Every Underground Era Gets a King. Right Now It's Nine Vicious.

The underground has been boiling and I've been saying it for a minute. On episode three of Inside The Screen I said the guy right now is Nine Vicious and by episode five I was calling him the Prince of the Underground and people were questioning it. So let me lay out why I think that, and why I think the underground always works like this.

Give the godfathers their flowers first

I gotta give word to the godfathers. Everyone talks about Carti and Carti is definitely a father to these underground artists. Thug and Future, those are the top three. Mount Rushmore for me. If you listen to the underground right now and don't hear those three in there somewhere you're not listening close enough. Half the time all I'm hearing is damn this sounds like straight Carti right now. I got into my whole Carti era here.

Every era gets a king

We always have this era thing going on. We had the Yeat and SoFaygo era of underground artists, and in my opinion we're now living in the era of Nine and whoever you wanna pick after him. Cozy, who was on the call with us, broke the history down as the underground starting around 2016, hitting its first peak around 2020 to 2022 and now hitting another one. I agree with that and I think every one of those waves crowns somebody.

The reason I think Nine is winning this one is he makes music for the girls, he makes Carti type stuff, and this dude is a reference demon. Everything he does is something else but he just puts his spin onto it. I love references, but for you to not be biting you have to put a pretty impressive spin on it. And he does his spins.

Ray's case: the underground has no memory

Ray wasn't fully sold and his pushback is where the title of this pitch came from. He felt like Nine is directly on the line between referencing and biting. He brought up how some of it is a straight Future reference and to the young fans it looks like he's creating stuff out of thin air. His point was these kids just be forgetting the roots and that bothered him.

You might be asking how I can hear the same references and still call him the king. Honestly Ray isn't wrong that a lot of fans don't know where the sound comes from. You can see it with Carti too. MUSIC is full of Lil Wayne influence and a lot of the kids running it up didn't catch half of it. But to me that's how the underground has always worked. The godfathers referenced who came before them too. Everybody has roots so the real question for me is did you add anything to them, and Nine adds something.

No press tour, still up

This is the part I really wanted people to hear. From what I've seen Nine Vicious doesn't go on Plaqueboymax's stream. He's not doing the streamer circuit. He doesn't do interviews. He doesn't do the livestream thing at all. And guess what? We were all looking for this album. Compare that to how much the streamer circuit matters for everybody else right now, Plaqueboymax got a Grammy nomination off it.

A lot of these other young artists are going through the media press pipeline and that's no shot at them. That's what you're supposed to do. New music, new media, you do your press tour. This man doesn't do a press tour and he's still up.

And the numbers backed it up in a way. EMOTIONS came out April 3 with 23 tracks and it was his first time on the Billboard 200 at #102, and it hit #16 on the Independent Albums chart. For somebody who's not doing the press run that's real.

So what did I actually think of the album? I think it's good. I don't think it's one of his best albums. I think it's his most anticipated one. And I think this is the first time I've seen him do great marketing, the artwork was fire and the visuals were fire. Coming in I'd already heard his last albums, the singles and the EP he dropped before it, so this one felt very chill to me. I guess that's the whole emotions thing he's going for. But it's still better than a lot of what's out right now in my opinion.

The critics were harder on it than me. Pitchfork gave it a 4.8 and AllMusic called it an endless blur. I get where that comes from with 23 tracks, however I don't think critics are who he's making this for.

The product is the product

The other thing people say is the gimmick. Ray asked me straight up if Nine is gonna grow out of it. His only gimmick is getting people to hate him, but outside of that bro makes fire music. And the product is the product. If the product was trash the gimmick would get old because the music isn't good enough to hold it up.

I also think we're in an era of culture wars in rap. Back in the day you had cliques like Roc Nation and Wu-Tang Clan and that type of thing died down going into the 2010s. Now you're starting to see big rap cliques again and he's been going against all of them. Love it or hate it, that's attention he earned with music first.

And I think he has the longevity. Look at Lil Uzi. Uzi was a superstar and I still don't believe Uzi has reached his pinnacle, he's not even at his mid career yet. Nine performing at Rolling Loud in Orlando in May and dropping SEDITION in September tells me he's not slowing down either. The underground is even getting animated features now, so it's not going anywhere.

So I'll ask you. Who do you think is next after Nine, and do you think the kids are even gonna know where he got it from? Pull up to the CXM Discord.