Explaining Xaviersobased
We’ll be reckoning with Xaviersobased's (contested) greatness for years to come
A lot of rappers sound like they spend more time recording their own music than they do listening to other people’s. One of the things I find most refreshing about Xaviersobased is how he draws from such a massively deep pool of influences, some of the moment, others relics of the days of ringtones and DatPiff premieres. The 22-year-old New York rapper cribs generously from old- and new-guard Harlem rap, drill, trap, jerk, cloud rap, EDM, SoundCloud rap and probably a dozen or so other strains of niche regional or internet genres I’m only half familiar with at best. He’s so clearly a fan of it all, to an almost geeky degree you rarely witness in newer rappers, who would rather feign the impression that their art just kinda happened on its own rather than suggest real curiosity went into creating it.
There’s also a strong shot of Milwaukee lowend in his music, so I should offer this disclaimer upfront: That lowend influence may help explain why I connect with his music so much, despite being solidly two decades older than the typical Xaviersobased fan. Hearing my city’s signature sound celebrated, manipulated and re-imagined by a significant coastal artist is so viscerally satisfying for me. I was driving my car the first time I heard “Packs Gone,” from Xaviersobased’s new album Xavier, and I reflexively found myself hitting the 414BigFrank dance just like that white guy in all of Frank’s videos, because the cadence was so unmistakably Milwaukee. At least the track starts that way. But then the song vaporizes into an ethereal slurry, in a cinematic twist I’ve never heard actual Milwaukee lowend do. That’s Xaviersobased in a nutshell: Even when the influences are explicit, the execution is always surprising.
To state the very obvious: Not everybody in my age bracket shares my love of Xaviersobased. If you’re a greying critic, there are fewer easier ways to run up engagement than by dunking on Xaviersobased. There’s one guy on Twitter who sincerely seems to believe that Pitchfork’s interest in Xaviersobased is an elaborate troll job. A few weeks ago, another legacy music critic (who I won’t call out by name because to his credit he deleted the tweet) dismissed Xaviersobased as “heavily auto-tuned music for teenagers to play out of phone speakers.” To which I’d argue, what’s wrong with any of that? There’s something about Xaviersobased that turns once open-minded rap lovers into cranky ’80s dinner-table dads muttering “more like crap music.”
But even truly good-faith listeners struggle with him. Three of my thirtysomething friends have given him a real chance (I love them all so much for that) and their verdict is consistently a confused thumbs down. A FADER profile on Xaviersobased last month floated the idea of “trained ears,” the notion that you’ve got to rewire your thinking a bit to appreciate this music. That suggests Xaviersobased is a taste that can even be acquired, though. Maybe he’s not. For some people, cilantro is always going to taste like soap.
For me, thankfully, it’s less a matter of training my ears than simply exposing them. The only thing required to enjoy Xaviersobased’s music is to spend a little bit of time with it, so the thinking part of my brain can get past any reflexive objection it might have to dud lyrics (there are plenty; Xaviersobased’s music is a sonic experience, not a lyrical one). Most of his songs open on a note of “hmmm, I don’t know about that.” The walk-on-water feat of it all is how they almost always manage to find a way to subvert that initial skepticism and Trojan Horse their way into “oh fuck yeah” territory, often just within a minute or so. The effect compounds when you hear him pull that trick off multiple times in a row, and hearing him stack it 5, 6, even 7 tracks in a row, as he does throughout Xavier, creates a special kind of delirium. (I was wondering why Xaviersobased’s once more EP from last year left me a little cold, and I now realize it’s probably because the EP wasn’t long enough – five songs isn’t enough runway to pull me into the right headspace. This is music best enjoyed through complete and utter immersion).
What I take away from this music varies. Xaviersobased’s breakout 2024 mixtape Keep it Goin Xav struck me as a deeply emotional experience, between the sweeping soundscapes and the rapper’s pervasive nostalgia for both a past he never experienced and a youth that on some level he seemed to understand was fleeting. I enjoy Xavier almost as much, even though it hardly hits me on any emotional level at all. It’s just pure, dumb pleasure, a collection of awesome moments. And there are so, so many: The Tron-ified Chief Keef fury of “Dat Shit Fr.” Those spill-over drums at the 56-second mark on “Minute.” The nursery-silenced blaw!-blaw!-blaw! intensity of “100,100.” How Xaviersobased’s monologuing about the importance of standing for something cuts through the otherwise loopy irreverence of “Mask On.” The chopped, screwed and fast-forwarded curveballs of “Skrap.” I’m just enamored with the creativity of it all. “Negative Canthal Tilt” is titled like an early Modest Mouse B-side and somehow spiritually feels like one; there’s a shared sensibility to its skewed, impenetrable youth logic.
None of this is to convince skeptics to share my enthusiasm for Xaviersobased, since I’m not sure that can even be done. Instead, consider this a polite call to, at the very least, stop treating an artist who’s clearly shaping up to be one of the major voices of rap’s new generation as if he’s a flash-in-the-pan edgelord. Xaviersobased is not the latest iteration of Lil Pump. His influence is already rippling through a new generation of rappers. And at 22 years old, and only a month or so removed from his major label debut – which we’re still talking about, at a time when the conversational half-life of most projects feels like hours, not days – he likely hasn’t peaked yet. You may not care for him, but don’t delude yourself into believing he doesn’t matter.