Swae Lee - Enemy (Rae Sremmurd Before The Fame)

Slim Jxmmi​ skateboards into the entrance of Hot 97 with Gucci goggles atop his head. He kicks the board up into his hand while Swae Lee begins to sing into the echoing, high-ceilinged lobby: “Codeeeeeeine craaaaazy.” He draws out each word operatically as they proceed to walk through, followed quietly by their DJ, manager, and publicist. They dap up the building security graciously then chase their way to the elevator. Once seated in a waiting room, Swae begins to explain how he got banned from Snapchat.

“Too many nudes,” someone chimes in. Apparently replying to a high volume of female fans has put Swae’s account in jeopardy. Slim Jxmmi’s Snapchat appeal is more about how creative he gets with it. He prides himself on putting the extra effort into coloring in a masterpiece for each message.

In the waiting room, the only thing that keeps the energetic Sremmurd boys from bouncing off the walls is the magnetic attraction of their phones. They focus on a flood of Snapchats, tweets, and Instagram notifications, constantly showing each other what’s being said to and about them. But they simultaneously tap into the social energy in any physical space that they happen to be in. At any given moment, they might be drafting a tweet while flawlessly executing an ollie and flirting with the label rep.

To the untrained eye, the Sremmurd boys’ incessant turn-up image can appear to be a manufactured glaze of infinitely hashtaggable song concepts and savvy music industry social media marketing. But after spending a few minutes with them, their kinetic energy makes it clear that they truly live this shit.

When the pair met superproducer Mike WiLL Made-It in early 2014, they were jumping on chairs in his engineer P-Nasty’s home studio. But it was more than pep that caught his eye. “I saw the talent,” says Mike. “I saw them in my homeboy’s basement. I saw them in this small room where the lights were off and some fucking strobe lights were going and they were just in there freestyling. They had so much energy. But as soon as the beat went off and I started telling them what I had to say, they were all ears. I don’t know how to explain it. I understand superstars. I understand legends.”

Mike was putting together a roster of artists for his production company EarDrummers Entertainment. He signed the brothers, who took the name Rae Sremmurd, reverse spelling the name of the company.
"THEIR MUSIC IS A REFLECTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA CULTURE AMONG PHONE-LIMBED YOUNG PEOPLE."
Fittingly, they first appeared on a mixtape with a hashtag in the title, Mike’s December 2013 release #MikeWiLLBeenTriLL. They followed up that song, “We,” with “No Flex Zone,” which premiered on Noisey in March 2014. According to their publicist, numerous websites passed on posting the song. People didn’t know who they were and their name was a jarring, easily mispronounced mess. What did “No Flex Zone” even mean? They had invented a phrase that would later evolve into a linguistic phenomenon that has superseded the reach of the song itself.



The words “no flex zone” had close to zero engagement on the Internet in the next couple of months. Then the summer began. In June, the term suddenly shot up exponentially in search queries, possibly because the song’s energy suits the summertime turn-up. The words “Rae Sremmurd” followed suit. Their second single, “No Type,” was made available on their SoundCloud account on Aug. 27, 2014. By then, “No Flex Zone” had turned into a smash hit (Nicki Minaj released her remix to it in July) and a hashtag meme. It had become a part of popular language, used to describe one’s impervious shield to external flex attempts. “No Type,” then, was what tipped the “No Flex Zone” snowball into what became the Rae Sremmurd avalanche. One-hit wonder claims were squashed outright. They were at least a two-hit wonder.

“No Type” took off, this time immediately. It became just as much and then more of a social media phenomenon than its predecessor, eventually earning them their first gold record. Its non-discriminatory titular concept could be applied to anything. “But, Rae Sremmurd, you do have a type,” the people quibbled. “Your type is bad bitches. That’s a type.”

“To us, bad bitches are a category,” Swae explains. “It’s not even a type. You got Asian, Latino, black, white, tall, short—we like all of them. As long as they bad bitches.”

There you have it: In the grand scientific taxonomy, “bad bitches” represents an overarching genus within which various species of bad bitch can co-exist. Apparently during the “No Type” video shoot in Venice, Calif., pedestrians made cameo appearances, and those who failed to meet the requirements of that genus were edited out of the final cut.

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