In which most of us do not express any interest in investing in Bitxhcoin…
[Video]
[4.43]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Significantly less interesting than you’d expect from an alt-pop-sounding Zoomer trap song. It’s “spooky” and has the “novelty” of awkward rapping.
[2]
Vikram Joseph: The mid-point of PC Music and Soundcloud rap was always likely to be sonically pleasing at least on surface level. The main rate-limiting factor in this particular reaction, though, is Phem’s lyrics, which don’t extend much beyond routine self-aggrandisement — it’d probably be fine in smaller measures, but this feels like a guest verse on a Pop 2 banger stretched across an entire song.
[5]
Katie Gill: This song just sounds juvenile. “Damn I’m hot as fuck” is a basic, boring hook to base your song around and a pretty good example of lazy songwriting 101. The beat’s all right, but none of Phem’s delivery sounds like she’s putting in much effort. Add in her deliberately cutesy vocal intonations and I’ve got flashbacks to various YouTube covers with a gimmick of, “Look at this skinny white girl sing Tupac. That’s the video! That’s the joke!” At least with this song, there’s nothing to suggest that Phem is more than this gimmick of deliberately cute rap, but like, she says pussy.
[4]
Stephen Eisermann: This is what happens when you take a Power Puff Girls stan that lives in LA (an important note!!!) to a trap concert: you end up with a mediocre attempt at hip-hop that would be empowering if it wasn’t so embarrassing.
[3]
Juan F. Carruyo: I feel bad for the narrator because it keeps getting scammed by fortune tellers and wizards.
[2]
Will Rivitz: Though those putatively in the know will usually point towards the Arizona Iced Tea flavor of taffy-stretched hip-hop as the main stylistic forebear of the emo-rap currently chewing up the charts, the first genuinely modern strains of heavily distorted sadness can be found in the work of SEO nightmare Kitty. Nobody within two or three years of her nailed the same combination of airy carelessness, crystallized trap drums, and fundamental emptiness she excelled at; GOTHBOICLIQUE and BONES wouldn’t have existed without her trail-breaking. It’s unclear why Kitty didn’t make the splash she deserved, given there’s absolutely no precedent for her failure to crack the mainstream; regardless, her style lives on in various states of evolution everywhere on the charts today. As yet not on the charts (strange!), sadly, is her closest stylistic analogue: Phem, essentially, is a Kitty disciple with an ear for sounds more distinctly grounded in the present. You’ve got the same nasally nonchalance and spacey hi-hats in “Crypto Bitxh,” but the low end’s dropped an octave and the mid-range’s dropped completely. Effectively, it’s everything that made impatiens tick half a decade ago, but with a more immediately visceral gut-punch of quivering bass and vocal layering. Whereas Kitty more captured the sound of retreating within yourself as everything crumbled around you, “Crypto Bitxh” is the sound of flaming forward in the same situation, doggedly pushing ahead no matter how unspeakably awful your surroundings. It is scrappily, snarkily, stubbornly self-assured, a young-adult fantasy novel’s maelstrom of a climax delivered through the eyes of a demigod too powerful to maintain both feet in our plane. If emo-rap’s colorful stars were Marvel superheroes, Phem is Squirrel Girl: relentlessly determined and spunky no matter the situation, absolutely badass, and able to defeat Thanos by herself.
[10]
Hannah Jocelyn: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could physically fuse together Billie Eilish and Bhad Bhabie, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
[5]