At a moment when “reality” is mostly a matter of opinion, the teenage rapper Nettspend appears: a 17-year-old cipher who is post-rage, post-race, post-everything. The impish high school dropout broke through late last year with bursts of songs like “drankdrankdrank” and “shine n peace”—dazed, disoriented snippets that channeled the sensation of sun-stroke or snow blindness. Connoisseurs of this particular strain of blown-out Gen Z party rap, as popularized by xaviersobased and his 1c34 collective, have dubbed the genre “jerk”—not to be confused with the California jerk music of 15 years ago that birthed that other kooky, fiercely divisive cloud rapper (whose Zen-ish concept of “based” is not be confused with the edgelord definition it’s known as now). Nettspend, or Gunner Shepardson from suburban Virginia, bleached his hair, and promptly became exalted on subreddits and Discord servers as the Bieber, or the Cobain, of fried internet rap—though to be fair, it’s hard to tell whether his evangelists are being serious at all.
Your tolerance for this music depends upon how quickly you can get past the image of a small Caucasian child who raps mostly about opiates and sluts, to the extent that his raps are “about” anything at all. My own knee-jerk reaction to the video for “2024 Freestyle”—where, between slurry one-liners on sipping lean and shooting guns, he bounces around a rented condo like a babysitter’s nightmare—was a mixture of revulsion and deep shame for ever being starry-eyed on the topic of “real trap shit.” But push past the ick factor, or lean all the way into it, and you might catch yourself vibing to Nettspend’s debut album, BAD ASS FCKING KID*, or arriving at the notion that a lean-addled shitposter whose history with firearms seems mostly based in Roblox is exactly the rap wunderkind America deserves.
It’s hardly profound to note that this twitchy, over-stimulated music is the product of a life whose action happens in a phone, songwriting included; while Nett recorded BAFK at least partially in-studio, he made his early tracks using a free app called BandLab, often in a matter of minutes. What’s fascinating is how polished these spontaneous compositions can be: songs whose scattered pieces coalesce into a glittering whole, like fine cubic zirconia. At a glance, a song like “Leader”—with a beat like an old Salem song bit-crushed to oblivion—registers as beyond vapid, a disjointed string of corny boasts and buzzwords. But notice how he builds momentum through internal rhyme, or the way he litters hooks with dumb-on-purpose malapropisms (“Leave it in the sack/Money full of bag”). Call it the event horizon for the punch-in mode of recording, whose popularity in the past decade-plus has rendered rap discursive and surreal. I’m not saying it’s ingenious, but it’s at least amusing.
There is a modest narrative to BAFK, which Nettspend tries to wrap up within the first 15 seconds. “It get weird growing up,” he gargles on the intro (it’s called “Growing Up”) over footwork-y percussion and synth sounds that do sort of channel Purpose-era Bieber. “I’m still a lil’ bit childish... But I ain’t no child, bitch,” he squeals in Auto-Tune on “Tyla,” whose giddy lurch is plainly modeled after Chief Keef, as are blatant Sosa-isms like, “I might get a tutor, just to fuck the tutor.” There are even a few gestures to the fact that he has parents, though they mostly seem to interact by phone. Perhaps at the behest of some executive or other, Nett was told that an album needs a hook, so here it is: the story of a kid coming up in this crazy world, one that’s almost condescending in its attempt at linear logic.
But in the album’s middle stretch between “A$AP” and “Beach leak,” something clicks. Over a Jersey club mirage of an EvilGiane beat, Nettspend begins the latter with a couplet that says it all in seven words: “Drugs in my drink/I fell asleep.” An inexplicably hilarious Grimes sample on “Skipping Class”—a lantern to guide the odd millennial listener down BAFK’s dark path—makes a poignant backdrop for a scene where the decision to part ways with a fellow truant (“Yeah, I’m done skipping class with you”) hits harder than the album’s many forced Peter Pan-isms. There is dizzy pleasure in the way the vowels roll off the tongue on an otherwise dumb line like “I just chucked a couple bands at a dancer,” or the imagery Nett conjures later on “F*CK CANCER” of a couple thousand pennies tossed into a wishing well, before a sickening off-hand remark (“I just popped two pills, hope it don’t fuck me over”) startles you back from the dream.
Maybe you’re old enough to remember when critics called Young Thug “post-verbal” and wondered whether Chief Keef was possibly autistic, or when the slur of “mumble rap” was weaponized in earnest—quaint reminders of the instinct to reject the new and strange. But I’m not sold on the idea that this delirious, dissociative, nihilistic music, which is hard to even think about in normal songwriting terms, is representative of the New Youth Sound of Today. (When I asked a friend’s teenage kid if his classmates listened to Nettspend, he responded with an eye-roll: “That’s like, for emo kids who want to be mysterious.”) Still, it resonates when Nett encrypts his own language (“We both got a lot to say/Speaking in codes ’cause they might listen to us,” he warbles on “A$AP”) or grapples with the limits of aura (“I try to explain how I feel, but I just feel it in my core,” from “Tommy”) or on “F*CK CANCER,” when he wonders, “What is real?” Nothing, basically. Next question.
