With shockingly little fanfare, we just passed the ten-year anniversary of Lil Pump’s debut on SoundCloud. It’s a tragedy for the cultural commentariat that his era came and went so quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I was once dismissive of Lil Pump’s music. He doesn’t make it hard. His music is the perfect combination of simplicity and insubstantiality to be actively painful to listen to. Ten seconds into most of his “best” songs and you get the gist. The rest of your incredibly short listening experience will be spent searching in vain for more content. He burns you out, slamming your brain against the barren asphalt of his lyricism. Lil Pump truly is both tedious and brief. I attempted to listen to more of his debut album, the self-titled Lil Pump, in preparation for this article, but felt my brain actively liquifying. I had to stop. I could only put him on in small doses while I wrote before I had to switch to literally anything else. Jay-Z. Future. Even Jack Harlow.
The few themes he does visit—and the word “theme” is really being stretched here—are the most overdone in hip-hop. They were already played out by the time he got to them in the mid-to-late 2010s.
His reductive takes on, surprise surprise, money, sex, and drugs somehow manage to go beyond unoriginal. In any song, the takeaway is that he has a lot of money, sex, or drugs, and therefore, his life is great. Occasionally, you may get a hint of the contrapositive: that you, the listener, don’t have as much money, sex, or drugs, and therefore your life is less great. If we gave three-year-olds a Baby Einstein keyboard with a midi attachment, FL studio, and Urban Dictionary, I think they could produce Harverd Dropout––Lil Pump’s 2019 album––in less than a year.
In his private life, Lil Pump (government name Gazzy Fabio Garcia) is the type of character one would expect from his music. From casual racism (comparing himself to Chinese NBA legend Yao Ming because his “eyes real low” on Butterfly Doors) and reckless public stints (getting banned by Jetblue for refusing to wear a mask during the COVID pandemic), to his goofy rap sheet complete with citations for driving without a license, disorderly conduct, and marijuana possession in Denmark. There is no part of Lil Pump that I am a fan of, except for the fact that Trump presented him as “Little Pimp” at a Michigan rally right before the 2020 election, and I think that lost Trump the state.
I am not the first person to flay Lil Pump for his vapid music and uninspiring persona. Anyone alive during the peak Lil Pump era remembers the debates over mumble rap: the genre of hip-hop popularized on SoundCloud and characterized not by the lyricism and wittiness that rap had been associated with, but its negation–a borderline rejection of lyrical content from rappers that audiences can barely hear and understand.
Everyone had an opinion. Cultural commentators put forth defenses of the genre as some sort of youthful rejection of old forms, or a post-ironic step in the dialectic, or a response to the general boredom under late capitalism, even for those who do have enough money to “only wear designer, esskeeit.” Many rappers of the old guard released diss tracks against the whole mumble rap movement, including my personal GOAT, J. Cole, whose track Everybody Dies dropped right before Lil Pump’s rise to fame. He took aim at “the amateur eight week rappers…Fake drug dealers turn tour bus trappers.” To Cole, their successes as “Pitchfork rappers/Chosen by the white man.. hit store rappers” could be attributed to people outside the culture elevating them due to their streamability (or if you are my conspiratorial family members, ability to denigrate hip-hop and the black community from the inside), not their actual skill.
To me, all of these arguments over the validity of Lil Pump and other SoundCloud rappers were, and are, misguided. Trust me, if it hasn’t been clear throughout this piece, I am no fan of Lil Pump or of his genre of music. I am firmly in the J. Cole-as-the-standard, somewhat elitist camp concerning rap. That means I am also not some absolute musical relativist who thinks any critique of music as good or bad is inherently subjective and therefore worthless. Rather, I believe that when we critique music as good or bad–which is something we can do–that the critique has to put the audience first, rather than the musicians.
After all, artistic expression is expression. The evaluation of good or bad expression is entirely dependent on the fidelity of the art to the artist’s message. So if Lil Pump, as an artist wishing to express his unbridled and simplistic joy at the fact he “be drippin’ head to toe everywhere,” finds the best way to communicate such is through saying “gucci gang” in cretic heptameter, he is more than within his rights do to so. Who is to say if there is more depth to his life experience?
To an extent, his music does have a place. It can be enjoyed, uncritically, in small doses for the emotional catharsis, but should, on the whole, be rejected. Not because it is bad artistic expression, but because we should be better than what it represents. Work, being faithful self-expression, doesn’t make it good for consumption. We have to ask of Lil Pump, since he has laid out his worldview and approach to art, if those are things we wish to engage with or adopt. Personally, I will pass. There is more to rap than talking about money, sex, and drugs. There is more to music than a 4-bar loop of 808s. There is more to life than being in the Gucci gang.