How will rap hits get made in 2025? Judging by the year’s first unexpected hip-hop breakthrough, the answer is by accident, more or less.
Two and a half weeks ago, LiAngelo Ball — the middle of the three Ball brothers, the basketball playing siblings who, along with their father, became a sports-world phenomenon in the mid 2010s — appeared on a livestream with N3on, a troll-like personality who has emerged as an irritant and provocateur.
They streamed together on Kick for over three hours — playing basketball, shopping, sitting for a loose conversation. But the real action came when Ball was driving N3on around in his Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. N3on asked Ball to play a song he’d been working on, Ball put on “Tweaker” and the modern alchemy of stardom — spanning serious and joking, preparation and chance, art and meme — was activated.
It had all the makings of an evanescent moment in a medium overflowing with them: a novelty song by a nonprofessional musician played for an unserious livestreamer. A blip.
But there was something urgent and catchy in Ball’s bellow. “I might swerve, bend that corner / whoa-oh-ohhhh,” he rapped at the beginning of the chorus. Listening to his voice booming over the speakers, Ball, who raps under the name G3 Gelo, looked pleased with himself. N3on was almost shivering with joy in the back seat. It was good content, both sides extracting something from the other.
And now, maybe it’s become something more. Since this unconventional premiere, “Tweaker” has done the speed-run through virality into real-life relevance. It’s been played in N.B.A. and N.F.L. locker rooms, and it’s a frequently used audio clip on TikTok. It’s attracted the attention of rappers looking to collaborate. And yesterday, it was reported that “Tweaker” landed Ball a record deal with Def Jam.
The success might be a preview of the coming normal. Rather than hurling song snippets into the TikTok ether (that is, if TikTok isn’t forced to cease its operations in the United States this weekend), or relying on an affiliation with an already-established artist, perhaps the goal is to be just absurd enough to hold people’s attention long enough for them to realize there’s something purposeful pulsing underneath the unlikeliness.
Being unsuspecting is part of the trick. Of the Ball brothers, LiAngelo is the basketball washout. (LaMelo is a Charlotte Hornets point guard; Lonzo plays the same position on the Chicago Bulls.) LiAngelo was recruited to the University of California, Los Angeles team out of high school, but withdrew following an incident in which he and two teammates admitted to shoplifting in China. He bounced around lesser leagues, but has never played a regular-season game in the N.B.A. He has a hangdog air about him, a slow sadness that makes him appear reluctant.
He has now joined a surprisingly robust list of well-known basketball players who rap, mostly mediocrely: Allen Iverson, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Damian Lillard, the stars on the often awkward 1994 compilation “B-Ball’s Best Kept Secret.” It’s easy to hear “Tweaker” as a kind of consolation prize, a distraction for Ball while his brothers accumulate N.B.A. glory.
And yet. “Tweaker” is deceptively lo-fi and unwieldy, but directly effective — art passing as a joke.
The chorus is perfectly shaped, if a little slang-by-numbers. Though Ball hails from Southern California, his vocal approach, and the accompanying production, are redolent of the urgent and sometimes clunky New Orleans rap music popularized by No Limit Records in the late 1990s (later streamlined by Cash Money Records), as well as the bouncier and less antic side of 1990s Memphis rap. These are styles where the martial stomp of the flow is as important as the words themselves, or more. (“I ain’t from the South, but kick it with my Memphis twin,” Ball raps on “Tweaker.”)
On the verses, Ball’s vocals are less surly, a little more shrieked and less convincing. Sometimes it sounds like he’s herding more syllables than space allows. The beat is built around a piano figure that sounds accidental, or drunk, like it was played with chubby fingers, adding to the song’s air of legitimate-illegitimate uncertainty.
Nevertheless, “Tweaker” has inspired genuine fervor, presumably some combination of genuine and opportunistic. The Baton Rouge veteran Lil Boosie and the Memphis star Moneybagg Yo both nudged Ball about potential collaborations on X. And Ball was quickly booked for the March installment of the influential hip-hop festival Rolling Loud.
Rarely has a new artist so effectively (and intentionally?) used the modern distribution system of livestreaming to garner an initial buzz, and then built something sturdy upon that bizarre flash of attention. Last year demonstrated just how broken the star-making apparatus in hip-hop has become. There are no reliable systems anymore — not the radio, not streaming services, not TikTok, not the streets.
Instead, there’s this: a happy accident at the intersection of flagging celebrity and incidental notoriety. Seemingly, Ball has completed the almost impossible-to-nail pachinko that ends up with a possible smash. “Tweaker” is an earnest attempt. It’s a stunt. It’s a gaffe. It’s a Hail Mary. It’s a meme. It’s a hit.
The post How a Failed Basketball Player Made the First Rap Hit of the Year appeared first on New York Times.
