DJ Smokey & Christ Dillinger: "This Song Is Terrorism"

From the Mother-in-Chief:

note: this document is a historical artifact left preserved as it was originally written to make a point about how cowardly rap journalism will always be, so long as the terms are dictated by white straight men. this is the real shit, from a crazy ass bitch who has nothing left to lose, because you always took it from me. this is didactic music criticism, no cowardly lion little bitch boy shit.

written december 2023 by the only trans woman running the gap game, and killed december 2023 by coward ass cis motherfuckers who stare like a deer in the headlights about to get run over when you tell them all the trauma they denied you had.

the reason why i know about this shit is because i have to be worried about my own existence as a trans woman in a world that hates me, in a rap game where many people fuck with me but some people also hate me and want me dead. you do not have to know the words of your enemies like i do in order to keep yourself safe. i am the anti-anti-christ: i must know the satanic verses better than the back of my own hand, so i am not brainwashed into believing them anymore.

you are not immune to propaganda. neither am i. so we must work to resist the infections together, actively.

Another alleged Kanye release date has come and gone. No matter what Vultures actually sounds like, the story beats of a Ye roll-out are all-too-familiar: listening parties beset by technical problems, samples left uncleared until the last possible minute, unhinged Hitler-praising tirades. No wonder Kanye is singing about vultures, when so many of the people still willing to associate with his brand see him as a means to an end—whether that end is economic or ideological.

Kanye has been surrounded by yes-men and interlopers for the bulk of his career, encouraging his worst instincts for their own gain, but by this point, it’s a prison of his own making: with each further step he takes into the cesspool of the far-right, Kanye ensures that his environment will only be hospitable to the most soulless of buzzards, like culturally-appropriating clout-chasers like YesJulz. Yeezy might have once aspired to build a epochal fashion house or Warhol-like Factory, but what he ended up with was more like the circus populated with carnies, who will spin any fiction and grease any wheels just for a little spotlight of their own.

Years ago, it was easier to delude ourselves into writing off Kanye’s hateful statements as “gaffes,” that he was just playing around, but the pattern of behavior has been clear for a long time. Kanye is right-wing: his Nazi fetish, his hard-line stance against abortion, and all the time he’s spent kicking it with extremist weirdos like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes all tell us this with certainty.

Though his actual political aspirations might be punchline fodder for late-night hosts, Kanye is probably the most visible and influential mouthpiece for actual Nazi propaganda who isn’t a media pundit or podcast host. For an older generation of Kanye fans, his descent into open fascism has been heart-breaking, but for a younger and more impressionable segment of his audience, Kanye’s endorsement of far-right ideology has been a potentially radicalizing gateway. 

While Kanye is by far the most extreme and in-too-deep example, he’s far from the only figure in hip-hop dabbling in dark ideas and platforming right-wing extremists. Earlier this year, DJ Akademiks announced his partnership with Rumble, the controversial streaming platform that’s signed content deals with right-wing figures from Andrew Tate to Donald Trump, Jr, as well as streams like baile funk vulture IShowSpeed and more boys whose names I would rather not legitimize, as well as Dana White's instant-CTE factory Power Slap: which itself has courted rap game figureheads like A$AP Rocky in addition to Barstool Sports beta-boys like Bravo's Jax Taylor.

Adam22 of No Jumper has never been a respectable journalist by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s come under increasing fire for interviewing straight-up white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes, in addition to the general misogyny and men’s rights ideology often espoused on his show. 

No Jumper’s mask-off moment illustrates how transactional the relationship of a white pundit like adam22 is to hip-hop culture. Though he might have been posited as a “tastemaker,” adam22 never really had any taste of his own, but was instead always chasing the algorithm; he initially started out posting BMX racing content, and only pivoted full-time to rap influencer after he saw the numbers brought in by his interviews with underground rappers. Now that he’s become an increasing pariah in the music industry due to his own record of sexual misconduct, adam22 has turned out of desperation to whatever gimmickry might get a flash of attention, whether it’s pornography or political extremism. 

On some level, No Jumper’s preoccupation with the right-wing is a full circle moment, because Internet rap and the online alt-right often benefited from the same exact algorithms. Though often described as “SoundCloud rap,” so much of the mid-2010s era of online rap music is more appropriately described as YouTube rap in how it used the platform’s recommendations algorithm to lure in new viewers.

Someone like 6ix9ine — who received an early stamp of approval from No Jumper — gained a following not necessarily because of his actual music, but because of his YouTube thumbnails: when you see a ridiculous-looking clown with a track named after a Harmony Korine movie pushed to you on the sidebar, it’s hard not to click. That’s not unlike the strategy used around the same time by the alt-right, which found that YouTube’s algorithm increasingly pushed viewers to the most extreme content, so the more shocking the title and thumbnail image, the better. 

Even aside from these more overt examples, there’s more subtle overlap between hip-hop and the right-wing. Doja Cat’s history of hanging out in questionable online spaces resurfaced again recently after she posted—and promptly deleted—a photo of herself wearing a t-shirt with the image of alt-right provocateur Sam Hyde. In a new interview with Ebro for Apple Music, Doja tries to downplay the shirt as a random image of a “funny guy” without much thought behind it, but given how Hyde has been an omnipresent meme amongst alt-right circles for nearly a decade, it feels like a flimsy excuse. 

Beyond Doja Cat’s tacit endorsement, Sam Hyde actually has more direct connections to rap music: emerging meme rapper Joeyy has collaborated on numerous videos with the extremist comedian. If you haven’t intentionally listened to Joeyy, you still might have heard his songs on TikTok: the deep-throated Trapaholics-esque voice saying “Legalize nuclear bombs” on his 2022 track “Garbanzo” went viral as its own trend.

“Garbanzo,” along with many of Joeyy’s tracks, was produced by DJ Smokey, who has been uploading irony-tinged Memphis-inspired beats for years, but found a new lease on his career with the success of the “Legalize nuclear bombs” drop. His releases this year have included the mixtapes YEAR 2023 AD: NUKES ARE NOW LEGAL, Nuked Out Dance Party, and most recently Cowboys With Nukes, featuring songs like “i love my nuke,” “walked up in this bitch with a nuke,” and “nuclear bunker with no wifi.”

Amidst a collage of lo-fi Memphis samples, Jersey club beats, and EDM-trap drops, is an endless stream of movie trailer voices and DJ tags saying things like: “This song is a war crime,” “This song is sponsored by the shadow government,” and “This song is terrorist propaganda and listening to it is punishable by death.” 

While it’s all filtered through ten layers of deep-fried irony, there are unsettling implications to DJ Smokey’s nuke fetish, especially when considered in line with the questionable affiliations of regular collaborators like Joeyy.

Other members of Smokey’s loose collective Shadow Wizard Money Gang have toyed with alt-right aesthetics too, most blatantly in a song like Christ Dillinger’s “DONALD TRUMP.” While Dillinger seems to be employing shock value more than making a sincere statement, the line is thinner than ever; ironic memes played a crucial role in the online right’s normalization of its dangerous ideas, by presenting extreme notions in the guise of absurd memes until they become more broadly accepted. Christ Dillinger has collaborated with Sam Hyde too—the strange bedfellows dropped an Anthony Fantano diss track in 2021.

Another recurring character in the Shadow Wizard Money Gang universe is Lil Darkie, whose top tracks include “HOLOCAUST” and “GENOCIDE”—if the moniker didn’t already give it away, his videos and album artwork regularly riff on minstrel imagery and old-timey racist cartoons. You might argue that there’s legitimate social commentary beneath the irony of an artist like Lil Darkie, but any possible critique is basically cancelled out by how many of his collaborators are white, like Canada's Freddie Dread, who put Darkie and Danny Brown on the same project.

The problem with writing critically about this kind of content is, not just the potential risk of giving someone like Sam Hyde more attention, but also the plausible deniability allowed by irony: whenever you start examining the influence of memes seriously, there will always be someone chiming in to tell you that it’s just a joke.

Of course, none of these artists have the dark money connections or global platform of someone like Kanye West. But the uncomfortable synergy between rap music and the right-wing on the online fringes shouldn’t be ignored, even if artists like DJ Smokey mask the fascist aesthetics in ironic armor.

To hear a voice on a song say “Legalize nuclear weapons” is one thing, but what are the implications when a DJ Smokey fan wears a shirt out in public that expresses that sentiment, sans context? Like Kanye’s allusions to controversial black metal band Burzum, the nuclear bomb aesthetic might seem edgy in a vacuum, but it implicitly reinforces reactionary power structures—nuclear weapons might not be “legal,” but our tax dollars have certainly paid for a lot of them.

The fact that DJ Smokey is a white artist who essentially built his career off of sampling Black voices from underground Southern rap tracks just makes it even thornier—it leaves the same unsettling feeling as compilations of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion conducting military strikes set to phonk remixes of Memphis rap. In these cases, it’s not just a case of simple cultural appropriation, but a more nefarious kind of political appropriation, that weaponizes Black music in service of white supremacist ideology.