Bhad Bhabie and Alabama Barker’s Rap Beef Warrants Column on Pitchfork

Only, wait, let me rephrase: the rap beef of the year so far features one such girl, and then another one who seems to play the part online. The latter, 19-year old Alabama Barker, is currently an influencer who made her showbiz debut the same year she was born (2005) on the second and final season of Meet the Barkers, her family’s reality show. “It shows everything from us basically fucking at the Playboy Mansion, to our son’s first steps,” pitched her father, Travis, Blink-182 drummer turned resident unc of the cursed pop-punk revival of the early 2020s. He and his second wife, former Miss USA Shanna Moakler, got their daughter’s name from a great movie, 1993’s True Romance, in which Alabama Whitman, call-girl with a heart of gold, proclaims winningly to her husband-to-be: “I want you to know that I am not damaged goods! I’m not what they call in Florida ‘white trash!’”

Since December of last year, Alabama Barker has been feuding with 21-year-old Bhad Bhabie, the sometimes-rapper and high-dollar OnlyFans model who lived a past life as a meme, having debuted in the public eye alongside her distraught mother in a 2016 Dr. Phil episode titled, “I Want To Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year Old Daughter Who Tried To Frame Me For A Crime.” By 2017, the South Florida teenager had transformed into a rapper (an Atlantic A&R called her the day after the episode aired) whose songs were nowhere near as bad as they could have been. At least they were on the level of the other SoundCloud rap songs that beset the Billboard charts in 2017, the year that memes overtook music by way of social media stars and TV personalities.

I can admit I’ve had a soft spot for Bhad Bhabie ever since I profiled her in the fall of 2017. She was 15 at the time, and strikingly candid in a way that both impressed me and made me profoundly sad. In a nail salon in Brooklyn, she casually admitted she’d had no designs on rapping until Atlantic called. “I have this platform, being famous. I can see how I want to use it,” she’d shrugged, picking at a bacon-cream cheese bagel. But she’d always been creative when it came to storytelling, and her truest talent, as she cheerfully told me, was deception. “I’m a really good liar, so I end up snitching on myself,” she said. Did she like the feeling of being in trouble, I wondered? “I don’t know if I like the feeling of being in trouble, or if I just like the feeling of you knowing that I just tricked you,” she answered with a smile.