Trippie Redd

Talking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe near the end of 2018 about what he hoped to achieve in the upcoming year, the rapper Trippie Redd said, simply, “Whatever comes to my head.” Looking back, it seems fair to say he made good. Like his peers—including Playboi Carti and the late Juice WRLD—Trippie represents a class of young rappers less interested in crafting the perfect monument to their ideas than jacking you directly into their creative brains, approaching the fluid pace of the internet as content delivery system with hustle and zeal. (“I go in regardless of whether I’m inspired or not,” he told Lowe about the studio. “Even when I don’t feel like working, I try and work.”) You can feel it in his music, too: Jump into a Trippie Redd project—whether a proper album or his A Love Letter to You mixtape series—and you’ll hear a sound that veers from depressive, emo-influenced trap to streamlined R&B, tracks as influenced by the provocations of Marilyn Manson as the finesse of Lil Wayne. Trippie was born Michael Lamar White in Canton, Ohio, in 1999. After his older brother died in a car accident in 2014, he took refuge in music, making tracks with a cousin in Canton before relocating to Atlanta, where he recorded and released a flurry of EPs into the digital slipstream. By the end of 2017 he’d racked up a series of increasingly high-profile collaborations, breaking through to the mainstream with the Travis Scott-featuring “Dark Knight Dummo”. In spring 2018, he declared himself “bigger than Satan” (a boast borrowed from Marilyn Manson); a few months later, he released his debut album, LIFE’S A TRIP. ! followed in 2019, while his fans—devoted and very online—mused with Kabbalistic fervour over fragments from streaming sources and social media rumoured to be on 2020’s Pegasus.