Steve 'Flash' Juon“Your girl’s on my woody like a beaver.”
“Baby Gravy 2” and “Gasanova” both came out in 2020. I’m not saying I deliberately skipped the former and only reluctantly covered the latter… no wait that’s exactly what I’m saying. I didn’t cover the first “Baby Gravy” so I had no interest in the sequel, and from what little I knew about bbno$ it seemed clear he wasn’t serious about rapping. Why did I want to cover two artists who became accidentally famous because they were parodying actual rappers? I didn’t. I had to re-evaluate Yung Gravy though when I found his album to be… tolerable. Not great, but not the complete joke I thought he was. bbno$ also requires re-evaluation since his “Eat Ya Veggies” actually landed on the Billboard charts and one song made it into CS:GO. I’ll roll the dice here.
“Where did I get all this drippy drip slick huh?
Find myself a baddie and she thicky thick thick”
I understand bbno$ describes himself as “oxymoronic, ignorant but melodic” and that sums up his bars well. As a white rapper from Vancouver though the funniest thing about “iunno” might be that he’s carrying a gallon of milk instead of a bag — although I’m also given to understand that’s more prevalent on the East side of the country than the West. The chief problem with the song is that the intended tone is impossible to discern. They rap like two pimps who do nothing but flex dick and sex chicks, but they spit punchlines so corny they remind me of Jon Lajoie. At least with the latter I knew he was doing it on purpose.
The guest stars don’t necessarily clear things up either. Y2K opens “Myrtle Beach Summer 1974” by bragging about how he “just hit 10,000 followers on Instagram,” which would be a comically low number for an influencer or content creator to be endorsing other people (millions would be preferred) but he’s at nearly 200,000 now so he’s clearly doing just fine. You could say it was prescient for them to hit him up when they did, but it feels like this was done as a joke where Y2K was ribbing himself and/or the audience. The song itself is no different. It reads like a celebration of the party lifestyle with the barely hidden subtext of mocking how vapid it is. The stars are dressed like Miami Vice and the girls they hit on are clearly creeped out.
At the end of the day I can only conclude “Baby Gravy 2” is a joke on purpose. It’s only 10 songs long, doesn’t even clock a full half hour, and features two of the whitest guys you know (aside from me perhaps) miming their way through rap tropes about being rich, getting laid, and living it up to the fullest. If their tongues were any more in cheek they’d bite them off spitting bars. The problem should of course be obvious but I’ll spell it out anyway — white rappers can be respectful to the art and culture, or they can take from it while flipping a middle finger to anyone who complains. This album leans so hard into parody that it’s in danger of being a big F U to hip-hop. There’s no way to be certain that wasn’t their point.