New artists show oddness pervades current rap image
It’s no secret that hip-hop is constantly evolving.
For every Rick Ross-type, the self-proclaimed ghetto MC still boasting about drugs, girls and money over triumphant beats, there’s a Kid Cudi, the self-loathing rapper-singer clad in skinny jeans.
Though the Cudi-esque rappers were new and different at one point in recent history, their style has now become an increasingly popular trend.
Such is the inevitable end of every subculture movement: If everyone’s claiming to be a Martian, as Lil Wayne, Cudi and numerous others have on various tracks, nobody’s really different after all.
Right in our Californian backyard, however, a new breed of hip-hop is brewing. It’s not exactly definable.
In a word, it’s odd.
Fittingly, the group that is so bravely defying the hip-hop norms is Los Angeles’ own Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, a group of 11 musicians, artists and skaters slowly gaining popularity in the music world.
My first introduction to this group was the grotesque video for member Earl Sweatshirt’s track “Earl,” in which Odd Future members drink a gross blended drink and then puke from it, skate and bleed from their nipples, among other disgusting things.
Next, I followed group figurehead Tyler, The Creator on Twitter after seeing his Kanye West-surpassing tweets, such as “Thank You So Much Sir For Letting Me Dookie On Myself In Peace,” “I Wonder What Being Table Feels Like,” “Sometimes, I wonder what Shopping Feels Like” and “I Am Pooty Tangs Hair Do.” And that’s only an example of one member’s strangeness.
Odd Future has been called “the new Wu-tang” because the group is composed of 11 young, collaborative friends, each with different personalities to bring to Tyler The Creator’s impressive beats.
They’re young (Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt less than 20 years old) and savvy, releasing albums for free on their Tumblr page and using the word “swag” to describe everything that they like.
Tyler, The Creator’s own mixtape, Bastard (released last year) begins with a rant that insults nearly everything that mainstream and underground hip-hop stand for.
It then goes straight into a piano-based song with depressing lyrics. Notably, the rapper often talks about his relationship with his father, who abandoned him when he was younger.
Much of Bastard and other Odd Future tracks deal with taboo subjects such as rape, murder and homosexual insults.
As with most rappers that talk about anything, it’s hard to tell when these guys really mean what they’re saying.
Their lyrics beg the “Die Antwoord” question: Are these guys for real? Or are they just genius enough artists, good enough at acting to fool the world into believing their characters? And does that even matter?
Eminem probably never did half the things he talked about in his records as Slim Shady, yet his albums catapulted him to superstardom.
The point is not whether or not Odd Future’s stories are real, but that people increasingly love listening to them.
But Odd Future is not the only propagator of this trend.
Even weirder is Lil B, a former member of Pack (you may remember their popular “Vans” song).
His solo work is, again, odd. His simple beats and hooks make him sound like a strange Soulja Boy, but he’s much more than that.
For instance, one of his songs is called “Miley Cyrus,” and the chorus is, I’m Miley Cyrus / Driving with no license repeated over and over.
He also has similar songs claiming to be Paris Hilton, Ellen DeGeneres, Mel Gibson and Bill Clinton.
Like Odd Future, he loves the word “swag,” and he yells it on almost every song. Bay Area legend Too $hort has said, “I love Lil B … but I have no idea how to define what Lil B does.”
Lil B himself would describe what he does as “based music,” a genre he invented to describe his strange, stream-of-consciousness flows.
But his songs vary so much and that description is so ambiguous that it doesn’t really explain anything.
Whatever he’s doing is working, as he’s selling out shows and catching headlines for his unusual antics.
Artists such as Odd Future and Lil B might not be revolutionary musicians or even particularly talented, but at least they’re pushing the evolution of hip-hop and attempting to do something different — and that’s swag.
Will Hagle is a sophomore majoring in narrative studies. His column, “Feedback,” runs Wednesdays.