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J3’s viral number rapping reminds me why I love hip-hop

Is he next up out of algebra class 🤔

January 23, 2025
J3’s viral number rapping reminds me why I love hip-hop

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Ten years ago, Omelly delivered one of the most iconic freestyles in the history of Sway in the Morning. The Philadelphia rapper started off on a merely mediocre foot, but before long he was struggling to string words together. By the time the beat for Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga” dropped, his brain had entirely short-circuited, and the only sounds that his mouth could formulate were desperate “Mmm-mm-mmms!” Sway graciously swept in with a history lesson: “What you really hearing is the building blocks of a verse coming together.”

While it was a stretch (albeit a kind-hearted one) in Omelly’s case, the facts were sound. For years, gold-standard MCs approached rap like a puzzle: in the process of writing and recording, bars could be filled with grunts, mumbles, or humming as the writer figured out what word should go where, and how it would be expressed. These adjustments formed much of what we know as “flow,” hip-hop’s most immediate expression of its infinite personalities.

At the top of 2025, a little-heard rapper called J3 caught a big viral moment that’s the photo negative of Omelly’s. It reveals something about how hip-hop is formed, but does so intentionally, and displays real talent. Over the past month, J3 has shared a series of videos where he raps numbers. No sentences, no metaphors, nothing that isn’t a mathematical increment. In my favorite clip, he opens with “100,000 803 / 200 300 8 17” in a pinched, paranoid cadence one TikTok commenter keenly compared to Skrilla’s. Last night, my wife politely asked me to stop mumbling “2 3 2 3 2 3” to myself.

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Unlike most viral rap moments, this one isn’t a mean-spirited meme snowballing out of control, or a gimmick created with more love for attention than the art. J3’s videos are the sort of thing that would cause your rap-hating parents to scoff if you showed it to them, but fans of the art can quickly clock that what he’s doing is not only difficult, but wildly original. Finding numbers with the best rhythm, making sure they either rhyme or flow through the line well, and delivering them with conviction — it’s absurd yet quite beautiful, its own integer-based cut-up poetry.

J3 raps more than just numbers on his other songs. He’s released two albums (2020’s I Am Jimmie’s Burning Hand and 2023’s Inception Theory) with a new single, “Yes, Chef,” released in October. At one point as I listened to his music on DSPs, I did feel a quick, brief pang of guilt that J3’s more goofy snippets were what attracted my attention. Then I rewatched them, and the raw skill and creativity he displayed quickly gave me comfort. No matter what J3 releases next, he’s already cracked a code.

J3’s viral number rapping reminds me why I love hip-hop