Rochester, New York artist RXK Nephew is leading a new wave of stream-of-consciousness rap. Call him hip-hop's Kerouac
going on with RXK Nephew. He even has a hunch as to what it might be. “What’s the poets that go up there on stage and they do their poem and everybody snaps their fingers at them?” he asks.In a 1958 essay titled “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Jack Kerouac advocated a practice of writing that involved “no pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained.” It’s a great way to describe RXK Nephew’s approach to rapping.
At the start of this year, he put out a collection of tracks inspired by Quiet Storm R&B and the family that he grew up with. “The blues and old school, that’s what my people listen to. My auntie and my grandma’s brothers and shit,” he says. “So I did beats from their favorite songs, so they can show up and they be happy and shit. It be a lot of other people’s favorite song, too.”
The practice has also made RXK a reliable source of online entertainment, as producers sometimes get songs back where Neph insults them over their own creation. “I be wondering what made the producers send me those kinds of beats. I be wondering if they really listen to me, if they know what kind of artist I am, and they just want to send me a crazy beat,” he explains.
The crowd was probably there because of Nephew’s most famous single, “American TTerroristt,” released on the winter solstice of 2020, and stuffed with metaphysical anxiety. The nearly 10-minute treatise rolls seamlessly through a slate of inquiries, each with an escalating sense of urgency and absurdity: “How the fuck all of y’all aHe succeeds at achieving a vernacular for a culture with an abundance of reasons to feel suspicious of authority and received wisdom.
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