Rae Sremmurd- All Night (Before The Fame)

“No Flex Zone,” 2014’s go-to anthem for standing on couches and waving bottles of expensive vodka around, is a weird song. It’s not weird in the way that contemporary rap signifies weird—murky, Auto-Tuned, sing-song vocals over beats that sound like they’re being broadcast from the bottom of a well, made by a guy who dresses like a necromancer. And Rae Sremmurd, the duo who made the song, aren’t particularly weird either. They wear primary colors, and when they stopped by the VICE studio to talk on a recent New York trip, one of them, Slim Jimmy, was carrying a skateboard like an accessory. The pair are brothers, and in person they’re friendly, funny, and thoughtful, projecting a down-to-earth demeanor at odds with their wildly unhinged musical output. Yet there’s something totally foreign about “No Flex Zone” that throws everyone off the first time they hear it: Rae Sremmurd sound like children. They rap and sing in raspy but high-pitched voices, and “No Flex Zone” is just chaotic enough, bouncing between its sung refrain of “they knoooooow better” and its clipped verses, to suggest that maybe it was, in fact, pieced together by amateurs. With a name that sounded like a single, quirkily named child and a discography that, when “No Flex Zone” premiered on Noisey earlier this year, was exactly one song deep, Rae Sremmurd initially seemed like they might be a gimmick. And even though “No Flex Zone” has since reached 20 million views on YouTube and its follow-up, “No Type,” has attracted nearly 10 million YouTube views, there’s still a risk that the group could end up as a rap history footnote. Rae Sremmurd look younger than their 19 and 20 years; the act they get compared to—and bristle at being compared to—the most is Kriss Kross, the duo who made “Jump” at ages 12 and 13. When I first heard them, on the song “We” on Mike WiLL Made It’s #MikeWiLLBeenTrill compilation earlier this year, the schtick was almost off-putting: Why were these guys who seemingly were not old enough to even convincingly sneak into a club shouting lyrics like “you, grab the Ciroc!”?