With the most recent rise of rap music also comes the rise of very questionable lyrics and artist personas. Some newly popular artists like Joeyy and Turnabout are experiencing their first brushes with fame at least in part because of their penchants for weird wordplay and even weirder online content. Many of their bars talk about drug use or other topics that are inappropriate but nevertheless appealing to their teen fanbases while others range from shockingly funny to genuinely confusing.
Joeyy is a hip-hop artist most famous for his 2023 collab with an artist whose name is likely better off not printed in the pages of a student newspaper “IM NOT GOD BUT I WISH I WAS”, which, yes, includes a lack of proper punctuation and many nonsensical rhymes about abusing pills. In Joeyy’s song “Eminem”, he says, “Italian feet, organ transplant receipt” which is funny because why is he talking about Italian feet in the middle of a bar about the effects of codeine? Well, according to notable lyric annotation website Genius, it’s just because he is saying he is rich and has expensive shoes on. But, again, what is the connection? Perhaps the non sequitur nature of it all is what’s most ear-catching.
There are many other silly bars like this, especially in longtime star Kodak Black’s music. In his song “Already”, he mumbles, “I just want the bread, keep the peanut butter jelly.” On the surface, it may seem like straight nonsense about everyone’s go-to struggle sandwich. However, basically, what he is saying here is he just wants money—not anything else that comes with it like the drama. In many of these kinds of goofily symbolic bars, rappers say things that seem very wacky but sometimes have an authentic, interpretational meaning to them that falls in line with the song’s overarching theme—other times, they simply don’t.
“I think the quote from ‘Slaughter House’ [by Sematary] ‘I’ll lay you down next to your dog’ is silly because of how random it was when he went from [describing graphic violence] to something that doesn’t seem as bad,” Hanan Mohamoud (9) said about another artist known for their head-scratching rhymes. “It felt like it went from serious to, like, ‘cutesy.’”
A lot of these lyrics include brain rot terms and memes, like when rapper BLP Kosher says, “fresh avocado” in a viral freestyle on TikTok, it’s a reference to a 2016 viral video posted on the now-defunct short-form content app Vine. Social media has been present in rap music and rap culture for over a decade-and-a-half now, from Soulja Boy plugging his Twitter account in the middle of a song on his album “Paranormal Activity” in 2009 to Drake dropping the line “Twitter fingers” in his 2015 beef track coming at Meek Mill (well before his losing battle with Kendrick Lamar last year). But now, more than ever, it’s being mentioned and incorporated into works like Witt Lowry using the word “doomscrollin’” in a 2021 song and even international superstar Bad Bunny casually saying “Instagram” in the midst of a lot of Spanish-language rhymes that same year.
These kinds of bars make the music more attention-grabbing, and they do admittedly successfully appeal to people who are chronically online, but there is a downside. After a couple of years or even months, the song and/or bar will no longer be relevant because we as a society have already moved onto new terms and apps. Will the next generation look back on BLP Kosher and Drake’s songs, wondering what Vine and Twitter are? Kodak Black is perhaps a rare case of an old-gen rapper who is still relevant and has so many fans because his bars are funny yet timeless.
“Stories that can’t be retold or understood [by] many demographics will go stale in any medium,” Adam Smith (12) said. “Our shift to short-form content also has had an impact on our youth, and they will lose interest in songs or trends faster because of it.”
Turnabout is an ex-Haunted Mound member and he has over 38.2k monthly listeners either despite or because of how many of his bars are very weird but mostly evade the crutch of brain rot-centric lyricism! In fact, he has an entire song called “Grimace” and he says, “I got Big Mac, pourin’ purple up / Happy birthday, Grimace,” which is a pop culture reference that actually lands with anyone who’s ever seen a McDonald’s commercial while also doubling as a drug reference to the youth about what’s known as “purple drank” or “lean.” Lean is a drink where you mix prescription cough syrup or things like oxycodone with sodas like Sprite, it has grown in popularity in the rap community ever since the late 90s when emcee DJ Screw, and later, Oscar-winning group Three 6 Mafia mentioned it in several songs.
“I think many young people don’t fully understand the lyrics, and mostly go off the rhythm until the messages they portray are ingrained without them realizing,” Smith said. “Rappers promote the lifestyle and glamorize it, usually painting the picture to their young audience that [the] only fulfilling things are getting money, promiscuity, and substance abuse.”
Lyrics like these can sometimes be deceptive because you can think what they’re saying is PG-rated when it really isn’t. This can be entertaining, but it can also be dangerous because unknowing kids will just listen and go around repeating lyrics, not knowing what they’re even saying, possibly causing them to get into trouble. Perhaps these kids might even become curious enough to try one of the drugs mentioned in a song by someone they look up to or idolize.
In the end, music is and will always be very prominent in our society, but we have to be careful about some things we say and exercise some distance when it comes to enjoying art of all kinds. While violent crime has decreased over time, drug use rates remain steady in America—including for those that can cause permanent brain and/or lung damage. If the bathrooms at Columbia Heights High School (CHHS) are any indication, that includes right here in our own community. So we need to be careful what and how we consume, whether it’s what’s in our AirPods or what we put in our body—no matter how much a line in a song may make us chuckle or bob our heads.
