The rising 24-year-old Florida rapper surfs affably on TikTok trends and sounds exactly like a label executive’s idea of the future.
If you haven’t had a substantial conversation with anyone under the age of 25 or been on TikTok over the last six months —if you are, say, a label executive with money to burn and a fuzzy, Post Malone-shaped image of what Kids These Days are into —Dominic Fike might sound like the future. The 24-year-old Florida singer won a multi-million dollar record deal shortly after he got out of jail for violating house arrest tied to an alleged battery of a police officer; he didn’t have any actual finished music to instigate the bidding war, just a few demos kicking around the Internet. But for trend-chasers, that was enough; he moans when he sings, his face is smothered in tattoos, and the beats change with the grace of an accidentally opened browser window—how do you do, fellow kids!? On his debut album, though, Fike proves to be no pioneer—he’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.
Fike, or whoever runs his marketing campaign, bills himself as “genre-less” or genre-bending, which is an accurate, but not revolutionary, statement. Billie Eilish zigzags through Soundcloud rap and piano pop ballads. Taylor Swift makes "indie" music now. Drake continues to wriggle through so many styles it barely registers when he adopts a new one. The songs engineered to go viral on TikTok contort through genres and textures, so that a 15-second snippet that whirls around the app can sound completely different from the rest of the song.
Over What Could Possibly Go Wrong's 34 minutes, Fike swerves from crooning over swelling strings to Brockhampton-esque treated vocals to raspy raps over chaotic guitar licks, sometimes all in the same song. "Joe Blazey" halts its muffled vocals midway through for an audio of what seems to be Fike confessing to a panic attack; when the music starts again, the song shifts into sinister bass, as he hisses about "going dark mode" in a hotel bar. On “Why,” he shows off a palatable boy-band croon. The blithe, catchy “Chicken Tenders" starts with whiny, pitched-up vocals clearly cribbed from Frank Ocean. By the time the song's two and a half minutes are up, the track has mutated into a call-and-response pop tune with a twitchy electronic drum pattern while Fike proclaims “The best part of my day is/When I get to see you naked.”
These are claustrophobic songs, and even aside from some of the more grating production choices (the extraneous outro on “Wurli” that morphs from elegiac strings into a siren-like blare, the sound effect of a baby crying in “Florida”), the lyrics prove equally suffocating. The album focuses on fame, which often seems like a confusing choice (Fike has 492,000 followers on Instagram; Doug the Pug has 4 million). “What’s it like being famous?” he asks himself on “Good Game.” “Hollywood doesn’t need a reason to make you think you look bigger than you are,” he wails on the self-serious “Politics & Violence.” “I hope they cancel me,” he chants on “Cancel Me,” a trollish track that's currently coursing through TikTok and seems desperate to provoke. “I hope I get Me-Too’d,” he says on the final verse; it’s yet another upsetting statement designed to provoke on an album in which he also says, “I done took an L on every corner like a swastika."
For the majority of the album, though, Fike strives to be aggressively palatable, another aspect of the sound that makes these tracks seem like TikTok bait. For all their incessant beat switches and transformations, these songs end up largely breezy and buoyant, opting to create a vibe rather than to telegraph any actual emotion. He may get credit for what happens next, but ultimately, the future of popular music is on the same course it's been on for the last year: regardless of, and maybe despite, this album, there was always going to be an upcoming slew of artists that sound just like Dominic Fike, slouching towards virality.
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