In the world of way too online rap beef, I’ve been loosely paying attention to this war of subliminals that broke out over the last few days between Jane Remover and skaiwater. I’m no Discord detective, but as far us regular folk know, it seemingly all started over a line from Jane’s new song “yes, yes, no, yes, no,” where, in a kind of cackling Joker character, she clowned on skai for needing to go on a Dabo stream—a fairly popular teenage content creator who mostly came to my attention last year for his cringey, fanned-out videos in the build up to Playboi Carti’s MUSIC—for attention. Meanwhile, skai responded by calling Jane racist, an accusation that has been floating around on the internet for a while, apparently dating back to one time when she said, “My fans are kinda like Opium fans if they didn’t listen to Black people.”
I was ready to put this in the go touch grass category, but things got darker when Dabo, who has been making cursed rage rap for some time now, tagged himself in with a nasty Jane Remover diss track and video called “Bleed.” In the clip, released on X, Dabo, wearing one of Carti’s Young Vamp Life caps, and a friend, punch and beat on a man wearing a red wig who is supposed to be a stand-in for Jane. As that goes on, Dabo, in shitty Auto-Tune, raps threats directed at Jane and commenting on the fact that she is a trans woman like, “I chopped the whole shit down like you did your dick,” “Make the pussy bleed,” and “Racist ho’, she talkin’ out her chest, ain’t got no titties.” He uses “Stop speaking on the culture, bitch, it’s Black business,” as a defense, but we all know it’s just a way for him to get away with, “I don’t give a fuck ’bout no misogyny.”
That isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of racism in internet rap scenes, where dudes get on nearly every week just because they’re white and the shows are packed out with white teens who will grow up imitating Black rappers until it’s time to get a job in the real world. But the Dabo diss feels like the release of an energy that has been fermenting in the underground for years, a generation of kids that grew up on the hedonism of Opium and the general manosphere and look at their allegations not as an irredeemable knock but proof of their masculinity and the way society punishes that masculinity. It’s an evil song, man. One that shows the intense rightward swing that has only hardened as the lines between hip-hop and the streaming universe have blurred. It might be some internet shit, but this poison is everywhere.
