Duwap Kaine Is the Best Rapper That Won’t Show Up in Your Algorithm
Duwap Kaine has millions of SoundCloud plays, and yet you can’t just stumble onto his music. The 17-year-old’s sporadically released singles won’t be found on any major Spotify playlist. His music videos hardly ever appear in YouTube recommendations, a result of bypassing both major and local curation pages. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find any interviews with him besides a two-year-old No Jumper video. It isn’t often in rap that a popular artist exists without a machine behind them, finding an audience almost entirely through word of mouth, but Duwap Kaine is exactly that.
A modest viral moment lead many to Duwap Kaine’s music in 2016. He released a song on SoundCloud called “A Stove Is A Stove”—one of his first singles to cross the million plays mark—that included a sample of an original song from Spongebob. At the time, Duwap Kaine was a 14-year-old from Savannah, Ga. making music that he didn’t seem to take too seriously. He rapped about typical teenage things: designer-brand dreams, exaggerated tall tales about being on the run from the police, listing the reasons school was trash. (“Fuck school, I know the trap can’t fail me,” he says on the opening line of 2017’s “Disagree.”) He rapped in a narcotized, mildly Auto-Tuned delivery that stemmed directly from Chief Keef’s Back From the Dead 2 over beats that sounded like internet reimaginations of Atlanta and Chicago. And behind his “I don’t give a shit” personality were refined and catchy hooks, little earworms that made even his punchlines stick.
Three years later, and the 17-year-old’s music still sounds influenced strictly by Chief Keef, although Duwap never comes across as a clone. While Keef’s world is rough and rugged, Duwap’s is like sitting on a cloud. He sounds like spends most of his time watching, or living inside, a Nicktoon.
Within the last two months, Duwap, who at times can disappear, has been suddenly prolific. There’s “Epic Fail” a space odyssey that features a whispery, drowsy melody; “Percs” a croaky-voiced remix of an unreleased Playboi Carti song; “Cardi B” a hardly mixed or mastered sonic adventure in which his vocals are nearly lost in the hypnotizing production. What used to sound haphazard in his music sounds intentional now; his quirks are purposeful, and stylized. His release strategy is still half-serious: he notifies his fans of a new upload with nothing more than an Instagram or Twitter post. The songs sound like bedroom recordings, he hardly ever collaborates, and he hasn’t worked with a major name producer since a string of Pi’erre Bourne collaborations in 2017. But it’s all part of the charm that makes Duwap feel like that last teenager with some sort of influence that is not tied to a corporation.
I’m not sure Duwap Kaine has any specific rap goals, if he does, only he knows what they are. But at the moment he’s making music that feels completely cut off from the outside world in the best way, and he won’t let anyone tell him anything different. Often that turns out poorly, but for Duwap, it works. Now the industry will continue to wait for the day Duwap decides to embrace the system—and if things go his way, that day will never come.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
