For the past three years, RiFF RAFF has become a cult phenomenon, and his proper debut, Neon Icon, is his movement’s anti-climactic culmination. It’s nearly impossible to criticize the album without coming across as an enemy of “fun,” due in part to RiFF RAFF’s knowing, over-the-top branding as low-culture trash. But irony and irreverence can only do so much lifting on a record this thin. Neon Icon is hardly an affront to hip-hop’s very foundation; instead, it’s an adequate, listenable rap album, and for a part-time rapper/full-time jaw-dropper, there couldn’t be a more damning outcome.
RiFF RAFF first reached the public eye on a reality show, MTV’s “From G’s to Gents”. But as a primordial piece of internet culture, RiFF RAFF’s star truly congealed in a wave of digital flotsam that crashed onto social media and YouTube around the turn of this decade, replete with collaborations and co-signs from Lil B, Lil Debbie, and Soulja Boy. Stylistically, his music originated in Houston’s laconic Swishahouse punchline style; personality-wise, he has a flashy appearance, garish tattoos, and absurdist wit—often in his music, but even more frequently on Twitter. His profile rose: he likely inspired James Franco’s role in Spring Breakers, then appeared on “One Life to Live” impersonating James Franco. He’s a troll, drawing accusations of minstrelsy, sparking thorough investigations into his background and receiving coverage that fawned over his “brilliantly absurd” lyrics and “rangy, Dadaist luxury rap.”
Although he calls himself the “white Gucci Mane with a spray tan,” his lyrical prowess plumbs a much shallower pool than Gucci’s. On Neon Icon, his rap style has atrophied into a game of hip-hop Madlibs, the “White ____” and “Rap Game _____” one-liners that have so bolstered his Klout score. As on “How to Be the Man”: “Might hit the club and it’s the white Danny Glover/ Rap game Uncle Ben pulling rice out the oven.” What does this mean? Absolutely nothing. It’s arbitrary pop culture juxtaposition, like Peter from “Family Guy” saying, “You know what I haven’t had in awhile? Big League Chew.” RiFF RAFF wasn’t always this limited. His earlier work that broke through the digital noise—records like “Larry Bird”—still possessed the feeling of forward motion, even if it just took the listener into strange little stoned circles.
In the three-odd years since “Larry Bird” first appeared online, RiFF RAFF has engaged in an uphill battle to keep the punchlines churning. As his audience has grown, they’ve demanded an increasing level of ridiculousness, so as it became necessary to efficiently produce newer, more ridiculous music, RiFF RAFF dropped the vestigial tool of narrative. So ridiculousness increasingly has become RiFF RAFF’s stock in trade, and this has happened because of the fans he’s cultivated—in distancing himself from earlier collaborators like Soulja Boy and TKO Capone, in signing with Diplo, and recognizing that ridiculousness pays big bucks. Narrative connectivity is not a priority.
What’s taken the place of that storytelling is something at which his label head Diplo excels: curation of cool. Thus, we get a record with a diverse musical backdrop. Opener “ Introducing the Icon” is an unexpected burst of early ‘90s House of Pain-style combativeness. It’s also one of the album’s best songs, swiping a retro costume that hasn’t been worn through with overuse, and which meshes surprisingly well with RiFF RAFF’s sloppy Texas delivery. (In contrast, one of Diplo’s weaknesses is songwriting, so the his production “Kokayne” has all the style of hard rock with none of the function.) The Mike Posner-featuring “Maybe You Love Me” is easily the catchiest song on the album, an earnest R&Bubblegum single that, while not a likely Billboard hit, is definitely on trend. And the album’s closing song, “VIP Pass to My Heart”, isn’t even a rap song at all, but a twee club jam in the vein of Uffie’s euphoric club rat rap single "Pop the Glock".
Ironically, the cool-chasing half of the record seems only to have stumped fans of more straightforward tracks like “Wetter Than Tsunami” and “Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz”. Music critic Anthony Fantano, a fan of RiFF RAFF’s lyrical ridiculousness, recently seemed confounded by the album’s musical breadth, criticizing the neo trip-hop cut “Cool It Down” as a “Whitey Ford Sings the Blues song”. It’s a catch–22 for RiFF RAFF. The “cool” musical choices give what would be a monotonous record needed variety, but they also threaten to delimit his audience to hipster trendspotters. Further muddying the waters is the presence of guest rappers Mac Miller and Childish Gambino, whose respective styles seem tonally at odds with RiFF RAFF and Diplo’s approach. The effect isn’t so much that those rappers have confounded our expectations; instead, their presence means the album’s overall direction comes across as confused.
The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose, although “Cool It Down” does seem an oblique response to those who’ve attempted to unearth his past or reveal him as a fake or minstrel: “They wanna tell you what you can’t do based on former facts/ If I wanted to hear that bullshit I’d be in history class.” Perhaps it’s a bit of masterful stagecraft, a knowing bit of irony, but the song scans as a sincere. What if it is? What if it’s not RiFF RAFF who’s the problem, but us?
RiFF RAFF has had his background probed more than almost any rapper in recent memory. Early interviewers seemed convinced they would unlock his enigma, which always entailed discovering whether he was “for real” or “joking”—a parody of hip-hop. These aren’t questions most rappers face; Lil B was celebrated for his eccentricity, but seldom interrogated as a rapper critiquing the form.
In a piece for ArtForum after Amiri Baraka’s passing last year, the artist Adam Pendleton suggested that Black American Culture is seemingly legible through only two lenses: realism and expressionism. “If abstraction remains illegible in the work of the black artist,” Pendleton writes, “This is because black individuals remain abstract.” Amiri Baraka’s work was proof that this constricted reading of black art was a lie. But that lie is the reason that many listeners experience a black artist’s eccentricity as pure expression, as if their art might not be equally constructed. When an artist like Riff Raff comes along, listeners jump to the obvious conclusion: as a white artist, he must have agency. He must be faking it, perhaps mocking black expressionism. And the investigation begins.
But what if he isn’t? Convincing arguments have surfaced suggesting the real originator of the RiFF RAFF flow—as well as those of many other artists in Texas—is the rapper Yungstar. Hugely influential, like several of the rappers in DJ Screw's Screwed Up Click, he never rose to national prominence. If RiFF RAFF’s primary influence, then, isn’t a stereotypical Southerner, but an influential yet obscure talent, the notion that RiFF RAFF is simply making fun of black culture falls away—as do the fans for whom that is his primary appeal. This would require recognition from listeners and the press that our fascination with RiFF RAFF was based on a false premise in the first place. And at that point, the bland truth of his art’s consequence is revealed: he’s just another marginal talent benefitting from an unsung artist’s innovations.
