Ah! Hi, everyone. Wellthony Thentano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. And it's time for a review of this new Nettspend album, Bad A** F****** Kid.

Here we have a new full length album from rapper and songwriter Mr. Gunner Shepherdson, aka Nettspend, who has been on a quick come up since the release of his KiCKDOOR project last year. Also a few viral singles and a Rolling Loud performance, all of which happened very recently. And as much as it may seem like on the surface, this is just another kid out there doing his thing, I think it's kind of important to dissect the new paradigm for hip hop that he and this record currently represent.

Let's start by turning the clock back ten years, when what we would come to know as SoundCloud rap would begin taking the world by storm. And while a pretty wide variety of artists hit it big coming out of the SoundCloud platform in the mid 2010s, I'm kind of talking about a very specific subset of creators and rappers and singers here.

I'm talking about Lil Pump, I'm talking about Lil Yachty, I'm talking about Lil Zane, I'm talking about Lil Uzi Vert. What I'm trying to distill here is what, I guess you could say are the most prevailing sounds and attitudes to come out of this era, to come out of this movement at the time, one where you not only had a lot of young artists taking a very antagonistic stance with the rules and aesthetics and expectations of hip hop music that came before them, but also in the process of that, embracing wholeheartedly a lot of aggressive and vapid and druggy lyrics. Simple flows, a super heavy reliance on Auto-Tune. Also very, very messy, distorted, amateurish production. And even if a lot of these artists weren't coming at their records with super informed intentions, they still had a raw presentation, a DIY spirit, and a hype energy you couldn't really deny.

And while the work of many of these artists definitely got a lot of hate out of the gate and has mostly been disqualified as mumble rap, you can't really deny the direction these people were moving in. It's proven to have staying power over the years, even if that staying power remains mostly with the sound and the trend, the direction it's all going in, rather than the individual artists kind of making it happen. They are, in fact, more of a revolving door of new faces that are kind of rapidly being swapped in and out.

And I guess why this is all worth bringing up is because this process has been going on for so long at this point. We are now getting artists like Nettspend who it seems like the only reference points he's working off of as far as what is hip hop to him, are either artists that fit into that SoundCloud rap rubric, or have come downstream from that trend wise, be that a Trippie Redd or a Playboi Carti or Yeat, etc., with a dash of ultra distorted cloud rap influence in there for good measure. It's important to remember in the context of this project, as if Nettspend wasn't already making it very apparent that he's still a pretty young guy. Really began blowing up before he even turned 18, and most of the bars that you could say are emotionally substantive in some way kind of deal in this awkward transitional point he's in the midst of between his teen years and adulthood.

I mean, we have the opening track, which makes numerous allusions to Nettspend feeling like he doesn't want to grow up. Whatever this phase of life that he's in currently, he kind of wants to lock into that. Then moments later on the track "Tyler", we have him also rapping that while he is 17, he's not just some child. And there's also a lot of bars here where he is tossing out tons of sexually explicit content, making references to being in places that you wouldn't think he'd he'd be as a minor, not to mention all the parts where it's clear that he wants to be older than he is, so he has more agency, and the only ways he can seemingly exert that at this point in his very young life are making music, getting high out of his mind, and also skipping class. Yeah, he's just not going to class. He's a badass fucking kid.

Another telling moment on the project is a bar where he says he feels like Future, but Gen Z, and that's because in artists like Future is this dude's reference point for what succeeds and trends in hip hop music. Because over the past ten years, if we've seen rap music become anything, it's been less regional. It's been more online, it's been simplified musically. It has been homogenized aesthetically and also has been thinned out topically, marketed more as a cool thing for kids to be into and less a megaphone for the black community at large.

And look now, in this day and age, we have countless teenagers who have grown up with hip hop, more or less in this state or a trending in this direction. And I think this album here is essentially the sound of things coming full circle because of that.

Now, beyond this, I'll say I think this album is a lot more interesting to talk about contextually than, um, musically. Because truth be told, Nettspend is not really a super skilled rapper. Very few of the flows that he doles out in the 30 minute runtime of this album are memorable, and even when they sort of are, they are delivered with a total ignorance toward tempo and rhythm. He raps in a way that really makes you have to wonder whether or not he's actually listening to the instrumental he's rapping over. He's got a very thin, nondescript, boyish voice that if it weren't for the autotune, it would not be cutting through these very hectic mixes.

Which brings me to the production on this record, which for the most part sounds like a distorted, saturated mess. It sounds the way a deep fried meme looks. It's the result of taking the same idea and compressing it, and xeroxing it over and over and over and over and over as it gets more distorted and more difficult to decipher each time.

And if you want an even grosser metaphor to work off of, it's kind of like being at the very end of a SoundCloud rap Human Centipede.

Now, musically, sonically, I don't know if there's much more to say about the album than that there are a few unlikely grooves along the tracklist of this album. There's one track where he samples Grimes, which sounds terrible, but it happens, and something else I could give the album most definitely is that it's not entirely this just noisy, nihilistic pursuit, as Nettspend does genuinely try to get across a vibe or a snapshot of who he is, and this kind of awkward stage of life moment that he's in the midst of. And for sure, he certainly comes across more genuine in his art than in artists like Ian does, for example.

Still, with that being said, most of the bars on this thing really just kind of amount to a lot of flexing and turning up. That is when Nettspend isn't subjecting us to some truly mind blowing deductions. Like when he says "She pull my pants down / I think she wants what's in my pants now."

No way. Nope. No way. I don't believe it.

There's not really too much to talk about on the songwriting side of this album either. There aren't too many memorable choruses on the record, and I mean, even if there were, uh, the entire thing just sounds way too frickin distorted and fried for it to be that pleasurable of a listen for too long.

Yeah, in a nutshell, with this album, I basically feel like I am listening to a smoothie of every trendy online shade of rap that has come up in the past ten years, but it's blended together so violently that pretty much anything that made all of these styles, all of these sounds individually interesting just gets lost in translation. It's an unflattering mess for the most part, but I suppose the silver lining of that cloud is that you can really only go up from here. I can't imagine Nettspend getting worse than this, though.

I suppose the weird information age capitalism social experiment this record is a result of, where you're just basically stripping out any and all aesthetic or musical or thematic meaning from an art form, slowly and progressively over a period of years, over and over and over and over, to the point where the end result just kind of sounds like autotuned white noise.

Yeah, that process can always take things to a worse and darker place, but most likely, if that's going to happen, it'll be an artist who comes immediately after this one doing it. Yeah. I'm feeling a light 2 on this album.

Anthony Fantano. Nettspend. Forever.