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By Frazier Tharpe
Photograph via Zhamak Fullad
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Let’s start with his voice, his genuine voice, which at press time the public has yet to hear. As it turns out, he’s a baritone, much deeper than his high-pitched voice suggests, though not so much that he would be surprised to learn that he turned 20 last November.
“What does 4batz look like?” it’s been trending on TikTok and YouTube for months. There are also dozens of videos, op-eds, and Twitter threads where it comes from: a total cottage industry of social media intrigue, all built around a mysterious child with just 3 original songs. in your name. (Add in Drake’s remix released in March, and his officially released paintings max out at just over 10 minutes. )
So who is 4batz, the mysterious golden grill artist who dons a shy (more commonly known as a balaclava) in the same way Batman wears a balaclava, which comes to fruition out of nowhere with TikTok-ready songs, hot enough to draw?A coveted feature of Drake and a recognition of Kanye?The short version: Neko Bennett, a Dallas native, says he never had a solid home, once working 12-hour shifts at a warehouse to stay out of trouble. , and we’ve decided to “blow my face” with music in order to be successful. An ex regrets leaving him. The even shorter version: He could be the next rap superstar.
Sweater through Balenciaga.
The masses got their first glimpse of fourbatz in the video for his second single, “Date @ 8,” released last December as an episode on the YouTube channel Four Shooters Only’s From the Block, a series of videos featuring hard-hitting freestyles. In the clip, Batz approaches the microphone with a handful of dollars, braids sticking out of the back of his mask, a crowd of his boys around him, blowing smoke and attacking the camera, and begins to make a song comfortably. A digitized voice about all the tactics with which he goes to drink and dine with a woman who deserves the world, in lyrics confusing enough to apply to any date but also endearing and sweet, unnecessarily profane and strangely expressed (spend “500 bucks for your fucking hair”). , $200 for your damn nails. “)
The song was in a position that worms and social media were in one position and, at two minutes and 20 seconds, was short enough to require consistent repetitions. But the video introduces stark contrast and raises many questions. Batz didn’t respond, letting the video do the talking for him. Later that month, Timbaland re-released it and implored Drake to do a remix. In March, this happened; Batz further fueled his mystique by remaining silent even after the Drake version dropped, further propelling his position in a position that skyrocketed streaming numbers. At press time, its monthly listener count on Spotify was just under 14 million.
The overused pejorative term commercial factory describes a type of apocryphal artist whose career is developed in the laboratory, packaged and opposedly engineered, someone anointed through nebulous powers that have recruited executives, artists, and tastemakers to advertise them, as opposed to emerging artists with genuine skills who are “discovered. ” signed and fed. 4Batz, who came out of nowhere with a handful of captivating songs that temporarily racked up millions of streams, a prime target for plant claims. Influential podcaster Joe Budden has given credence to a dark rumor from the 2020s: that 4batz’s music was created entirely through AI, with the boy in a balaclava replacing a literally non-existent artist.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” 4batz tells me of the whole plot. He has a mischievous smile on his face. It’s like I’m the bogeyman. [Then] other people will meet me and say, ‘Oh, that’s a normal black guy in the community. ‘
“Regular” doesn’t reflect that. 4batz, who grew up and still lives in Dallas, has a slurred, excitable voice, randomly deviates from conversation, and peppers his speech with slang: Each sentence ends with a familiar “brozay” and all other adjectives are “za. “In other words, he’s too weird and endearing to be a paid actor. And his story is too explicit to have been invented through corporate record suits.
Here in a North Hollywood studio, Batz wears the all-black badge we’ve come to expect from him: black tank top, black sweatpants, black Balenciaga shoes, and of course, even though we’re indoors and it’s 74 degrees. Outdoor: Shy black. Do you move without it?Sometimes, he says with a laugh, when he needs to travel incognito, but in recent years he’s been spotted even without a mask.
In person, 4batz doesn’t play the role of the surly, mysterious man. He has the face of a hyper-adolescent and can’t wait to tell his story as much as he needs to hear it. The curtain opened even more with their first official album, a nine-track work entitled U Made Me a St4r*. And with that, 4batz will officially be running as an artist who is here to stay.
Clothes and accessories, yours.
“All my life I’ve felt cursed,” says Batz. In conversation, he has a tendency to casually acknowledge traumatic moments that most people could overcome. Like the way their ex-father died just as they were starting to reconnect – on Batz’s birthday. How he thought about committing suicide, more than once. And how he never had a real home: “I don’t know what it’s like to have a house,” he says. ” I’ve lived in an apartment probably only twice in my life. The rest of the time I lived with my uncle, my grandmother, I slept on the floor. I slept in a church for 4 years. At one point, he emphasizes that he doesn’t come from there. “from the neighborhood,” but “from the slums. ” He later added that Los Angeles was “too cute” for him to wear a hat full-time.
His level of calling is a tribute to his upbringing: Four refers to the city of Dallas where he comes from, and Batz, he says, comes from his reputation for fighting and keeping him going: “You know, when you beat [someone], fuck it. “Get out of here. “
Most, if not all, of the wonderful musical hits have this singular moment of origin. In the music he’s released so far, Batz has left a trail in his own history for listeners to stick to, but now he’s in a position to make that clear.
“I lived a scenario in my life,” is how he timidly begins his story. It begins, as always, with a woman. Batz, who had never flown before, found himself on a long-distance stage with a woman from Chicago. She came here to make a stopover in it. ” Brother, the dwarf had that vibe,” Batz recalled, tugging at his mask. “I was in love with her, man. “
The relationship lasted 3 years and Batz moved in together; To show his devotion, he planned to take his first flight to see her.
“Then she called my phone,” he says, “and said, ‘Batz, I don’t need to be with you anymore. I don’t give a damn about you. ‘” Around the same time, literally a month before, my father died. So I said, “Okay, well, if you do that, I’m going to blow everything up. I’m going to be in all those interviews, I’m going to be in all those blogs, I’m going to be in all these fucking things. . . I’m going to be and I’m going to shit on you. I’m going to hurt you. My blood was boiling, brother, and I went in for about 10 minutes directly with my eyes closed, and the moment I stopped talking, I saw that she had hung up. And then I said, ‘hace. no cares. ‘
The next morning, Batz woke up to see her posting a new guy on Instagram. She identified him as one of her ex’s co-workers, literally the guy she’d told her to care about. (During their relationship, some suspicious Snapchats had encouraged him to FaceTime with the guy on his phone, to ask if they had a problem and the guy replied that they didn’t. ) “He played his role as if he were Michael B. Jordan. This guy wants an Oscar; Batz jokes sadly.
“At this point I’m in a deep depression, I’m screwed,” Batz says quietly. “I still mourn my dad, and at that point in my life, the only user I had, period, in Diversity at Point Blank Range. I’m not around anyone else. I love my mom to death. I’m not close to my mom. I’m not close to my grandmother. The “spinster” – her friend. Like my most productive friend. So, at that time, I was just thinking about suicide, I was thinking about a lot of things.
It wasn’t the first time Batz had hit rock bottom, or even thought of ending it. “My whole life I’ve been through this,” he says. I’ve been on suicide watch before. I went through all these other programs, took antidepressants and all that. I’ve been at this to the point where I got fed up. I said to myself, maybe I’ll just get up and go or maybe I’ll just push myself harder than ever. my life.
Pain and wickedness engendered determination. Batz returned to music, something she had overlooked during their relationship, in part because her friend hadn’t supported her aspirations. In an effort to retire from street life for good, Batz worked a 12-hour shift in a warehouse while settling into a Kanye-style regiment, 3 songs per session, when he went out at night, downloaded beats from YouTube, and looked for other things in them, all while searching for his best school credits.
He’s toyed with other styles and subgenres. ” Piercing music, Texas music, emotional music, hurtful music, ‘Honey, why are you in pain?'” she says. “I’m doing everything in my power, I’m just watching. “keep going. And that’s the problem: the fact that I’m looking to get ahead.
These experiences, he says, weren’t forged enough to share, let alone upload to Soundcloud. Then, one day, inspiration struck him as he did what he calls his “pre-workout ritual”: looking for a photo of his ex and her new boyfriend. “I felt like a bitch. This woman talked crazy about me with her friends, made me feel small, cheated on me, and still I got up and flew to her.
All garments and accessories, yours.
He came up with the first bar: I can call and catch a plane. I might come to see you today. You hate that I’m stuck in my habits, but you like it when I play. And then, in one take, another minute of words of scorned lover and unrequited preference was poured out. It’s what we now call their first song, “Stickerz ’99. ” The name is a metaphor for the state of the brain he was in. ” When you get a sticker, you put it in front of the wall and take it off, put it back on the wall and take it up. If you remove it, you do it 40 times. The 40th time it may not stick to the wall anymore,” he says. “So basically, I’m glued to someone who doesn’t need to be glued to me. “
This raw vulnerability is minimized by the substitution of the vocal tone deployed by Batz, first raised to the maximum to sound almost foreign, then a choppy, fucked-up reminder of the same lyrics to close the song. Batz cites the decision to adjust his voice as typical of Texas. — the DNA of DJ Screw, the Houston legend who pioneered the art of cutting tempos and vocals at frigid speed for a slower, Southern speed — however, he hints that some of the songs on U Made Me a St4r* actually feature his real, unadjusted vocal vocals, he doesn’t specify which ones.
Batz attempted other, longer takes of the song, which he said “sounded awful. “It was this brief first edition that elicited the most positive reactions from close confidants with whom he tried his music, such as his older brother.
He took this as a signal to double down on what seemed true, regardless of precedent, and to present himself in his music as who he was: a young man raised in Mint Condition, 112, Sade and Anita Baker through artists like his mother. and grandmother, with an appreciation for DMX and 2Pac, thanks to her father before he passed away, and an affinity for others like Chief Keef of her own generation. As Batz says, “I don’t forget the times when I was in a stole in Dallas, pushing that bitch down the road, and Aaliyah comes in while I’m drinking skinny, or while I’m, like, grabbing my gun. And I realized: Why did this [consider] yin and yang?Why didn’t anyone put those [feelings] together? And I said, You know what?That’s who I am.
After all, when he took his maiden flight, he went to Los Angeles to make a “Stickerz” video with the creators who contacted him and presented him with a photo shoot. It’s a cool clip, but while you’re sitting, maskless, with your hair braided like a beautiful woman or sadly pounding on the edge of the bed, there’s not much to distinguish you from the vast sea of newcomers uploading videos to Youtube.
Coincidentally or not, no one cared about 4batz until he got shy. This is unprecedented; The online terminal will feature RMR, the masked Minneapolis rapper who went viral in the winter of 2020 with the video for “Rascal,” in which he sings Rascal Flatts’ hard-boiled ballad “These Days” while he and his henchmen barbecue and point guns. But what RMR was doing with this juxtaposition of song and symbol seemed more planned and consistent with the formative. “At the end of the day,” RMR told an interviewer, “I do this because other people are very ignorant in their own affairs. “box and need not venture outside of their truth consistent with themselves. “
4batz insists on his own combination of sound and visual presentation: a street guy who softly sings a song to express his grief while looking dressed for a B.
“We’ve been wearing balaclavas since we were kids. It’s not a suit, brother. It’s just my way of riding,” Batz said. Nothing is calculated. I did it because it’s my kind of clothes. I bring other people into my global and if they like it, they love it. If they don’t like it, I don’t care. It’s like a door: if you need to get in, hey, come on, let’s have a party here. But if not, then he’s still your little. We relaxed.
“I think the similarity is in the visuals,” says Carl Chery, Spotify’s artistic director and head of urban music. “You have someone in ski goggles who looks like a rapper, but he’s not. But sadly, RMR might not keep up with that music that resonated. The difference with 4batz is that there are already some songs that work. It’s not just about “Date @ 8” and the remix, it’s also about “Stickerz” and “On God. “
Chery points out that Batz’s current numbers (Spotify’s 14 million listeners) are empirical evidence of real, forged engagement. “
“Look, if you look at everyone who’s been successful at a very rapid pace, whether it’s Ice Spice or Travis Scott, enthusiasts are going to call everyone like that a commercial factory at some point, until they don’t anymore. “”, says Milano, the manager of 4batz. I take it as a compliment. Only then will we know that he has a lot of talent. That other people at some point thought he was an AI is crazy, but it also shows how they can’t even believe that someone could be so talented.
Sweatshirt, his.
The video for “Stickerz” may not have made Batz explode, but that’s how he met Milano and other like-minded people in the music industry who came to form the team around him now. “He played his music “To me [on the day of filming] and he didn’t have equipment. He just creaked,” Milano recalls. We just started the construction from there. I’d give him ideas, he’d give me ideas, and so on. We’d bounce off each other.
All of these concepts centered on Batz’s intuition not to flood the domain with a lot of music and to take any opportunity to stand out. Batz notes that he released “Date @ 8” and its visual in mid-December, which is a no-no in the music industry. But the no-man’s-land of the holiday season has left an open path for him.
Batz also rejects gender labels. His new songs evoke the pubescent heartbreak of Immature or Tevin Campbell, for example, with a production that is animated through Age Ain’t Nothin But a Number, one hundred percent Ginuwine, Case or Early Usher, but when I ask if any of them their initial attempts to localize their sound were more rap-oriented, Sounds confused. “I’m still a rapper,” he replies, before doubling down, almost as if encouraged by the idea. “I feel like I’m rapping. Yes, rhyme and.
If your songs sound like R
“We’re at an attractive level where the lines couldn’t be blurr between hip hop and R
Batz starts the tape for me from above, with the 3 singles played back-to-back, encouraging me to rap with him as if we were two friends watching freestyles of Funk Flex instead of singing duets lyrics about paying for dates with nails. When, in spite of everything, he arrives at the new, his enthusiasm increases: “Now we are about to enter,” he warns.
Like the singles, the new song has a headline (e. g. , “Act 1”). There are sketches that explain a truncated edition of the harrowing story he has just told me, but they are useless; The story is already there in the music. Batz constructs a mythology in real time, which he compares to “one of those ancient testaments or testimonies. “He mimics blowing the dust of an ancient tome, as if he were in Search of Heaven. Lost Ark, and says, “I’m writing Hitale. And in case the name of the tape doesn’t clearly reveal his muse, the canopy shows him holding a crossed-out photo of his ex.
The music in the second part of the cassette responds to skeptics who found Batz’s early songs compelling yet joyful. The five new songs are much longer, but they still seem like fuller thoughts, as they polish their narrative. Lines like “Here’s some other vase” — as in some other space ornament tossed and torn apart in a poisonous fight, underscoring a volatile relationship that only reinforces Batz’s confidence that the quotes he’s making a song about are designed to last; are particularly less edited for TikTok.
“I wonder how encouraged he felt through this trend of altered voices, because artists are now releasing music that is fueling the Tiktok craze and releasing sped-up versions of their songs,” says Chery. “And I think it’s wonderful that it’s wonderful. ” that he says, ‘Okay, no, the original product will be that I have a changed voice. ‘
The 4batz aesthetic is the next logical step on the path blazed by artists like Drake, who oscillates between comfortable pop songs and frat raps, as well as the more difficult technique of an artist like Future, who has just released an album of vulnerability alongside an elite street boss album communicating for the second time in his career. 4batz is the susceptible thug who can credibly cite Sade and Chief Keef as inspirations, who sings about his Ruger as tenderly as the woman who nearly ruined his life. Can you imagine Drake connecting enough with this music to give it his prestige without getting paid for it?
When I ask him about Drake’s remix, Batz simply says that he’s grateful that a star like that shows him his love. But he’s not one to be surprised. Apart from Ye, who reached out to his team and gave them random FaceTiming last time. In the fall, a call that Batz says “made my year,” he says the only celebrities he’d love to meet would be DMX and 2Pac, his dad’s favorites. In March, when Drake directed It’s All a Blur – Big as the What ? The excursion arrived in San Antonio, Batz was invited to attend as the main guest; It was the first concert I had ever attended. The most important thing that came out of this experience?” I want to do more songs. “
Drake’s OVO label distributes U Made Me to St4r*, but 4batz remains unsigned. Regarding rumors that Batz could make their partnership official, Milano says: “We’re still building. These guys – 40, Morgan, Drake, Future the Prince – achieved the same goes for all the industry players Batz has come into contact with. They love him and perceive who he is. We’re going to build relationships across the industry that makes sense to build. with.
“It’s a reflection of its time,” says Chery. He started making music a year ago, uses mystery and cultivates a mystique. Adjust your voice. It blurs the line between two genres. I don’t need to make a statement, however, it’s a snapshot of today’s artist.
Batz already has big plans for the project, which will officially be his deyet album. So far, he’s following a path not unlike the one opened by The Weeknd: the dark figure with the angelic voice who slowly, but actually, emerged into the light. Lights. Batz points out that, as Weeknd Maximum symbolizes, each and every artist “has their time. “
To hear it told, we’re still in the first act of 4batz’s story. If a few viral songs drive the industry crazy and enough to call it a plant, then he’s eager to see how his peers react to this new task and everything that comes after. “Wait until they listen to that damn tape,” he said cheerfully. They’re going to say, ‘I hate that. ‘”
When he spoke to Kanye, Batz said, “He was telling me, ‘Get used to this, because now you’re here. People will look at you like a walking ATM, but they will see clearly. You know what I’m saying. ” Because you’re a star.
The day fades away at dusk. Batz’s team has on-court seats to watch the Warriors take on the Lakers, but he passes up the opportunity. He has two gym sessions to do a day, exhibitions to rehearse, and new songs to polish. True stars are grown in a lab.
PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographed by Zhamak Fullad Designed by Jason Rembert Skin by Hee so Kwon with Dior Beauty
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