It’s midnight and I’m sprinting home, dodging cars and red lights. There are so many rats shrieking and scampering they seem to be having an internal clan war. After a week of delays and cancellations, it’s finally time for the most important interview of my career. I get back to my apartment, grab some Flavor-Blasted Goldfish from the cupboard, and settle into my desk. A man in a Tom Cat beanie and soccer jersey appears on-screen, grinning madly.
Over the last couple of years, 25-year-old David Swegg has baffled the internet with a grab bag of antics. He feebly karaokes underground rap songs, even singing the producer tags. He awkwardly freestyles motivational speeches and pithy jokes. He dances to music, although he’s so limp it looks more like he’s trying to shake dust specks off his jacket. But he’s beloved to the point where he amasses millions of views and is almost as popular as many of the musicians he makes clips about. Swegg tells me a fan who approached him in public was so starstruck he couldn’t stop shaking.
Swegg belongs to a new breed of influencers who can’t pinpoint exactly what it is they do. They might release a few songs, but they’re not really musicians. They might receive press passes to shows, but they’re not journalists either. Yet nor are they dancers or solely shitposters. They’re more like recurring cast members in what has become a live TV show unfurling in the internet music scene. Just as they’ve created memes, fans have in turn turned them into memes, folding them into a new canon of absurdist humor that can be as grating as it is clearly addictive and contagious.
Just like any reality show or the WWE, spectators have their heroes and villains. Depending who you ask, these creators are cool or corny, inventive or insipid, and they’re either lovable goofs or sludge-content grifters. More than anything, the vortex of creators feels representative of this very specific moment in music. Blurring the lines between truth and gossip, organic growth and payola, and turning a new generation of musicians’ work into a punchline—welcome to the hysterical now.
Swegg’s been posting media online since middle school, when the Atlanta native was involved in the YouTube anime music video scene. One of his heroes was the diss gag YouTuber RiceGum, whom Swegg relentlessly pestered without ever getting a direct response: “I would DM him everyday saying, ‘Follow me GOAT, follow me GOAT.’ He never opened it, but he did follow me on Twitter at one point.” During COVID, Swegg started making videos sitting on the couch, talking, with anime themes playing. That spiraled into his current content, which includes underground rap singalongs and little speeches with dopey proverbs that hit like TED Talks for people with brain parasites. In one clip, he stands outside with a bag of takeaway, dressed in red Vetements pants and a graphic sweater. “What better way than to end my day off with some good old-fashioned Longhorns. However, I can’t get over this hunch that there’s something missing,” he pauses, posing intellectually. “Ah, that’s right, a fat thick-booty latina.”
He’s also known for spamming a gif of Kevin Gates swaggering goofily in front of a London Tube train, which influenced others, even Bladee, to comment the same gif under posts. A distinguished taxonomist, Swegg has made videos coining words like ligonite, refuke, jasfercate, juncerterate, and his personal favorite, detritonize. But unlike with a proper taxonomist, his invented terms have no real-world referents: “I’m not gonna lie, yeah, I do make the words up,” he giggles, pleased with himself. “People would message me, ‘Bro, what does this word mean?’ They would Google it too, and screenshot and send it to me: ‘No results found.’” I ask him to make a word up right now. He thinks for ten seconds; I look away from the camera and take a sip of tea, in case he’s feeling pressured. Finally: “Jictonite.”
Unlike Swegg, the creator 42ceo hasn’t coined any words yet. Instead, he’s invented new ways of enunciating some—distending them so drastically they verge on an all-new language. There’s his NEETTT-uhhssspppPPEEND. PLAYBUH CARTEEE! Breaking nuuuuse. Tap any 42ceo video and it’s like watching a Shakespearean soliloquy set to friedambic pentameter. Sometimes he commits so hard to the inflection that he starts coughing, choking on raw air. “KEHN Carson! Featured on Jeapordee! Let’s GoOOooo,” he spasmed in a video.
42ceo’s account functions midway between journalism, gossip, and performance art, like a diarrheal Daily Mail that can’t stop shitting out a feculent spray of hearsay and breaking news. He also runs a series called “Aura Charts,” where he ranks the hottest underground rappers based on ephemeral hype. In many videos, he wears a suit and bowtie that’s meant to contrast comically with the infernal rap he covers. He walks me through his tie color nicknames: there’s “Lean” (purple), “All Red” (red), “Opium” (dark blue). But he’s going to need a new moniker for that last one, since he just bought a black tie that literally says Opium, after a fan discovered it on Etsy. “They were like, ‘You need to buy this,’ and I was like, “Oh yes, I do,’” he recalls with the giddy tone of a grandma who just found her lifetime grail at Bergdorf Goodman.
Fans and foes alike have dubbed 42ceo the “Underground Unc.” Although in reality he is a 24-year-old named Sam from Toluca Lake, CA, many are convinced he’s old as fuck because of his demeanor and sartorial choices. “At first they weren’t really calling me that, they were just saying ‘get a job, you have no life.’” He only started using his face in clips a year ago, but now he gets swarmed at shows. He dreams of creating something like the Barstool of underground music: an extended universe of accounts, from 42Sports to 42Finance. He’s halfway there, with a small empire of popular accounts and college interns who run his pages and take cuts from his promos. Labels like Interscope give him press passes to cover their concerts, and he’s trying to up his game by applying for media access to cover Lil Durk’s trial in 2025.
Maybe the most intriguing character in this new hodgepodge is friutsnacks, a 20-year-old named Erica who’s one of only a few prominent women in the space. With her wide smile, neon hair and zippy expressions and dances, she’s become something like the e-girl of underground rap—memed to death by young guys who say she “isn’t worth shit” yet beg her to be their girlfriend. She began uploading clips at the end of 2021, and is most known for a style where she gazes into the camera, bobbing lightly and lipsyncing to underground rap. She’s grown so popular that people have started calling it the “Friutsnacks Method” and she gets so mobbed at concerts that she can’t go unless she’s backstage. “That sounds so egotistical but it’s actually unbearable,” she groans.
The commotion around fruitsnacks is an odd combo of envy, misogyny, thirst, and real support. “I’m not gonna lie, it’s hard. I get a lot of hate,” she sighs. “I get the most hate out of everybody in that whole scene, like not even just girls, guys included. People made up so many rumors around my name.” After she dropped her first song, detractors immediately dogpiled and called her a Molly Santana clone. She says she’s been bullied a lot ever since she was a little, because she didn’t have friends, so “nothing actually really gets to me. But it’s just like dude, it’s stupid,” she laughs. “People say, ‘Oh, she’s not pretty enough to have clout.’ But like, I didn’t even mean to blow up!”
Swegg, 42ceo, friutsnacks—these three are just the screwy surface of an ever-expanding ensemble. There’s the bizarrely stylish Playboi Canine and Diddybop, the irony-laden TikTok dancer who runs a crew of creators called the Rizz Ohio Gang, whose buzzwords should indicate the level of low-effort puerility they’re working from. We can’t forget about Dabo, the Twitch streamer and music “critic” whose reviews contain so many vigorous bodily twitches and caterwauling cries it’s like you’re watching an exorcism at a funeral. “Bro gave it an 8.7 after 5 heart attacks, 4 mental breakdowns, 8 seizures, 12 natural disasters, 4 aneurysms, 19 divorces and 4 crying sessions,” one top comment cracks. Dabo recently went mega-viral after acting like he’d won the lottery because Playboi Carti vouchsafed him a handshake. I don’t even know how to unpack gloinpce or Loud Pack Sef’s content, it’s basically Facebook affirmations for people who tuned into the Nettspend x Rhonda situation like it was a true crime massacre.
Of course, people have been shitposting forever. Our brains have been rotten for decades, millenia even, ever since cavemen wrote gibberish on the walls back in 69000 BC. What’s different is the way you can really monetize it now, exploit the appetite for absurdist humor to get promo opportunities and disguise marketing in a way that allegedly “appeals to the zoomers and Gen Alpha.” A lot of this shift can seemingly be traced back to the Instagram account Hyperpop Daily. The page pukes out a steady stream of surrealist promo and memes that range from tornado announcements to furry allegations. A recent breaking news post featured a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with an OsamaSon song whirring in the background, for no reason. Last year, the owner told me he was inspired to start posting after reading a Wattpad fan-fiction story fantasizing Bladee and Yung Lean were students in the author’s high school. “For some reason, Bladee started self-harming,” he reminisced. “I was just like, what the fuck is going on? It was so OD and I was just like, if someone did this ironically it would make for god-tier content.”
Currently, many of the accounts exist somewhere between side passion and career. 42ceo’s network of pages is big enough that he has employees, but he’s also got a full-time marketing job for a health and wellness company. Swegg has another full-time occupation. friutsnacks is the only one I spoke to who’s made enough to quit her work, as a drink runner at a breakfast spot (she says she gets more from one video than she would in two weeks at work). She’s currently studying English at a local college and lives at her family’s home in Chicago. It’s ironic that the most frequent comment on these gainfully employed creators’ videos is “get a job” or “put the fries in the bag.” Of course, the haters calling them talentless hacks are also fueling their rise anyway, helping them become notorious enough that posting evolves into a full gig.
These accounts have real influence, shaping the discourse around rappers and boosting news. Swegg tells me that many people thank him for introducing them to Ian after he made an early video about the rapper. friutsnacks says she did a lot of early paid promo for Yhapojj in 2023, which surely helped raise his profile. “friutsnacks has literally made some of these artists — not made them, but she has literally caused people to talk about them constantly, and that’s why she gets so much promotion [requests],” 42ceo said. “Even the big artists she posts, the posts you’d never think are [paid] promotions, literally are [paid] promotions.”
friutsnacks described a system nicknamed the “TikTok Illuminati” where industry heads manufacture viral music fads by orchestrating the same set of influencers to make paid content. “They give you a creative that you have to go around, which is like, you have to use this part of the song and use a caption similar to this. So it starts to create a trend,” she explained.
Her promo is so revered that she’s gotten to the point where she can be selective about what she accepts. “I want to make it like, it’s not accessible to everyone kind of thing, you know?”
It’s easy to be cynical about the way these influencers are incentivized to offer nonstop positivity, and how it’s often impossible to tell payola from genuine endorsements. These issues infest the entire mercenary music-influencer complex, not just in rap, but they feel turbocharged here. Some of the more news-y accounts, like Underground Sound and Kurrco, simply rip stories and photos from journalists and fans. The only editorial standards they tend to abide by is, well, the nondenominational Church of Clicks, so it’s common to see baseless rumors circulate. “I definitely wouldn’t call myself a journalist by any means, but I would say some sort of a commentator, someone presenting news,” 42ceo reflected earnestly. “At first, I really did not understand the impact of what I was saying… As time went on, I’ve tried to become more careful, like, ‘Okay, this is just a rumor, this isn’t confirmed.’ I’m also trying to be more skeptical myself. I don’t want to be known for just saying stuff that ends up not happening.”
Underground rap’s total takeover by brainrot feels depressing — yet somehow also refreshing. Depressing because of the way that doofy humor cloaks calculated advertising, in the process rewarding some utter drivel, while turning everything serious—risky artistic choices, truly inventive music, emotional struggles and abuse allegations—into an ironic meme. The style of humor has also crossed over to the mainstream to the point where it’s lost its whimsical punch. Oxford named brainrot its Word of the Year; MrBeast and Ninja hopped on the “mass unfollow Vexbolts” trend (this would require footnotes and a micro-glossary of terms to explain).
The refreshing bit is how sweet it is to see everyone linked by a shared set of references and jokes, the meta-context of a new community with emerging musicians and comedians to root for. There’s an increasing ideological divide between the r/hiphopheads truthers, Fantano sheeple, those who worship Kendrick, Denzel Curry, J Cole—and the kids nursed on Drain and Slayworld, now matriculating at the University of Opium and Nett & Lil O High School. A lot of both this new generation of music and its associated brainrot humor boils down to “if you get it, you get it,” and if not, sorry—a formulation that seems to enrage people in the latter camp. “It’s like, you’re getting ratio’d by a 15-year-old posting a Xaviersobased clip and you’re 26, you got a mortgage, you gotta pick up your kid from soccer practice,” Hyperpop Daily told me on a phone call. “You don’t know what the fuck’s going on, and of course you’re gonna be mad at the world.”
“I think we can all agree that this generation is beyond cooked,” Swegg tells me with a grin at one point. “Like, this generation is so fried. I mean, every generation is fried in its own way. But this generation specifically, the brainrot is just… it gets to a point.”
What’s good brainrot versus bad brainrot? I ask.
“Excellent question,” he considers, like I’m in a seminar with Dr. Swegg. “Hmm, you really got me thinking. This is crazy.” He looks around, puzzled, rolling over the idea like clay in his hands.
“I guess it depends how you look at it,” he begins. “I don’t know her personally, but I’m going to say Hawk Tuah is good brainrot. She took that Hawk Tuah stuff and now has her own podcast and this puppy or kitty donation center going on. And then you got the negative brainrot: “Make a JOI,” “Can I goon to you.” Come on, that’s terrible brainrot!” he laughs incredulously. “I goon to you, I’m gooning to this right now!” he cries in a high-pitched voice. “Come on, people.”