Steve 'Flash' Juon“I don’t give a fuck ’bout no followers
I don’t give a fuck ’bout none of this shit
Yeah, fuck all the internet, fuck all the politics
Yeah they could suck my dick
You heard what I said? You heard what I said?”
I don’t want to go there right off the top but Yeat’s “Up Off X” from “Lyfë” is forcing me to call bullshit immediately. Noah Olivier Smith owes his entire rap career to the internet. It’s not even up for debate. It’s so well known that even the often unreliable Wikipedia cites the fact that two of his songs (“Get Busy” and “Money So Big”) went viral on TikTok and launched his career. If he wants to posture like he doesn’t care about the internet in general or social media specifically that’s fine, but that’s exactly what it is — posturing to appear like he’s too cool for the room. I suppose it would be fair for him to say his internet fan base sucks if they blew him up as an ironic meme and then abandoned him, but “Lyfë” sold 30,000 copies in its first week out.
When the first song on your album is in collaboration with Lil Uzi Vert, things are going well in your career. The BNYX produced “Flawless” is as slick as you’d expect it to be. It’s another song tailor made for influencers to lip sync to and dancers to make dances to. Substance? Well if you count bragging about driving million dollar cars and being “Buffy the Vampire Slayer with these Cartiers,” sure. I’ll even generously say it’s not the worst bars I’ve heard from an artist who blew up from TikTok (that award goes to the Island Boys) but I’m not blown away either. Songs like “Talk” are almost entirely about that BNYX production and allowing yourself to be mesmerized by the sing-song vocal delivery. What’s said doesn’t matter. He could rap “llama llama red pajama” to this shit.
The fact Yeat consistently uses an ë with diaeresis in his song titles is his most distinctive feature. Even the album “Lyfë” has that odd letter at the end. In English that’s usually used to indicate an non-silent vowel at the end of a name, such as Chloë being pronounced “clow-EE” instead of “clow.” Does that mean we’re supposed to pronounce his album’s name “lif-EE” instead of “life” then? I’m absolutely overthinking this, which is more than I’ll say about songs like the Outlit produced “Systëm.” The one point Yeat is sure to emphasize with or without the ë is how much he doesn’t give a fuck about anything at all.
“Me and you, we are not one the same
Molly, Percocets, still go insane
Made the money go up, made the money go down
Make that shit disappear if you lame”
All the congratulations in the world to Yeat on riding the wave of TikTok fame to mainstream success as a rapper. There are new lanes to this game and some people are willing to get in them while others hold their nose up. Yeat may say he doesn’t give a fuck about the internet, but the reverse certainly isn’t true, and for the time being that and his production are enough to hold his career up. “Lyfë” proves you can shine anything up with enough time and/or polish, and this album certainly has a high gloss finish, even if he’s ultimately got nothing to say other than he gets a lot of head and takes out a lot of opps.