Image via Alex Figs
Eric Diep lives to blog another day.
YTB Fatt is intimately familiar with death. The memories are vivid. Fatt recalls eating cereal with his cousin Zai in South Memphis when he was 15 years old. They exchanged “I love yous.” It was any other day. Fatt says his cousin was just going to change clothes and come back. Noticing he left his bowl, he put the bowl in the sink. Once he got a call from a friend that he got killed in the streets, he remembers racing to West Memphis to see his body lying on the ground.
Twenty-three now, Fatt’s relationship to loss has driven him to get sober; the pain he endured in the trenches became his motivation to create some of the most honest hymns in Southern hip-hop. Not only does he pay tribute to passed loved ones with tattoos or eulogies, he also samples the songs they used to listen to together. One of his late aunties put him on to artists like Usher, Juvenile, and Tyrese. “When I play that, that’s who I think of,” Fatt says. “That’s my momma, her sisters, all of them. My momma had it hard also, so we be playing them music and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Damn, I’m finna remix this shit.’ I don’t be trying to remix this shit, but when I hear beats, I just go.”
On Zai, his July mixtape, is one of the most cutting street records of 2024. Here we have an upstart rapper from West Memphis, signed to Moneybagg Yo’s Loaf Boyz label, boasting a Memphis drawl with a Midwestern sound. His best moments feature cavernous bass and sinister raps about grinding, saying fuck the other side, and living with the peace he’s found after surviving duress. His voice cuts through with a raspy delivery as he’s “knee deep” in the “fox shit.” With Fatt, it’s not the chase for cosigns or acclaim, it’s all about a dedication to breaking his family’s generational curses. He’s made ends meet by gambling big during dice games and locking in the studio for over 100 days straight. He’s stunted with cash, jewelry, and big mansions on social media, but fears returning to empty pockets and grief.
On this August day, Fatt calls from his home studio, fresh off getting three foxes tatted on his right arm. He’s working on the deluxe to On Zai, an additional five tracks with one featuring Lil Dann, which he says will be songs about what’s happening in his life right now.
“I’m finna let these folks know what I’m going through,” Fatt says. “Not on the pain side, but through the gangster side. Fuck who? Shit, who we don’t fuck with. I’ma let it be known.”