Last week Lousy Lover pulled up on Blaq Lyte in Bangkok, bringing with him his taste for classic house styles. But the Miami DJ, who’s making waves with his own production and label, took a decade-long, circular route to the club life.
Lousy Lover is best known as Kris, the cofounder of streetwear brand Felt USA, which is usually associated with rap music, like many streetwear labels. But he’s kindled a love for house music for 15 years and is finally leaning into that passion. “As a kid, I kind of used to have to hide it. All my homies in my hood were like, ‘What the fuck is this shit?'” he laughs, now 32. “I lived a double life almost.” His interest in the music was sparked by sneaking into EDM festivals to get into trouble, but it was a gateway into the long history of dance music. He traced the roots of the massive EDM cottage industry that exploded in the late 2000s back to the days of Paradise Garage and The Warehouse online. “I had to figure it out on my own, because I had no one to ask about it. I wanted to know how we got to this point with guys in mouse costumes on massive stages?”
When Kris left Miami for New York at 18, he drifted even farther from house music and became immersed in the local rap scene when he started doing freelance design work at the label Cinematic Music Group. “I got plugged into this hip hop matrix,” he says. “I mean, I’m hanging out with Cam’ron, helping him design a vinyl. He gets mad when I text him ‘k’. House music wasn’t a part of that world.” Although he loves rap, Kris nurtured his love for house by digging for records during his decade in New York, rarely finding a chance to play them and losing a lot of them as he jumped from couch to couch.
The growth of Felt and Kris’s time at Cinematic went hand in hand. “I was smoking with all the rappers when they stopped by the office and was trading Felt for weed. That’s how a lot of the rappers started wearing it. They clown me for making house music now!” But the support of rappers like Joey Bada$$ and Smoke DZA led to a large order from powerhouse Opening Ceremony, and then suddenly everyone from Frank Ocean to Rhianna were dipped in Felt gear.
Kris had started Felt with his best friend Louie back in Miami and were building a small circle of support there, but put it on hold while they sorted their new lives out in New York. “We kept designing shirts, we had like 40 of them,” he says. “But we didn’t have any money to make them.” What they did have, though, was a legit-looking website. They had printed a couple of really cheap shirts at a discount mall back home, then used disposable cameras for product shots and a lookbook. When opportunity finally came around, they were ready for it. “We were faking the funk at first. They were shitty shirts but looked real in the photos. We had to shoot them from far enough away so you couldn’t tell that the labels were basically peeling off.” But with investors and some notoriety, they turned it into a very real, lasting thing, releasing collaborations with huge corporate brands like MLB and Playboy just this month.
With the lockdowns in 2020, they decided to move back to Miami. They had enough money at that point and Felt was independent, so they were free to do whatever they chose: “The plan was to go home, get an office space, open a store, buy a Chevy, and get two pit bulls.” He built custom shelves for his thousand-strong record collection in the new office and linked with his little cousin Slugg, who was already deep into the house scene there. They started a label called Lisa’s Kickback and are pressing vinyl for all their releases.
Because of Felt, the label was able to grow within the rave scene pretty quickly. “My cousin and some other friends were always wearing Felt,” Kris says. “I went to one of his parties and there were six people wearing our hat. It made me realize this is a whole new market. Like, yeah, cool, Cam’ron wore Felt in a photoshoot, and now X amount of people are wearing it. But the moment a DJ in the house scene wears it, everyone wants to wear it too. I don’t understand the science of it. But once I noticed it…” He’s been applying what he’s learned from streetwear and merch at rap shows to the rave scene, comparing it to house music’s roots. “Larry Levan had Paradise Garage T-shirts. Why don’t we do that? Vinyl is basically merch now. We’re making T-shirts and trucker hats, creating a theme for all our artwork.” Lisa’s Kickback now has residencies at local mainstays Floyd and Jolene. “We sold our first party out, so they kept asking us back. It was an easy decision for them.”
Now Kris is trying to convince the friends from the rap world he’s gathered over the years to join him in the dance music scene. He recently dropped a Chicago juke-type house cut with fast, bouncy drums featuring Dallas rapper Tay Money. “I’m hitting up all the rappers I know trying to get verses. It’s time!”
