-hearing fans enjoy live shows. The Starkey Hearing Foundation contacted Maxey shortly afterward and outfitted him with Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids that connect to his iPhone and iPad and can play music right into his ear like an earbud.
"What's amazing about Matt is he's not only bilingual, he's bicultural," says Kurdi, 35. "At first he felt too deaf to be hearing and too hearing to be deaf. But now it's a huge benefit; he's able to, for example, talk to Chance, and there's no lull in the conversation. He's able to talk about different hip-hop artists. He's able to talk about whatever basketball game. And then he can go into the deaf culture, and he can connect with all of them and sign."
Maxey moved to Houston, and the team expanded to include a videographer, a manager, and Amber Galloway Gallego, another hearing ASL interpreter. Earlier this summer, they hosted an ASL hip-hop camp for adults and kids, then booked their first festival gig at Bonnaroo—where their work alongside D.R.A.M. caught the eye of Chance the Rapper.
Maxey’s passion and his obvious love of music are the first things Chance remembers noticing at that Bonnaroo show. “He conveyed so much emotion through signing,” Chance writes in an e-mail. “It was incredible to watch.”
And then a lot happened, very quickly. "He called the Access Department, the Sign Language Department, and he was like, 'Yo, I want to meet that dude interpreter you have,'" Maxey remembers. "Because I'm the only black young guy interpreter over there, they knew it was me. It was early in the morning when I heard, and I thought, 'Okay, y'all playing. It's too early in the morning. I just woke up. You know I had a good night last night. Don't tell me this first thing in the morning.'"
Chance invited Maxey and DEAFinitely Dope to join him onstage for two shows in Miami and Tampa—where Maxey's friends from the Florida deaf community turned up in force. Then DEAFinitely Dope tagged along to Wisconsin and Delaware for shows before becoming the official ASL interpreters of the rest of Chance the Rapper's 2017 tour. At every show he can, Chance gives away free tickets to deaf and hard-of-hearing fans.
“It's a great feeling to know we're including people who are often left out when it comes to live shows,” Chance writes. “Which is also why we're advocating for more artists to link up with DEAFinitely Dope and figure out how to bring music ASL interpreters into their spaces.”
These days, Chance himself sometimes busts out the ASL sign for "blessing" onstage when he performs "Blessings," and has been known to offer a sign-language "thank you" to his deaf and hard-of-hearing fans. "Every time we see him, he asks for a few signs," Kurdi says.
Chance’s other favorite sign he’s learned from the DEAFinitely Dope team is “miracle.” Meanwhile, Kurdi says, Chance's manager, Pat, loves to sign "too much sauce."
"He'll learn funny lines like that," Kurdi remarks. "He's always like, 'I'm Pat. I've got too much sauce.'"
There's a line in Chance the Rapper's "Favorite Song" that Maxey still puzzles over sometimes, and it goes like this: "Dang dang dang, skeet skeet skeet / She do that thing for three retweets." It's not the "dang" or the "skeet" that presents the issue (yes, "skeet" is what you think it is in sign language); it's the retweets. Sometimes, Maxey simply fingerspells "RT." Other times, he makes a tiny beak with his fingers and then signs "phone"—"Twitter."
"It depends on the audience," Maxey says. "If their English is strong, I spell. If their ASL is strong, I sign: Bird on phone. Social media."
It’s challenging in 2017 to be a good sign-language interpreter of hip-hop music, and it's only partly because the genre finds itself in a lyrically experimental phase lately. A few months back, for example, a video of a sign-language interpreter at a Waka Flocka show went viral. According to Maxey, this particular interpreter abbreviates too much, boiling down the sentiment "I go hard in the paint" to something more like "I'm great."
"To me, 'going hard in the paint' is like, I'm driving down the lane, about to slam-dunk it," Maxey says. "If it were me interpreting, I'd be like, 'He's driving,' or 'He's going into the paint.'"
Maxey ran into a similar problem trying to sign through Migos's "T-Shirt." "I got to 'neck water faucet' and was like, What the fuck does that mean?" Maxey says. Eventually, it dawned on him: "Water is like diamond. He's got so many diamonds on his neck, he's running like a faucet."
Other translators, though, get too literal, Maxey says; he's seen interpreters use the "campfire" ASL sign when, say, a pair of sneakers is fire, or you're smoking fire next to your window at night to relax. But come to think of it, Chance's songs have a few potential landmines themselves: In Chance's "Smoke Break," "you wouldn't say you're smoking a bowl," Maxey says, with his hands out cupping the air in front of him. "No. You're smoking a bowl," Maxey repeats, this time with one hand holding an imaginary pipe and the other cocked at a lighterly angle above it.
And then, of course, sometimes a rapper says the N-word, and the cross-cultural can of worms springs open. When he can, Maxey skips it to avoid controversy: "If it makes sense in context, sometimes I just replace it with 'homie,'" Maxey says. "Even I never really get used to seeing that word signed." But when there's no reasonably clean substitution, all three interpreters sign the ASL term for that particular slur onstage, and it's usually Kurdi and Gallego, who are white, who catch flak on social media for using it.
Which is why Maxey—who, as a deaf black man, is a demographic rarity among ASL interpreters—is such a crucial figure. "A lot of interpreters want to interpret hip-hop music, but they don't know the culture. They don't know the slang," Kurdi explains. "Matt wants to change the game for interpreters."
Sometimes, though, ASL interpretation is hard just for plain old technical reasons. For example, Maxey says, "I love listening to the music, but I would hate to interpret Busta Rhymes."
How come? "Fast as fuck," he laughs.
The deaf and hard-of-hearing access section of Lollapalooza's Grant Park stage is stationed right between the performers and the general-admission audience, at the forefront of the crowd—the logic being, presumably, that this way deaf concertgoers have a better view of the ASL interpreter, plus most of the people standing flush in front of the megastage are already deaf. So as Matt Maxey dutifully sobers up before he performs for the largest crowd of his career, he also provides mesmerizing up-close entertainment for the immobilized front row of regular-admission festival-goers. Girls in lace bralettes wave him over to teach them how to sign "Hi, my name is" and "Nice to meet you," while guys in Anthony Rizzo jerseys with the sleeves cut off reach across a low metal fence to bump shoulders in a bro-hug.
But it's the folks starting to gather inside the Deaf/HOH access zone who are really Maxey's people. These are the fans he and Kurdi have texted with over the past few days, helping them make sure they've gotten the accommodations they need from the festival, and it's these people who ensure that every morning Maxey wakes up to an avalanche of social-media push notifications on his phone, sometimes a hundred strong. "Can I visit them? Can I come perform for them? They have a deaf brother. They have a deaf sister. They feel inspired. They just learned sign language. They want to learn more," Maxey says.
Patrick Petty, a fan who came to see Maxey and DEAFinitely Dope perform at Chance's Lolla show, says his deaf sister, Annie, "looks at Matt like I look at Jay-Z." A lifelong hip-hop fan and a new friend of Maxey's, Petty says he and his sister can finally lose their shit over music together thanks to Maxey and the videos they watch of him on Instagram, and though she couldn't make it to Lolla, he can't wait to bring her to a show. "We're gonna cry tears of joy over this shit," he says.
Chance himself recognizes there’s an opportunity—a need, even—to connect with people like Annie. “One of the most important things I can do on tour is give access to all people, to all fans,” Chance writes. “No one should feel excluded from my show. So it was a blessing to meet Matt and DEAFinitely Dope, to help welcome the deaf community.”
Eventually, a tall young woman in a baseball cap and a Deaf/HOH Access wristband engages Maxey in what looks unmistakably like some lively sign-language banter. They exchange phones for a moment and then exchange them back.
Then, all at once, Maxey has to be backstage; for the next two hours, he and Kurdi and Gallego make the communication gap between Chance and the 50 or so deaf fans gathered in the Deaf/HOH section feel ever smaller. The fans sway and sign to each other, and occasionally sign Chance the Rapper's "sign name"—two fingers and a thumb on the right hand, raised up toward the right temple. After the show, the three interpreters pose for a photo with all the deaf fans; Maxey puts the official setlist between his teeth, and everyone throws up the "I love you" sign.
"I think a lot of hearing people don't appreciate how much we get out of music," Kurdi says. "We listen to a song, it takes us back to childhood or it puts us in a good mood or it makes us want to party or it makes us connect. That's why there's, say, a graduation song—we all recognize it and we all connect to it.
"Deaf people miss out on all that, and they shouldn't have to," she says. "So to have an artist say, 'I want interpreters on my show, at every show, and I want deaf people to come in and join us for free' has been just so amazing. To feel like someone cares about them, for one, and for two, to hire a company that is owned by a deaf person? There's a million others out there that are owned by hearing people."
It's important work Maxey does in the deaf community. But for the most part, it's also a pretty good time. The next time Maxey gets in touch, it's the following afternoon. After the show, he was whisked away to an afterparty in downtown Chicago with Chance and co., and didn't get to sleep until five in the morning. He debriefs me on this last part and adds a flourish in a language we both speak fluently: a smiley-face emoji with sunglasses on.
