The Georgia teenager’s oddball digicore tracks reflect the creative freedom of rap on TikTok. His debut EP opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns.
A legion of hip-hop vloggers, streamers, influencers, and promo accounts—some bankrolled by record labels—wants you to believe in a New Underground of internet rap. Its commander-in-chief, a white, keffiyeh-wearing man from Portland named Yeat, has over seven million monthly listeners on Spotify. In his wake, an army of RapTok-famous teens trot out their attempts at pluggnb, digicore, rage rap, and everything in between. Platform dynamics threaten to erase musical lineages; kids ditch class for studio sessions in L.A. Are we out of touch, or has the future somehow been decided for us? How to separate the signal from the noise?
cheRomani+’s viral single “euphoria,” featuring Specxfic, presents one solution: Cut away all the noise. Drumless loops aren’t just for steely New Yorkers with snow in their beards. When digicore producers SEBii and kimj fit a bouncy bassline (and little else) to cheRomani+ and Specxfic’s breakneck flows, it prompts you to experience the song through their rubbery voices, tuning in to every namedrop and silly threat. Their almost cartoonish velocity atop the sparse instrumental feels like slamming two cans of Monster, or if Do or Die had a hyperpop arc. Fast rap hasn’t sounded so fresh and alive in a while.
Like a lot of newly minted TikTok rappers, the most notable thing about cheRomani+ might be just how little there is to know. Early in the pandemic, the high schooler from Georgia quit basketball and casually started toying around on FL Studio. Last summer, he received attention on TikTok for his remix of Yeat’s song “Off the Lot.” He scored a couple more internet hits with “euphoria” and a feathery tune called “agenda,” and…that’s about it.
Compared to his big singles, cheRomani+’s debut EP 3 opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns. A disciple of rapper-producer Lil Tecca, he’ll occasionally land on an idea that marries voice to music in a unique way, like when he sings urgently over the triumphant brass of “Hugo.” On opener “City” and closer “Nine,” che does a serviceable Yeat impression; his latest collaboration with Specxfic, “007,” is fine but doesn’t touch “euphoria” or their ridiculous TisaKorean-meets-Tay-K moment “School k pt 2.” cheRomani+ isn’t a particularly compelling writer (few rappers in this scene really are; this is a producer-driven environment), so when his beat selection is average, too, there isn’t much left to chew on.
What’s interesting about che is that he doesn’t have the baggage of an artist forged in a specific SoundCloud scene. For as much hate as “TikTok rap” gets, it offers a creative freedom that the hyper-specific norms and genre tags of other internet rap communities sometimes suppress. Yvngxchris pivots from sample drill to rage beats, pluggnb artist Weiland draws fresh ears to his weird, kinda bad synth pop, and cheRomani+ can make oddball digicore. 3 presents a small, rather unexciting picture of that freedom; in the grand scheme, it’s probably just noise.
0 comments:
Post a Comment