Screenshots via YouTubePeople of the rap world, come into the kitchen with me. Let's open up the fridge and see what music we can feast on today. And let us hope and pray that what we find when we open that fridge is a fat kid drinking milk from a jar. Yup, confirmed: There is Fat Nick, the Miami rapper, and he is drinking milk from a jar all over the rap game.The internet has been around long enough now that, like the major label system before it, it has kind of established its own rhythms for how hype works: Artists get on blogs, they put some music out for free, a million booking agents and managers and record labels and branding partners swoop in to capitalize on the artist's hype, and finally, when all is said and done, maybe the artists go on tour and play awkwardly to rooms that are too big for them. Miami rappers Fat Nick and Pouya, who are still both in their teens and therefore understand how the next version of the internet will work better than any of us, have gone about things a more traditional DIY way, organizing a nationwide tour themselves and playing sold out shows to any venue that will have them, provided the show can be all ages (Fat Nick takes credit, for instance, for shutting down an Austin venue during SXSW because he told his underage fans to rush the door; most people assumed this swarm was for A$AP Rocky). It's punk as fuck, and it's what hip-hop should be: A youth movement that doesn't wait for someone to throw money at it. In many ways it feels like a 2015 Odd Future. Oh yeah, and it looks like this:Yup, that's Pouya eating ramen in a bathtub while wearing a hair net and having a girl dressed as a cat twerk standing above him. With the sort of unquenchable enthusiasm and lack of filter that says "maybe this is dumb" that only youth can offer, Pouya and Fat Nick seem to be in a battle of one-upsmanship for who can offer a more provocative image. Their raps, here over a minimal, softly digital beat by producers Don Krez and Hltr$kltr, tend toward boilerplate shit-talking and threats that pile on each other to a point of meaningless absurdity, and they seem occasionally geared to push buttons: At one point Pouya raps "something in the air tonight got me feeling creative / put the drugs in the drink uh 'til she sedated," which is obviously fucked up, but later he undercuts himself by adding "you smell the sarcasm coming from my breath." Fat Nick raps in a threatening, semi-intelligible mumble that seems emphasized to play up the fat kid thing and works on sheer charisma. It's jarring, stupid, and fun: You can instantly imagine moshing to this. And I haven't even really discussed this video, which contains images such as this one, of Fat Nick in a top hat with a makeshift wizard staff:Like everything these two are doing right now, in true teen fashion, the main artistic ethos seems to be taking a suggestion, concluding, "Yeah, that'd probably be cool," and then doing it. Hence this weird-as-hell video, directed by Giancarlo Loffredo, which finds Pouya stalking his apartment in a bathrobe and pitting girls dressed as cats against each other in Mortal Kombat-style fights. Could you be offended by it? Probably. Is it dumb as hell? Yes. Is it a refreshing dash of absurdity in a musical landscape that can feel a little over-scripted? Absolutely. If this is the kind of disruptive, weird shit teenagers are doing in 2015, I'm into it. "So What" is off Pouya's South Side Slugs mixtape. Fat Nick's Fat Camp comes out soon, on April 28. Check out the video for "So What" below:Follow Kyle Kramer on Twitter.
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