You could never say that Rae Sremmurd can’t stay in character. The Mississippi brothers have an image of being hip-hop’s hard-partying, swag-bragging, enfant terribles, and – true to form – they are worse for wear today, following a big night out in Paris. Younger sibling Khalif Brown sways in woozily, living up to his nickname, Swae Lee, a cluster of diamante-rimmed pendants clanking around his slender frame. Aaquil – Slim Jxmmi – the elder by two years – rises from the suite’s adjoining bedroom and with one eye still closed, hand down his joggers, announces: “Man, I got a hangover … I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower go light up at one o’clock in the morning and then I was drinking till …” He slumps on to the sofa and helps himself to some fries. “It was a rock-star party.”
Rae Sremmurd burst into view in 2014 – topless, as per their signature look – with two singles, No Flex Zone and No Type, establishing their knack for a hashtaggable hook and a lite-but-hype hybrid of electro, trap and crunk. Keen to distance themselves from the accusations of “kiddie rap” and the comparisons to Kriss Kross levelled at them on the release of their debut album, 2015’s SremmLife (that they’re in their mid-20s but barely look out of their teens doesn’t help), the pair released a followup, SremmLife 2, last August. This time, added to the usual adolescent fodder to froth up any frat foam party, there were downbeat relationship jams and a weirder, darker sound.
It wasn’t the downbeat relationship jams, however, that swept Rae Sremmurd from merely widespread to absolutely unavoidable. Last September, they released the single Black Beatles featuring Atlanta mainstay Gucci Mane, which was just another Rae Sremmurd single for a month or so. Then a group of school students in Jacksonville, Florida, filmed themselves and the mannequin challenge meme was born: a group of people pose as mannequins, then go wild when the beat drops. At first, there was no specific song to go with it, but then Rae Sremmurd’s US label, Interscope, realised there was a gap for a soundtrack to the meme, and – with help from the website Pizzaslime – set about making Black Beatles that soundtrack.
“With Rae Sremmurd specifically, their music fits so well into memes and short-form content, so the goal was to become the soundtrack to all the things that plug up your timeline,” Gunner Safron of Interscope said last year. “I knew if we could build some momentum by increasing awareness and feeding the right audience we had a shot at this thing taking off. The mannequin challenge hashtag started finding its way online, and we saw how it was going to build, and there wasn’t one song that was associated with that when it first came out, so it was just about taking Black Beatles, knowing that we had a hit song on our hands, and finding ways to associate that song with the mannequin challenge. That’s where we were really successful.”
Really successful is right. In November, Black Beatles reached No 1 in the US, where it stayed for seven weeks. Rae Sremmurd surfed the mannequin challenge wave, staging and filming their own version, naming their favourite mannequin challenges – including Michelle Obama and Paul McCartney.
“We dropped a lotta heat in a short period,” says Lee, who is half on his phone, half grinning into the distance and speaks hazily, in slogans. “It was an epidemic – like, the world started doing it and putting our song behind it.” His words weave around Jxmmi’s.
“From Hillary Clinton.”
“To Paul McCartney.”
“Paul McCartney, the real deal. Paul McCartney was lit!”
Rae Sremmurd come from the Kardashian school of self-promotion. At their gig later that evening at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, it’s notable how they don’t just selfie at the end of a show but the whole way through it, posting clips on Instagram in real time. Even though they didn’t start the mannequin challenge themselves, they’ve turned it to their advantage. Someone with a camera hovers over my shoulder during our interview, presumably in case any snippets are suitable to use later.
And yet Black Beatles, in which they reimagine themselves as the modern equivalent of the Fab Four – “I’m a fuckin black Beatle, cream seats in the Regal / Rockin’ John Lennon lenses like to see ’em spread eagle” – is more than a novelty viral hit. In fact, Jxmmi says: “[We] don’t want to make our music based on memes.” As well as reaching No 1 by an unconventional route, Black Beatles suggested a new kind of beat could go mainstream. Billboard writer Jason Lipshutz called the song “brash and unabashedly strange”, compared with music by 2016’s other popular hip-hop artists: “Listen closely, and you’ll find [it’s] closer to the Stranger Things theme than anything released this year from Drake, Future or Kanye West.”
“It’s unheard of,” Jxmmi claims. “We kicked in the door, we went No 1, the beat was crazy. I don’t know, #Sremmlife.”
The beats came from their co-producer and hip-hop hit-maker Mike Will Made-It. He appears to have masterminded Rae Sremmurd like a one-man Stock Aitken Waterman. They were discovered by one of his team, P-Nasty, when they were still performing as YouTubing troupe Dem Outta St8 Boyz and working in McDonald’s in their hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. He tipped off his boss, who signed them to his label, EarDrummers Entertainment, and gave them their moniker, an anagram of his label’s name. An echoing “Mike Will Made-It” appears on all their tracks, like a sonic stamp of ownership. Key to their unique appeal, he says, is how they straddle the hip-hop and pop worlds. They’re “the hood Backstreet Boys, the most ratchet that pop is going to get”, he explained in one interview. “There’s no one in pop who can get this ratchet and there’s no one in hip-hop who can get this pop.”
Those early comparisons to Kriss Kross caused Twitter beef between Rae Sremmurd and US radio personality Ebro Darden, who suggested the similarity. Darden also suggested the brothers used ghostwriters to pen their lyrics, which they responded to with an impressive freestyle session for the radio DJ Tim Westwood, riffing and rapping for 20 minutes straight. There’s also the small matter of how one of Lee’s freestyles – “OK, OK, ladies, now let’s get in formation” – is said to have formed the basis for Beyoncé’s Formation last year.
“Beyoncé had booked a studio session and requested that we come, and Swae freestyled that and it was real dope,” Jxmmi elaborates. “We didn’t expect for her to be calling back, like, she wants the song.” Was that line intended to be about empowerment? “I was saying it like, OK, ladies, like, come together, stop hating on each other,” Lee says, in a slightly abstract explanation. Nevertheless, it’s a little odd that they helped to inspire pop’s most talked-about feminist anthem, considering their lyrics usually pull from a more puerile pubescent palette (that freestyle for Westwood contained decidely unFormation-like lines such as: “She can’t smoke with us cause she kissed a dick”).
Sremmurd are not about to make their own politically charged statement album just yet. Despite their mother bringing them up on conscious hip-hop such as A Tribe Called Quest and soul such as Erykah Badu, they say people today would rather hear Black Beatles than protest songs. Jxmmi begins to shout, offering his version of what he thinks people don’t want to hear from him: “Man you gotta git Donald Trump out that office!” Their own take on Trump wasn’t exactly a warning of dire consequences if he were elected. Up Like Trump, a track off SremmLife, was about wanting his dollar bills, not wanting him far from the White House.
“We saw the future when we did that song, we did that song before Donald Trump even thought about running for president,” Lee says. “He was just a regular businessman and we made that song. Next thing you know, he’s running for president, beefing with Russia. That was just, like, some prophet shit.”
Has the fact that he’s now in the White House changed how they view the song? The joke, after all, has become real.
“I don’t care,” Jxmmi says, shrugging. “Donald Trump is not gonna stop me from doing what I gotta do. I just hope he don’t saying nothing too out the way to make somebody pissed off at the whole America.”
So it hasn’t become an anti-Trump anthem?
“Nope,” Lee says. “Everybody be like, ‘I know y’all regret making that song,’ but I just be like, when I say Up Like Trump I’m thinking about fans, financially, successfully, up like Trump, owning businesses, being bossed up.”
Rae Sremmurd don’t want to change the world. They just want to provide a party for people who want to party. “Young people wanna rage, that’s what we wanna do,” Jxmmi says. “We wanna bang our heads against the TV. We wanna bang our heads against the wall. We want to stomp through the floor.” And is there empowerment in the escapism they offer? “It’s like the same way – you know how people fall into alcohol ’cause they be depressed and stuff? They fall into that SremmLife music and the SremmLife vibe and now they’re not depressed no more.”
To some degree, they are putting on personas in their songs – “I’m the lonely dude in the party,” Lee says, somewhat unconvincingly; “I’m the drunk guy stumbling through the party smoking a blunt,” offers Jxmmi – but that’s because they want to promote positivity. Better that, they suggest, than pretend to be what they’re not. “I ain’t gonna say no fake shit like ‘Shooting 50 niggas up in here.’” Lee says. “I ain’t gonna do no crazy shit like that.”
“If you listen to our first album and then our second album, there’s nothing about violence, it’s all fun party music,” Jxmmi says. “We just proved that you can make fun rap music and it don’t got to be all negative and you can still be successful doing it.”
Is that what Rae Sremmurd is all about?
“It’s about being yourself,” says Jxmmi.
“Living lit. Everyday lit,” continues Lee.
“Free spirit.”
Hashtags waiting to happen.
SremmLife 2 is out now on Polydor
