Fat Tony via Mylkweed / Fatboi Sharif via Tim Saccenti
If reading novels as “research” for the novel he’s writing counted towards the actual writing of said book, Will Schube would have written so many books.
Someone needs to make a buddy comedy about Fatboi Sharif and Fat Tony. I’d happily volunteer to write the screenplay, but considering I should have finished this story months ago, I couldn’t guarantee a first draft until the early 2030s.
After all, it’s hard to find two artists more charismatic on the mic and in front of the camera. Take a look at the visual for Tony’s “Drive-Thru” or Sharif’s “Phantasm” for a screen test. As for source material? We got plenty.
See Sharif’s 2021 macabre breakthrough, Gandhi Loves Children, made with his fellow Jerseyite, the beatmaker Roper Williams. There was 2022’s snuff film-on-wax Preaching in Havana and 2023’s excellent Steel Tipped Dove-produced Decay. Last year’s ten-minute black lodge nightmare Something About Shirley was named one of the year’s best by The Wire. Sharif is a demon that’ll lecture you for hours on the Cannibal Corpse discography before extolling some collection of ultra-rare slasher flicks from the ‘70s that not even the Criterion Collection has unearthed.
Tony hails from Houston but calls LA home (give his GoFundMe a peep; he tragically lost his home in the LA fires). He broke through in 2011 with his star-making turn on Live.Love.A$AP and continued to certify his reputation with Smart Ass Black Boy (2013). After four years off, he dropped Macgregor Park, an ode to his hometown that dove into Houston’s history with car-rattling low end and regular references to UGK.
In the following years he unleashed a bevy of projects, like 10,000 Hours, Exotica, and I Will Make A Baby in this Damn Economy. A cursory listen to these albums paints a portrait of an artist obsessed with rap but constantly itching to work outside its boundaries. His baseline hits all the markers we’ve come to expect from a rapper in their mid-30s. In his Above the Influence interview below, he mentions Nas, Future, and MJG as influences on Brain Candy.
He’s a Southern kid obsessed with the middle ground between emotion and lyricism — a fascination blended with his own desire to incorporate unexpected perspectives into his work. He dropped a BIPOC-focused magazine with writing from Alia Shawkat and Cadence Weapon and visuals from Flyger Woods. He can also lecture you on the importance of Z-Ro. “Swervin’” is Bun B homage but Tony is also a Bad Brains obsessive and earnestly croons over pedal steel guitar on “Got It out the Mud.”
Brain Candy has few predecessors or forebears because Tony and Sharif like the same things but regurgitate them in vastly different ways. You won’t find a ton of artists like this who can work together, let alone want to. It hits similarly to the first time I heard Armand Hammer; ELUCID free-associating from the heavens while billy woods explains the scene outside his window with the language of Amiri Baraka.
Tony is a punk kid and Sharif is a metalhead, though they both devour Three 6 Mafia and Minutemen in equal doses. In the below interview, Sharif puts on for Primus and Beck. Tony shouts out an overlooked yet integral cog of the Dungeon Family.
Fat Tony is the kid in the back of the class that isn’t paying attention because he’s writing down Hova rhymes bar for bar. Sharif is whatever is in that box at the end of Se7en. With Steel Tipped Dove cooking up beats that sound like what Lord Infamous might rap over if he was into Rhymesayers-era Aesop Rock, Sharif has the home field advantage – but that was all by design.
Tony explains, “I’ve always wanted to do a project with Steel Tipped because the beats he does are not typically the world that I live in musically. I’m not one for boundaries, and I thought it would be cool to go into Sharif’s world with a producer that already lives in that space.”
Brain Candy exists in this liminal space between the scariest shit you’ve ever heard and romance jams that David Lynch characters can get freaky to. Surrealism needs an updated definition. Who else names a song after Sade then raps about the room spinning due to Edible Arrangements? “X-Files or X-Videos” moves so slow it can cause panic attacks or a newfound obsession with DJ Screw. It’s a tightrope, but Fatboi Sharif and Fat Tony see the abyss and smile; asking for a blindfold before walking above a pit of alligators.