There are the couples who travel the world together; the couples who double as workout partners (living like the 1-on-1 scene in Love & Basketball, I imagine). When I was in high school, there used to be couples who dry humped at lunch. There are the couples who spend their time dressing each other in matching outfits and snapping pics—I’m reminded of them whenever I listen to a Ken Carson song. A lot of couples have their thing. DEMIYAA and Lil Rae’s thing is that they rap together. Technically, My World is the solo mixtape of DEMIYAA: a sometime rapper with a day job that seems to be selling cosmetics and bundles on Instagram, who appears on all 12 of the tape’s tracks. But it functions more like a two-hander with Rae—her man and a diss-happy rapper in the full-throated Atlanta drill scene that popped up a few years ago—who is on seven of the songs (eight if you count his ad-libs on “Ik I Look Good”). Together, DEMIYAA and Rae carve out an unusually romantic slice of drill.
The general vibe of My World is DEMIYAA sitting in the passenger seat doing her makeup, while Rae cruises around Atlanta buying her stuff and getting into bullshit. Basically, it’s a new generation “’03 Bonnie & Clyde,” in which Jay and Beyoncé were so joined at the hip that Hov said, “How hard she rides with me, the new Bobby and Whitney/Only time we don’t speak is durin’ Sex and the City.” OK, sure, that’s a little blasphemous; Miyaa and Rae aren’t storytellers anywhere close to that level, but they’re good at making it seem like they care deeply for each other in their own ways. On “One Call Away,” DEMIYAA holds Rae down by sneaking a weapon into the club for him. On “With the Gang,” over a sweet beat that sounds like it should be in Animal Crossing, Rae returns the favor by threatening to beat the ass of a guy that was bothering her. He spends the rest of his verse alternating between fighting inner demons and hyping Miyaa up: “Can’t lie you thick as fuck, yeah, I know you eat your cornbread.”
Without each other, DEMIYAA and Rae are less interesting—the tape rides on their flirtatious push and pull. On DEMIYAA’s solo tracks, her casual delivery sounds too much like she’d rather be doing anything else other than rapping. She can’t make up for her lack of energy with stylish flows like the laid back Detroit guys, or jokes and charisma like the chill Atlanta girls. But together with Rae, her carefree demeanor and his jacked-up chaos complement each other, as they pull off set ups and scams with the regularity of other couples going on walks in the park. The tape is at its most loving when they’re just sending each other twisted words of affirmations. DEMIYAA lets him know she will roll his blunts for him on “Cyber Truck”; Rae promises that if DEMIYAA wrecks her whip he’ll buy her a new one on “Back of the Bank.” It’s not exactly In The Mood For Love, but they sound like they really mean it.
Too bad the beats aren’t better. They’re a bunch of cheap-sounding drum-heavy flips of pop songs and rap hits that have been flipped a million times before. They’re boring and unconsidered, like they rapped over whatever “type beats” their YouTube algorithm recommended that day. It’s not the biggest deal—the point of the tape is the chemistry and feeling between them. There’s a moment on “Ik I Look Good” that captures it, where over a decent enough rework of a soul classic, DEMIYAA softly mentions what it’s like to hang around Rae. “Rae hop out the backseat and act a fool,” she says, almost like she’s shaking her head at him. And then, for a half-second Rae appears just to say, “I be trippin’,” his equivalent of a guy apologizing with puppy dog eyes. It’s the sweetest moment on My World, one of the only drill mixtapes I can think of that could be reasonably described as pretty cute.
