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Peanut Butter and Swelly

  • Illroots
  • The CMSN

Philly rap duo Chiddy Bang's mixtape pairs a disregard for language with indie-baiting production.

Earlier this year, Chidera "Chiddy" Anamege, the rapping half of the Philly rap duo Chiddy Bang, broke the Guiness World Record for Longest Freestyle, rapping for more than nine hours straight. And if you want to hear some utterly godawful rapping, pull up a video of Chiddy finishing off that marathon. Or rapping for a 10-minute stretch during hour five. Or 22 minutes into it. Really, any random moment from the writ-large publicity stunt is going to give you some truly clumsy time-killing fluffiness. Even if Chiddy was Rakim, he couldn't have pulled this thing off; there's not a rapper alive who could say anything compelling for nine hours straight. But a great rapper wouldn't have attempted this stunt because a great rapper wouldn't have needed to do it. There's no worthwhile artistic reason to rap for that long-- it's pure online traffic-bait. When you rap for nine hours, words stop meaning anything; they become a way to fill time. If you pull up a random video from the nine-hour stretch, you'll see Chiddy wandering aimlessly around a spotlessly furnished room, flopping down on a blinding white couch, lifelessly throwing out words while the other dudes in the room stare at their iPhones. It's depressing.

That same disregard for language is all over Peanut Butter and Swelly, Chiddy Bang's recent mixtape. As a rapper, Chiddy never shows the slightest bit of intensity or emotion. This is breezy cool-kid rap and nothing more, which might be fine if Chiddy did it with style. Instead, we get some truly awkward, forced, jumbled line construction. On the very first song, Chiddy actually uses the word "hashtag" in a (terrible) hashtag-rap punchline. Here's Chiddy on himself: "My life is pretty as the face of a girl/ And watch out, I got too much soul for the world." On a girl: "She got them soft legs/ She got them plum thighs/ And her bathing suit is something that is fun-sized." On his rivals: "Rapper, you should die/ Reading Catcher in the Rye." It's grisly.

Chiddy Bang first started building blog attention because producer Xaphoon Jones used samples of some extremely recognizable mainstream-indie pop hits (MGMT's "Kids", Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago") to build his synth-rap tracks. These kinda-juxtapositions don't quite qualify as a neat trick; rappers have been rapping over weird shit since rap's earliest days. As canny as they are, the production choices are simply lazy, a transparent bid for Chiddy Bang to become the one rap group a certain subset of indie kids cares about. So on Peanut Butter and Swelly we get stuff like Chiddy rapping over Matt and Kim's "Cameras", a decent song that's way too thin and burnished to serve as the skeleton for a rap song. Or we get "Heatwave", the posse cut where Xaphoon throws bleepy keyboard sounds all over a Martha and the Vandellas song for absolutely no reason. They seem to be aiming for the "Oh, hey, I know that song" reaction. It's not like they go anywhere with the songs. It's all reference with nothing behind it, and that also goes for the rapping. A line from all over: "Got me throwing my arms around Paris, shit: Morrissey." It just figures that this kid's Morrissey reference of choice would be some shit from Years of Refusal.

On "Heatwave", after painful verses from Chiddy and the odious Pittsburgh frat-rap goon Mac Miller, we get a verse from the Texas gangsta legend Trae, who stays on autopilot and steals the entire mixtape anyway. (Rest assured that the score at the top of this page would be a couple of decimal points lower without him.) Trae has been making a transparent bid for career-revival lately, showing up on tracks with ascendant weed-rap goofballs like Wiz Khalifa. Even so, his appearance here feels jarring. Trae made his name with a gutturally depressive hardhead style. He's a ferociously powerful voice who can sound tough even when he's talking about intense emotional pain. That makes him basically the polar opposite of Chiddy, a rapper who never has anything to say and who always sounds comfortable saying it.

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