Schäffer the Darklord, a.k.a. STD, is a 47-year-old rapper who’d probably have a few words to say to his 20-something self if he had access to a time machine.
“I feel like I made an impulsive decision to adopt the stage name in 2003,” Mark Schaffer said, “and all these years later, I do have a bit of buyer’s remorse. But I’ve built too much of a catalog at this point to consider changing it.”
Over the past two decades, the Iowa born-and-raised MC has released several albums, EPs, singles and collaborations, including several with fellow Iowa City expatriate Coolzey. His songs are filled with a mix of goofy juvenilia, absurd sexual content, nerdy grammatical breakdowns and introspective lyrical detours, such as a song about sexual consent titled “Yes” from his 2015 EP Sex Rhymes.
“I don’t like telling people this,” the New York-based artist said, “but I’m going to tell you because I feel like I gotta let this skeleton out of the closet and shine some light on it.” Back when he was a young man, STD created a series of recording projects with fake hip-hop groups that used different voices to represent a variety of fictional rappers, and “MC STD” was the default nom de plume Schaffer used to deliver his crassest material. All the names he employed were patently idiotic, but STD was his go-to because its rhyme scheme and number of syllables worked best for writing lyrics.
“I was doing really grotesque sex material,” he explained. “I was just this dumb white kid trying to be shocking, so I chose STD to be my stage name and I wrote ‘Schäffer the Darklord’ around that to make it fit. But now that I’ve grown up, I’m utterly mortified at the thought of any of that original material making it to the ears of my audience.”
Schaffer’s journey reflects the growth of other likeminded white guys who fell in love with hip hop when it bubbled up through mass media in the 1980s. He grew up in the small town of Corning in southwest Iowa, and by the time he graduated from high school, Schaffer couldn’t get out fast enough — first attending the University of Iowa and then moving to San Francisco with a group of Iowa City art kids in the late 1990s before finally settling in New York City.
“I think that like any Gen Xer who grew up in a culturally isolated part of the country,” Schaffer said, “hip hop was handed to me by Yo! MTV Raps.” He had grown up as a passionate fan of music, mainlining the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and other things his family loved, but when Schaffer discovered hip hop, it struck a chord. “I felt like I had found it on my own, and there was something that was magical about that.”
Hip hop appealed to Schaffer because artists like the Fat Boys, the Beastie Boys and Slick Rick used language as an instrument by telling vivid, hilarious stories over beats while wearing cool, colorful clothes.
“Everything about it was so new and exciting while growing up in a cornfield and surrounded by like a thousand white people,” he said. “And that absolutely did wonders for me. I had a couple of friends, but I was definitely kind of a freak. I think a lot of my classmates were happy to have their sort of Mayberry high school experience, but I always wanted something different — and I dreamed of moving away and living in a big city, like in the movies.”
Schaffer recorded his own solo hip-hop projects on a four-track when he was playing drums in a few arty rock bands as an undergraduate, and he continued performing in bands while living in San Francisco. However, all that fell by the wayside when he started focusing on his stand-up comedy act and rap persona that attempted to be edgy but was just cringey, in retrospect.
“I thought I was doing something kind of unique,” Schaffer said, “but I was just this young art kid with a sheltered upbringing. I was a lifelong hip-hop fan and I was trying to take all of my favorite elements of hip hop and make this grotesque exaggeration, so my characters were really violent and very sexual in a grotesque way.”
“I thought that I was being very funny,” he continued, “and didn’t realize that what I was doing was a pretty offensive impression of what I thought hip hop was. The big shift was when I realized that I wanted to tell jokes, and I wanted to make hip hop, but I didn’t want to make the joke at hip hop’s expense. I wanted to use hip hop as a medium to tell jokes and to tell stories without making the medium the butt of the joke.”
“S to the T to the goddamn D” still uses outrageous imagery and punchlines to entertain audiences, but in a way that avoids being a novelty act by more candidly addressing his feelings about sex and drugs, though there is still room for ridiculousness. For instance, some of his songs have explicit content but no swear words, like “Do Sex,” from STD’s 2013 album Sick Passenger. In it, he brags about how he’s going to have sex with not just one, or two, or three audience members, but everyone in the room — until the final twist at the end when he impulsively changes his mind and decides to go home alone.
Ladies, let’s form a single file line
Maybe undress first, to save a little time
Oh and fellas! Oh yeah I’m talking to the dudes too
Guess who else I’mma do sex to? Here’s a hint—YOU!
Ooh regardless of your weight or race or gender
I’mma do you! And that goes for you too, bartender! …
Did I mention what you’ll get for free?
Everybody at this party’s gonna get an STD!
Schaffer said he’s a theater kid at heart, and when performing his songs onstage he makes exaggerated facial expressions and does over-the-top pantomimes of his lyrics. At some point, a burlesque producer in New York City saw his act and hired him to emcee a show, which snowballed into years of hosting “like a billion burlesque shows,” as he put it.
“This led to getting into producing my own burlesque shows and ultimately getting to the point where I got super burned out and kind of walked away from doing that entirely because I felt like I was writing music more slowly.”
Then, about four years ago, he and his partner Bunny Buxom—who is a burlesque performer and producer — became obsessed with professional wrestling, and they started to notice countless similarities between both forms of entertainment.
“Everything is done in a physical way, telling stories with big costuming, big entrances, pomp and circumstance,” Schaffer said, “and so we put our heads together and figured out a way that we could create a show that combined those two things.”
In TasselMania, burlesque performers play wrestling archetypes such as heels; there is a ring with announcers, referees and dramatic rivalries; and the audience members bring signs to cheer on their favorites.
“Whoever gets the loudest pop,” said Schaffer, who plays the ring announcer, “is the winner of the match.”
Tassel Mania began as a lark, but the two oversold the first show and realized that they had something bizarre and magical on their hands. It has been on ice since the start of the pandemic, but hasn’t yet been retired, so we can expect a few more twists and turns on the road traveled by this burlesque-comedian-rapper journeyman.
Kembrew McLeod is a theater kid at heart, too. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 303.
