Prior to TikTok, viral rap stars took off through SoundCloud and Vine. Lil Yachty, Lil Pump, and OG Maco—this first generation of meme rappers paved the way for the success of Lil Nas X while handing corporations a ready supply of appropriation-ready rap lyrics to keep pace with millennial consumption habits at the same time. Now that the first batch is getting older, we are learning which of them can actually rap without resorting to gimmicks.
Ugly God belongs to this first wave. In 2015, the Houston rapper racked up more than 33 million hits on SoundCloud for the iPhone ringtone-sampling “I Beat My Meat,” spawning a mini-dance craze in the process. He hit the Billboard charts with his follow-up single “Water” and was inducted into the the 2017 edition of XXL’s Freshman Class. He appeared on singles alongside fellow XXL classmate PnB Rock as well as with rappers like Famous Dex, Lil Yachty, and Lil Pump. It was a good run, but two years is a long time in viral rap years, and Ugly God’s debut album Bumps & Bruises confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities.
Ugly God raps over his own production for the project’s 14 tracks, which makes the whole thing feel a lot longer than it is. The music is tinny and piecemeal and the raps are dull and repetitive in the worst possible way: “Went to college for the hoes, blew up then I dropped out,” he mumbles on “Jaguar.” He shows his money off for “bitches” and “hoes” in the most tired patriarchal way imaginable: On “For Real,” he follows “My diamonds on fleek/I’m on her neck like a leash” with the chorus “My old bitch cold like ice/My new bitch hot for real.” (Shoutout to the apparent hordes of women getting their bills paid, hair and nails done, and overall expenses handled by Ugly God.)
Worst of all, he isn’t even funny, and humor was one of his only strengths. “I might make some Cajun/I fuck with Caucasians/My dick game amazing/Get served like a patient,” goes one numbing stretch from “Back to the Basics.” Not even the song called “HAHAHA!” gets a laugh: “Hahaha when you kiss your bitch right after she ate this semen, huh/Hahaha when you send me your music and I’m knowing I ain’t never gon’ stream it, huh.” Other than a guest feature from Migos’ Takeoff, the album’s only saving grace is “Bumps & Bruises (Interlude),” an under-two-minute track in which Ugly God raps about being one of meme rap’s pioneers and calls out the new generation for copying his playbook for success. Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that his social-media reign is over, and while it’s surreal to classify someone a has-been at the age of 22, Bumps & Bruises is a time capsule from the mid-2010s that should have stayed buried.
