Steve 'Flash' Juon“But I am the best rapper
And uh
My shit is so fire”
This is a historic moment. Be sure to make a note of the date, time, and place you read this. You’ve just discovered the new worst rapper in history, and his name is Lil Flexer. Calling tracks like “Tha Fire Freestyle” from “Ice!” songs may in fact be factually incorrect. You might be fooled by hearing percussion and an instrumental sandwiching lyrics together, but there is no substance between the bread. If I said the filling was rice paper it would still be more substantive than this. It’s an actual series of run-on sentences that were recorded in one take. Nothing was thought out or written down ahead of time. No effort was made to go back and revise it. You can actually hear Flexer running out of “freestyles” on the spot and struggling for more things to say. It’s painful. I broke a finger last year and that hurt less than listening to “Ice On My Wrist.”
This is the Lil Flexer song that went viral, although “viral” in this case is such a low bar that you could make a video of a kitten playing with string and get more views. It wasn’t enough for Flexer to assert his terrible, no effort, no quality bars into a Fisher Price microphone over tinny beats. He somehow decided this also had to be accompanied by a terrible, horrifying, computer animated video with some graphics worse than a Unity asset flip. If someone is purposefully making something so bad people take notice and gawk at it, you can at least see a semblance of thought that went into that process. In Flexer’s case we can’t even give him that grace. He actually crosses the threshold from no effort into negative effort on tracks like “Maverick Merch.”
Go to the nearest zoo to you right now and listen to the howler monkeys for a minute. That is absolutely more of a song and more pleasant than what Flexer did on this track. He’s not even trying to do anything. He’s making a noise and repeating it. There is no production. He found something online and he looped it, but he didn’t mix it well enough to hear it or his vocals well, which truth be told is a kindness. Everything about “My Chain Got That Ice Boi!” makes me question everything bad I said about Soundcloud rappers. This is an attempt to be one. It’s an attempt done so poorly that the curve has been lowered. Every generic and mediocre singing emcee just got bumped from a B- straight to an A+.
In the half decade that passed before I wrote this review “My Chain Got That Ice Boi!” had exactly 141 views on YouTube, which is 140 more than it deserved (he can have the one he got from me). I can’t imagine this shit doing any kind of numbers on Spotify or Apple Music, but you can still find his “Ice!” there anyway. Inexplicably it’s a “Deluxe Version,” as though anything Flexer did requires a new version with expanded content. This review may unintentionally have the opposite effect of what’s intended. I don’t want you to listen to Lil Flexer. I don’t want this album to even exist. It is a failure of humanity as a whole that there’s a Lil Flexer album and we should all be ashamed of it.
As for Flexer himself, whoever he may be, I genuinely hope he went on to good things after this album. I hope he went to college or a trade school, got a good job, settled down with a partner and some pets. I hope he makes life hack videos on TikTok for fun. I hope he’s doing ANYTHING OTHER THAN RAPPING because it can only lead to more pain for him and everyone else.