Dessert Lips Has a Lot of Fun

It’s a familiar story, a trope even: A young person, hoping to reach stardom, moves from a small town to New York. The city famously attracts its fair share of dreamers who arrive with this goal.

Kegan Zema has similar aspirations. He came to New York last year, after graduating from the University of Maine. But unlike many other up-and-coming musicians, his motto is carefree and simple: “Nobody gives a shit.”

All he cares about, he says, is creating songs that he deems tasteful. And when he’s not working at Chloe’s Soft Serve Fruit in Union Square, he makes music, using his laptop and a microphone.

“It’s about what makes me get up in the morning,” he said. “I’ve got to create something.”

Last month, Zema celebrated his most recent creation, an album entitled Looking Good, Feeling Good. While this is not his debut album – he plays in a post-punk band called Journalism – this is the first one released since he gave himself the pseudonym Dessert Lips.

On stage, his aesthetic speaks to his aspirations. He wears lipstick, dances with his hands on his hips and simulates snorting cocaine onstage.

“I would love to get to the point of rocking Gucci and YSL everyday,” Zema said. “I would love to achieve bravado and the image-obsessed material of rappers, and I want to combine it with hipster self-consciousness.”

“He is so much fun,” said Aiko Nasabuchi, a 23-year-old film curator who attended the musician’s show at Williamsburg’s Legion bar in February. “He’s something you don’t see often, and his music makes you feel good.”

In his recording studio, which doubles as the musician’s bedroom, Dessert Lips practices simplicity. His songs sound studio-produced and unmuffled.

“Dessert Lips is an alternative persona where I blow up my actual vices,” Zema said. “I’d like to think he is the pinnacle of all the shit facing our generation: self-centered, commodified.”