To that effect, Sad Boys, the similarly cult-ish, home-grown hip-hop crew led by 17-year-old Swedish rapper Yung Lean, have definitely filling my late-night YouTube binges with a lot of food for thought lately. In contrast to the violent lyrics and skate-rat aesthetics that made Odd Future seem so fresh and different when they were first coming up, everything about the Sad Boys, at first glance, seems aggressively, almost farcically generic. Take the video for Yung Lean’s recent single, “Motorola,” for example. Like your typical Yung Lean missive, it’s just a hand-held, very home-made-looking clip of the cherubic-looking artist standing around somewhere in his native Stockholm, doing a kind of half-assed cooking dance and sing-rapping over a trap beat in a dull, Auto-Tuned drawl. The standing around part maybe isn’t all that far off from your typical rap video, but there’s something very one-note about the whole thing; his voice, quite literally, hits the same two or three notes on the scale each time, and it also repeats the same rhythm over and over again, along with the same, strange, factual statement of a hook—Gold on my wrist, Phone in pocket—like its taking an inventory of the things every self-respecting “rapper” should have.

Or maybe not just every rapper, but everybody. Yung Lean and his crew aren’t exactly devoid of particularities—they are, after all, Swedish, still young enough to be in high school and strangely obsessed with images of a futuristic East-Asia—but their lyrics read like some kind of Google translate-generated amalgam of every pop culture-related meme that has ever flickered past your peripheral vision on Tweetdeck. Look them up on Rap Genius, you’ll get a semi-coherent amalgam of American hip-hop slang and whatever mass market items, legal or illegal, that Yung Lean and his Sad Boys happen to be wearing or eating or sipping at the moment. Among the commodities Yung Lean boasts about consuming on “Kyoto,” his most famous and melodious single, there’s Mario Kart, cocaine, Cristal, weed, pizza and lean. Other recurring Yung Lean motifs are Arizona Iced Tea, Northface Jackets, Gatorade, pills, phones, morphine, Bacardi and money, typically threaded through impressionistic, semi-linear narratives about Yung Lean's existential apathy and loneliness: Lean steady depressed bruh emotional boys in the VIP section/ 1 million plants in my room my walls are melting/ Reach out a hand with no gravity because no one is helping. It’s that self-definition through name-checking thing again, only the things that Yung Lean chooses to align himself are so played-out, expected and cliché that he seems to encompass both everybody and nobody at once—not the sum of his own idiosyncrasies, but of the generalities of a homogenizing, international pop culture.

Truth be told, it isn’t exactly something I would normally think of as “good music.” The trap-inspired productions by Yung Gud and Bladee can be pretty monolithic and awe-inspiring at times, but there’s a sluggish, almost energy-less quality to Yung Lean’s rapping, like he’s trying to create passably radio-ready hip-hop by exerting as little effort as possible (not even necessarily in that charmingly raw Chief Keef way, though). Given the similarly cast-off quality of the majority of his music videos thus far, it won't come as a surprise that Yung Lean and his cohorts are already causing some critics to wonder whether the whole Sad Boys thing is just a big elaborate joke. Catching them at a gig in London this year, Pigeons and Planes’ Joe Price noted that it was pretty much impossible to tell, even if the young fans who rolled up carrying cans of import Arizona Iced Tea and wearing the clan’s signature gold chains and bucket hats seemed to be taking the whole thing deadly seriously. I haven’t seen the Sad Boys play live yet (they’re coming to New York this month), though my hunch is that there’s definitely a lot more going on than a post-ironic rap music parody. You can hear it in the constant references to sadness and incompleteness, in the viscous, seductive drugginess of the music. If you look closely, you can see it in some of the finer details of their online presentation, like the wording on the button on their website that links to their store: “Just touching money has been proven to reduce physical and emotional pain.”

There’s a sense of humor to it, sure, but as Steph Kretowicz noted in her essay on Sophie and the PC Music dudes last week, it’s the sense of underlying emptiness that stays with you the longest. As with the most powerful, concept-based musical statements, you can’t ever really tell exactly where Yung Lean and the Sad Boys stand, or even where they position themselves in relation to the cultural reference points they mine. When you live where I live in Brooklyn, New York, you can walk over to your corner bodega and pick up a tall can of Arizona Iced Tea for a dollar; in Sweden, it’s something much harder to find, maybe even the kind of the thing that you seek out and covet and savor as a means of setting yourself apart from the other kids in class. Do the Sad Boys make the music that they make because they feel like they can’t escape American popular culture, or because they feel like they’re outside of it, pointing across the Atlantic to the things about this country that they’re crushing on from afar? Surely, it’s ambiguities such as these that make the Sad Boys so magnetic, although I can’t say I was surprised the other day, when Yung Lean name-checked Daniel Johnston on his Twitter. Like Odd Future before them, I think they’re aware of their outsider positioning, and that it’s the outsiders who end up changing the discourse. What really makes Sad Boys seem like they’re turning over a new page though—at least from this side of the pond, and in keeping with the evolving politics of taste—is that they’re trying to be outsiders on the inside.



