On Nettspend, Xaviersobased & the Confusing Future of Hip-Hop

Image via Xaviersobased/Instagram

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Jayson Buford once beat John Starks 1-on-1.

It was a June night in the East Village and about 30 or 40 teenagers in Nettspend t-shirts clustered on the block, screaming in adoration as their hero, a 17-year old white rapper from Richmond, left the club in a black SUV. He’d just performed a sweaty, sold-out show that made me feel ancient.

Nettspend makes brutal-sounding structure-free, auto-tune rap that channels Chief Keef if he’d grown up in a suburban Virginia basement playing PS4, watching SpongeBob, and surfing the Soundcloud abyss. It’s the next phase of plugg, trap, and rage music. Brash distorted vocals and digital synthesizers stretching themselves into a painful nihilistic future, where Playboi Carti is revered as the inventor of a gothic baby-talk language that is only understood by those younger than 25.

I’m 28, the same age as Carti. Technically, I’m a young millennial, but I’m still a full decade younger than the median age of Nettspend’s fanbase. And maybe that doesn’t make me the right person to understand it, but it’s mediocre at best. At its worst, it’s fake rebellious atonal internet pop built for kids whose brains have been rotted by Tiktok. The songwriting is bad. The vocals and flows are completely indebted to established Black artists, and it completely bypasses traditional hip-hop audiences in favor of appealing to white computer nerds who haven’t seen the light of day in the entirety of their 16 years.

Despite its obvious attempt at punk energy, it lacks the hard-hitting punch of worthwhile rap. The songs are fragments, garbled sketches that fail to stick to your ribs. The aesthetic of a rapping sub-Bieber blonde with floppy unkempt hair would get him laughed out of any Black neighborhood. Then there’s the fact that he’s a “post-identity” artist. His whiteness isn’t even a factor in his work because it’s effectively colorless – a rough draft made for message board diehards and hyperpop stans who wilt at the prospect of actual human interaction.

Nettspend fans aren’t the punk kids; they were the kids that were scared to go to punk shows. At his show, watching his virginal fanbase, I’m struck by an unusual sensation. For the first time in my life, I’m old enough to finally start hating what the kids are listening to. This is both something that amuses me, and quite frankly, upsets me.

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There’s no softer target than making fun of “the kids.” It’s been a cliche since at least the birth of rock n’ roll, but there are probably papyrus scrolls from ancient Egyptian scribes complaining about how no one plays the lyre like they used to.

Adolescents are always experimenting with new music styles and fashion trends. And adults are always mocking them. I was once one of these older guys, steadfast in the belief that the best music is whatever you heard when you were young. This might be why I was also initially averse and confused by the rise of the Upper West Side’s Xaviersobased – who is frequently lumped alongside Nettspend – and has established himself as the first rapper who sounds like he’s exclusively a product of the 2020’s.

Grunt while reading if you’ve heard it all before: Xavier Lopez grew up listening to Lil B, Chief Keef, and maybe little Max B. He’s not from the streets, but he skateboards, and has an modestly interesting fashion aesthetic. In fairness, Xavier is a much better rapper than Nettspend; he’s much more advanced in his sound, and versatility. In a way, he’s a welcome addition to the New York rap world. It’s refreshing to hear a five boroughs artist unbound from the superstars that preceded them. It’s also a reminder that the internet has made modern rap inspiration much more diffuse and devoid of regional tendencies than in the past.

Xaviersobased been making music for four years, and every year, he continues to improve. He clearly understands presentation, and mixtapes culture. 2024’s breakout mixtape keep it going xav has a DJ talking all through the music, like a classic Clue mixtape. He’s eccentric, mysterious, and laconic too. (I highly recommend the interview he did with Hakeem from Our Generation Music). He’s been able to create a fanbase that strictly reacts to the music, not a sideshow that promotes hypermasculinity or contrived “trouble.”

“classist”, from the 2022 mixtape install, has pro-class politics and anti-fascist lyrics. (“slap the shit out of an nigga if he classist/I cant fuck with the states the shit be classist”). As opposed to identity politics that render a person stuck within a prism of himself (or the man who looks like him), Xavier is opening up his world to include all oppressed people. Whether it was meant to be woke, or just a throwaway line from a young kid, it was a welcome surprise, especially since corny identity politics are so prevalent in culture now. “who u was” sounds like a beat from the video game at your local pizza parlor. At times, when he hits a power falsetto, Xavier feels like an original artist. Let’s say Post Malone if he had an honest bone in his body.

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The seventh song on his most recent tape, with 2, “You See Me”, has a vocal ease that could only come from smoking sour diesel minutes before entering the booth. Ad-libs are practically plugged into the lyrics. “Aight” sounds like it could have been on the Uncut Gems soundtrack.

Xavier doesn’t exactly give off the feeling of hearing a Harlem dirtbag talk smack to you from outside the bodega, but he’s not of the Dipset generation. He comes from after that, just when the internet was moving so quickly that you no longer needed to interact with other humans to share music.

Xavier’s drawl is mostly devoid of an accent, but the instincts — a gift for consistent songwriting, knowing when to use negative space, and understanding when to let the beat ride in lieu of rapping over the beat — continue to get better. The thing is, he’s only 20, and still figuring out who he wants to be. Then again, Pop Smoke was 19 and carried himself with the self-regard of a mid-century Yankees center fielder.

While Xavier has slightly more swagger than Nettspend, he remains indebted to the culture of internet forums. His music is an extension of someone who sounds like they first heard Chief Keef or Speakerknockerz on a blog. It’s devoid of any type of movie-ready life experience, worldview, deceptive intricacy, or autobiographical narrative. It’s not like Future, now 40, is going to receive a Pulitzer someday. But I know things about Future: I know he was shot when he was younger, I know he loves women, I know that he was engaged to Ciara, I know that he takes his Atlanta ties seriously; I know that he is a solid dude who demands that only solid people stay around him. Xavier doesn’t have that quite yet in his music.

Hip-hop was for the downtrodden, but now it seems like it is increasingly becoming more for weird kids who are fake rebellious like the characters in a Salinger story. Sometimes, Xavier feels like Frogger: a machine to play on, built with devices that are making the sound compelling — not the craft of the artist who is singing it.

Still, hating to hate is corny. It’s easy to see what this generation of kids – and myself to a degree – see in Xavier. The music is stern and abrasive, an anime version of Lex Luger. When it clicks in your ears, it really does. It’s punk for kids who watched YouTube documentaries of Playboi Carti. The music isn’t consistent yet and the lack of adult swagger can frustrate me at times.

In the video for “Special” which premiered on On The Radar, I was left cold. Xavier was wearing a hat built for a kid celebrating his 7th Grade Halloween party at his catholic school. The problem with these kids isn’t necessarily the music, but rather the fact that they don’t feel like dudes I want to be around. Once, rappers were the big dogs who bit, the hustlers that survived by any means. Right now, Xavier’s music is solid, and will probably only improve, but stage presence — the idea that you are watching someone that you could dream of being — is not yet present. I’m watching the kids that I used to make fun of in high school.

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In fairness to Xavier, with 2 is a fairly strong showing. It also has a song that finally made me want to defend Xavier to the people who tell me the kids are slightly beyond their diverse ears. On the spacious and sharp “Pediatrician”, his best song to date, Xavier sings casually about a mundane memory from childhood. “In the pediatrician and the tv playing Noggin, flyer than a rocket, had a Spongebob wallet.”

Once the hook subsides, the swag rap takes over; and without altering his voice, he says, “baby, I’m gon make it real, I’m tryna fuck you.” That was the closest I got to understanding their view of older people as haters instead of mere skeptics. Xavier sounded arrogant, caustic. It’s the makings of New York superstardom: being so nonchalant with your abrasiveness and still being able to capture the hearts of the listener.

Dipset was strong because of that magnetism. Despite the crassness about 9/11 and gleefully shouting out the Taliban, every kid wanted to dress like them and speak as lawlessly like they did. New York is a city that is predicated on deranged perseverance. The most successful New York rappers are able to turn the dark flame — the hunger for money, respect, and power — and make it into a virtue. Outlaws did dirt but were still beloved by people because of their ability to convince the public that the charges wouldn’t stick. They don’t mind your behavior since they want to be you.

But Xavier has a long way to go until his music is consistent enough to cross generations. I spent the night of the Nettspend show thinking about the future of hip-hop, especially as it relates to me. There’s more than a few artists to listen to — the game is in a solid place — but no matter what my critical perspective may be, Nettspend and Xavier are obviously poised to be two big stars of the future. They’re sincerely disrupting the genre with their brief songs and serrated vocals. They put on riotous shows that prove that their fanbase isn’t merely just online bots. And they’ve already received plenty of critical acclaim.

But the skeptic in me thinks about how quickly this has all happened, and how raw both of these artists remain. To me, Xavier has a real chance, but Nettspend remains nothing more than hype and shrill pandemonium. There is no clever writing or slick aphorisms. All we’ll have left is a merger of identities and sounds, as opposed to a new voice in a genre that has been one of the best chroniclers of American life since its inception. As the outside world continues to take place on the internet, this is a reminder that maybe we’ve begun to miss the socio-economic conditions, style and cool that hip-hop was actually founded on.

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