Nettspend.
Cian Moore via the artist.
Everything has been going great for Nettspend. So why is he so unhappy? Despite ever-increasing ticket sales and streaming numbers, the teen rapper sounds unbelievably stressed out on his debut album early life crisis, like his roots aren’t bleached but greying.
To be fair, Nettspend lives a stressful life. The implicit addictions in his music (which generally read as kayfabe) aside, and you’re still left with a boy, barely a man, at the center of a dizzyingly large panopticon, orbited by HBO, Underground Sound, Gucci’s Demna Gvasalia, and DJ PHAT. That’s before we get into the myriad bloggers spilling ink online about his music or the hordes of Zoomers moshing out their socks at his shows. But perhaps most damning, a large contingent of these people, even those picking up his tour merch, simply don’t take him seriously.
With a sonic palette indebted to OsamaSon’s Psykotic and Che’s REST IN BASS (plus a little xaviersobased and 2013-era radio), early life crisis will likely be received by critics as a creative step back, proof that Nettspend is out of ideas. Detractors would be right to call this album muddled and bloated, but that seems to me a symptom of too many ideas rather than too few. At 21 tracks, nearly double the length of his last project, early life crisis gives our young star room to play without fear of failure, for better and worse.
Some of the style experiments here are legitimately beautiful. “crack” is an immediate standout, bringing a Jetsonmade bounce to Crystal Castles-type arpeggios that spur a silly but addictive hook. Early song “ce” feels like it could make SOPHIE proud, Nett’s voice sounding like a dying sqwauk amidst heavy machinery and metallic percussion. The back half of the album offers up some truly incredible production by DRACO.FM, Ig, cranes, azure, and CXO. These instrumentals would be highlights on any A-lister’s album, and have been carefully calibrated for maximum impact.
The majority of these songs are jagged and diabolical, evidently informed by watching the fluid dynamics of crowds on tour last year. At times, Nettspend’s vocal tics — his signature pinched melodies and aloof flows — feel rote, as if he asked Suno to generate a Nettspend-type verse. In turn, early life crisis is at its best when Nett is pushing himself vocally. His lean-soaked hook on “lil bieber” is surreal and skyscraping: “I brought / drank, back / no Justin Bieber, yeaaaa” (I can see JB’s team in my mind this morning, prepping the cease and desist). Near the album’s close, “hey, hello” recalls his Cash Nett heyday, treating a spacey Rok beat as a springboard for him to caterwaul out. More melodic moments like “hey, hello” are few and far between on elc; they're sorely needed to provide some light and air on such a dense and dark record.
The contrast is crucial because of the sheer volume of speaker-breakers on early life crisis. Nettspend’s verses work about half the time on these harder hitting songs. But because he has more resources than most of his peers, and is getting some of the best beats the rage scene has seen in a minute, even his underwhelming vocal performances, like on“plan b,” “paris hilton,” and OsamaSon collab “pain talk,” go down smoothly thanks to his producers.
But when his vocal intensity matches that of his production, things click. I can catch a glimpse of Nettspend as an artist, and not just an 18-year-old gliding by on a career built off of aura-maxxing, nonchalant posting, and his proximity to artists more original than him. In particular, the three-song run of “sick,” “cross em out,” and “shades on,” blows past hits “Bird Box” and “Shut Up” out of the water.
“shades on” seems destined to be a fan favorite, built around a sample of “23” by Mike WiLL Made It and Miley Cyrus. It’s actually way more fun than you’d expect for a song utilizing such a recognizable sample, probably because the source material was so maligned on arrival. “23” was controversial because of Miley’s reductionary cultural appropriation, which has been labeled flatout minstrelsy by some critics. Whether Nettspend’s team is deliberately cultivating that connection, or falling into it, flipping the track is a surprisingly overt acknowledgement of the racial crux animating the Nettspend machine. When I reviewed BAD ASS F*CKING KID, I wrote that he’d largely sidestepped concerns about his age by ignoring them; ditto for questions about the optics of a white child saying he makes “new trench music.”
In turn, early life crisis will likely stir a debate about Nettspend’s blaccent. Album centerpiece “who tf is u” sees Nett bragging about how he “don’t eat no catfish” and his “baby mama batshit.” The latter phrase sticks out even among Nett’s constant use of “slime” and other trap music signifiers. “Baby mama” isn’t merely lifted from African American Vernacular English, but a concept entirely foreign to Nettspend’s current life experience.
Does Nettspend think having a baby mama would be cool for a rapper? It’s unclear. Even with a generous reading, his choice to use that term feels forced and inauthentic, and that drives back to the lingering question of what Nett really believes about himself, and about hip-hop. It’s a jarring moment that foregrounds his status as an outsider or interloper when he desperately wants to signal belonging.
And no matter how different and lonely he says he feels, Nettspend clearly wants to belong. Throughout early life crisis, he alludes to fake friends and unreliable lovers (including a few choice words for frenemy fakemink on “halftime”). You get the sense that despite his professional success and carefully manicured image, Nettspend feels alienated not only from us everyday peons, but from the people closest to him.
Nettspend’s biggest problem is that he’s too famous. His name and image are used by older observers to signal their in-knowledge, and by younger generations for their shitposting lingua franca. Caught in the middle, Nettspend is endlessly seen and discussed, but ostensibly misunderstood. And on early life crisis, it seems his edges are starting to fray.
The album art for early life crisis by Nettspend.
