Photograph by Pascal Beauboeuf of Beautiful Beef Productions
On a warm day in February, Westgate Avenue, next to Blueberry Hill, is blocked off for a music-video shoot. A crowd of roughly 100 cheers as a rap song blasts across the speakers. Those who know it join the refrain: “It’s my butt! Oh yeah!”
Henry Biggs, who resembles actor Bill Fagerbakke, dances in front of the crowd. By day, the 47-year-old serves as associate director of Washington University’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy. But right now, Biggs is in full character as his rapping alter ego, Headmess, wearing a red hat and green satin pants stuffed with an enormous posterior.
“It was mortifying!” Biggs laughs after filming is finished.
This isn’t the first time he’s performed as Headmess. All told, Biggs has recorded three albums and five music videos. Mostly, he explains, his “music has all been very serious with social issues and these constructs,” like his songs about Martin Luther King Jr. (“MLK”) and the Rwandan genocide (“X Marks the Spot”). “It’s My Butt” is a song that he wrote 20 years ago about “butt empowerment,” says his friend Hope Wurdack.
Biggs’ old-school rap style first came to national prominence with his 2003 video “Wrap,” which caught the attention of CNN. He was interviewed by Anderson Cooper, spoofed on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, and written about in The Times of London.
Biggs, a professor with a Ph.D. in metrical phonology and a father of four, raps linguistic puzzles. In “Between Clenched Teeth,” for instance, about the constrained role of women in society, Biggs limits himself by only using words with the vowels E and Y.
In “Wrap,” Headmess talks about his sexual prowess: “All my lovin’ is all you gonna ever want.” But the long acrostic that literally wraps around the lyrics reads, “Don’t listen. It is all lies. Here is the truth. Miserable and reviled, I’m marking time. Dying slow, abject, desolate and forsaken.”
“He’s the king of all nerds,” quips Michael Silverman, who produced Biggs’ 2008 album, Pilzop Lilzit. “I think he’s a bit of an overachiever. There’s nothing he won’t try or do. He challenges himself in every possible way.”
Biggs, who grew up in the Central West End, was part of New City School’s inaugural class. “It was super groovy,” he recalls. “We just hung out on beanbag chairs and sang songs. Of course, when I went to Country Day [now MICDS], they actually expected me to learn things, so I had a lot of catching up to do.” Not only did he catch up, he also won theater awards and was named “most gifted athlete.”
Biggs went on to Harvard University, where he studied classics. He was most interested in the ancient Greek rhythms of Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony. Every Friday, he’d meet with his professor and scan the literature, determining where the poetic accents fell. “I loved it,” says Biggs, who also directed musicals and wrote rap songs as segues between numbers.
Around this time he was listening to rappers like Ice T and Big Daddy Kane, who “started thinking about words in different ways and doing different, less conventional rhymes,” Biggs explains. “I’m sort of a purist. I ask, ‘What is the quality of that rhyme?’”
After graduating in 1986, he worked at Grace Hill Settlement House in north St. Louis for a year before moving to Europe. “I really wanted to learn a foreign language,” says Biggs, who went on to earn a master’s degree in language and civilizations at the Sorbonne in Paris and study German at the Goethe-Institut in Germany.
“I also kind of had a bee in my bonnet about trying to swim the English Channel,” he says. After seven months of training, Biggs crossed the channel in just under 13 hours. “You get kind of delirious [from the cold],” he recalls.
When he returned to the States, Biggs decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles because of its renowned linguistics program and to springboard his music career. There, he wrote songs and worked with a producer named Shaky J: “He was in Compton, and he used to love to play my stuff to other people and say, ‘Who do you think that is? Who do you think that is? This guy, man, this guy.’”
Biggs began shopping his songs around. “I got callbacks from three record companies,” he says. “I gotta say, the first two callbacks were not ideal, because these songs have weird complexities in them. I had been working so hard on the rhythm and all these ideas, and when I explained it to them, they were like, ‘Blech.’”
It was French singer Mylène Farmer who got it. Biggs happened to be teaching English to the French star, and he played some of his cassettes for her. “A lot of [the puzzles] were based on French ideas,” says Biggs. “Mylène liked it and said, ‘We really want you to sign with us.’”
In 1993, he and his family flew to Paris, where they stayed in a hotel for a week while Biggs recorded. “Farmer said, ‘We need two more songs.’ It was 2 o’clock in the morning, and I had to write in the hallway of the hotel because my family is in the room and the kids are sleeping.”
Biggs finished recording and flew back to L.A., where he finished his Ph.D. on the classic French decasyllable. Meanwhile, a law passed limiting the number of English songs that could be played on French radio—effectively stalling his album. “It put this sort of chill on anything that was in English,” says Biggs.
When Houghton College, a school in western New York, offered him a job as a French professor in 1995, he accepted and was quickly promoted to chair of the foreign-language department. He was too busy to rap, he says, “but I got more and more interested in intricate songs.”
That led to “Wrap,” which he wrote after becoming associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in 1999. His friend Peter Engelsman shot the video. In it, Biggs is a “geeky loser professor” who looks over at a car of beautiful women and imagines he’s cool.
Biggs remembers Engelsman saying, “I’m going to put you in all these ridiculous costumes, put you in a Dalmatian coat, and then you’re going to wake up and realize you’re still extremely uncool. You’re going to look over, they’re gone, and you’re just going to sort of drive off.”
During the ensuing media coverage, Biggs was asked to speak at area high schools. He also started a class at Wash. U., Rap of Ages, which explored the linguistic origins of rap.
In 2008, Biggs retired his Headmess persona with a farewell concert at 560 Music Center. “I was feeling like there needed to be a coda, and I think somebody talked about having a benefit concert,” he says. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll do this, and the whole announcement will be that I’m not doing it anymore because I’ve retired.’ It was utterly ineffective. I think I had somebody five days later ask me, ‘Hey, can you perform for us?’”
Today, Biggs’ life is mostly dedicated to academia: He’s currently working part-time at Wash. U. while finishing a master of laws degree in international law. He also recently received a juris doctor degree from Saint Louis University School of Law and a degree in French law from Université Paris Dauphine. “I’m interested in potentially being a law professor,” he explains. “But frankly, I’m studying for the interest.”
He admits Headmess isn’t quite retired, either. “Everybody knows retirements don’t seem to stick these days,” he says. “My whole life has been about the study of rhythm. What really is abiding for me is the music.”
Biggs says he plans to keep rapping “as long as it’s enjoyable—and as long as it keeps embarrassing my children.”
