Rolling Loud generation beware! Meet Edward Skeletrix, the enigmatic memelord, clothing designer, and rapper with the spirit of a Reddit joker and who is quickly building a parasocial cult following with his new 30-track double album, Museum Music. His backstory is vague—roots in Florida and Atlanta, a SoundCloud baby who’s been floating around the underground for a decade, founder of the streetwear brand syckli—but the schtick seems to be: Consider all of the hack fashion rappers (for one, the Opium guys) getting filthy rich off empty platitudes hidden behind tryhard ambiguity, and now watch Edward do the same thing to prove that the modern-day rap industry and its fans are a bunch of easily manipulated dumbasses. “It kind of scares me how easy it is to create a narrative. I could create a narrative about anything right now and as long as I put in minimal effort and make people emotional, the masses will believe it,” he once posted, in a tone that sounds like he’s alluding to World War III and not Lil Yachty’s podcast or whatever.
The bit loosely goes back to Edward’s 2023 mixtape, Skeletrix Language, on which 10 of 13 tracks are titled “Typical Rap Song” and another is “Rappéur FW 24 SS 24,” a sort of Playboi Carti spoof. Cribbing boilerplate variants of the pyrotechnic rage rap of Yeat’s 2 Alivë and mimicking the foaming-at-the-mouth grumble flows you can spot on Whole Lotta Red, Skeletrix Language is like a mind game. The idea: If he critiques rage, all of the underground rap fans will mindlessly eat up his rage. Got ’em. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit for the master plan, but what makes me think differently is soon after Skeletrix Language he teased a project that never officially materialized, Skeletrix Islvnd Rvdix 66.7, an apparent homage to Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 by SpaceGhostPurrp. Purrp was the leader of Raider Klan who, in the mid 2010s, became so disillusioned with the social politics of underground rap that he dedicated his life to social media rants exposing the artificiality of his former friend A$AP Rocky and the star-fucking ecosystem that propped him up, in a way that blurred the lines between emotional breakdown and prank.
Museum Music could have used a dash of Purrp’s acidic bitterness. It’s mostly one big, cryptic troll job, cloaked by thick layers of irony and various online and real-life stunts, including a Manhattan exhibition that featured Edward Skeletrix motionless inside a glass box. (The show also included art from his friend Brennan Jones, the worst white rapper out, mildly viral for big-upping Kanye’s praise of Hitler in an attempt to troll; in attendance was Joeyy, the other worst white rapper out, with his own meme-fueled, alt-right-adjacent backstory.) “I’m a creative director first before anything, that’s my talent. I don’t like making art,” Edward wrote, virtually deadpan as usual. In my eyes, this statement reads as a send-up of the hollow crap you expect from someone who might have an image from Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show printed out on their wall like the Last Supper. That’s the kind of person Edward seems to be ribbing on the second side of Museum Music.
