Olivier: I just knew you were gonna’ ask me some shit like this. Yeah, I think people are obsessed with cultural novelties, that’s why someone like ian was able to take off for literally just rapping on fake Lex Luger beats. You have a preconceived notion of an artist based on the way they look and when they subvert it, it blows your mind. Couple that with the half-serious, half-joking approach to the music and it all leads to where we’re at right now.
Alphonse: Kieran, how much of the engagement with 2Slimey’s music do you think is irony-based?
Kieran: A lot of it. Similar to Nettspend, credit goes to the clipfarming zeitgeist. It’s the ridiculousness. Che doesn’t go viral like either of them. There’s a guy who always texts me about 2Slimey saying, “Nobody’s doing it like him,” but if you’re tapped in you wouldn’t think that. Anthony Fantano isn’t in the SoundCloud trenches, so when he hears this he’s like, “Holy shit.”
Alphonse: That’s my thing. I don’t even end up having that strong of a reaction to the music. I’m just like, “Yeah, this is what rage rap sounds like right now.” I’m more surprised when an artist punctures the noise with a little bit of softness, like skaiwater’s “rain” or the melodic parts of A Great Chaos or the plugg foundation of tdf’s Blueprint.
Mano: 2Slimey did one of those obligatory underground rapper interviews where he was talking about how he’s so inspired by metal, but he is one of the first rappers I kind of believe. He’s just screaming on some of these songs.
Kieran: It’s like one of those industrial electronic genres.
Alphonse: That’s when race comes into it too, though. Non-Black rappers get away with some bullshit because as soon as they start incorporating other genre elements into their music, all of a sudden it’s not talked about like rap.
Mano: He’s definitely a rapper. He can’t pull off the I’m not a rapper, I’m an artist Tweet.
Alphonse: Pull a fakemink.
Mano: One point on 2Slimey we might be overlooking is that producers really fuck with him. A lot of the underground discourse we see is from 17-year-olds who know how to use Bandlab and are more interested in the way a rapper uses presets than lyrics. It’s about how they get their voice to sound the way they do.
Kieran: There’s that clip of 2Slimey on PlaqueBoyMax’s stream, when he refused to use Max’s $2,000 mic or whatever and wanted to use his cheaper one instead. Almost fetishizing the cruddiness.
Alphonse: I’m not a gear-head so I sort of check out when the music becomes more about the equipment, it starts to sound like video game talk. I understand that video games are pretty influential in the way people think about and discuss music now, but it seems so impersonal.
Olivier: With each SoundCloud generation—and these generations keep getting shorter and shorter—there’s an emphasis on texture more than anything else. It constantly feels like we’re at a breaking point, until somebody comes and grounds it. I miss that emotional urgency. OsamaSon gets it on psykotic when the album opens with 808s that feel like your car speakers are broken. It makes me think he just had the craziest two weeks of his life and needed a sound to reflect that.
