Does Viper even understand the music he is creating? Who knows.
When I first glanced at the album cover for Viper's project You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack, I was hit with an uncomfortable amount of vertigo: where had I seen this face before?
Viper is not a popular artist, nor was I familiar with the genre of cloud rap at the time. So how was it possible that I recognized him immediately? It turns out that Viper, otherwise known as Houston-based rapper Lee Carter, is all over the internet. Not for his music, but as a meme.
Because of Viper's silly facial expressions and album covers, his face had become the default format for many spin-off memes that spread through the internet. Meanwhile, samples of his distinct voice had also become its own meme, and so Viper's face and voice became discernible by anyone who had grown up on the internet.
However, Viper is still a rapper at heart, not just a meme, and his music has not received nearly as much attention from the 12-year-olds of the internet as his face has garnered. In fact, Viper has been making music since 2004, all the way from the birth of cloud rap, and is still releasing music today. Throughout his extensive discography, Viper has established himself with an unmistakable style, and further research reveals that Viper may have been one of the first cloud rap artists... ever.
Hustlin' Thick
Viper released his debut mixtape in 2004, titled Hustlin' Thick. Hustlin' Thick doesn't initially seem like a revelation: and that would be a mostly accurate assessment. Hustlin' Thick follows the well-trodden hip-hop tropes of soul samples, looped production, and an obsession with money, drugs, and women (as well as basketball).
Despite this, Hustlin' Thick still manages to set itself apart from the overly saturated underground hip-hop movement with Viper's vocal delivery. Viper's voice is deep. Very deep. So deep that it sounds as though Viper is mere millimeters away from his microphone, whispering in your ear in true ASMR fashion.
It's unsettling at first, and the lo-fi production along with his slow and methodical flow turns off most listeners. However, there's something deeply personal and affecting about Viper's voice that slowly infects your ears until there's nothing else you can listen to. It's impossible to draw comparisons, as I've never heard anything like it.
Hustlin' Thick would also introduce listeners to Viper's production style, which focused on rhythmic piano samples over boom-bap drumming. While being amateur, it's hard not to nod along to Viper's beats, as its simplicity is plain but effective.
It's easy to look past Hustlin' Thick to Viper's more outlandish projects, but the magic of Hustlin' Thick is that it's a fun and feel-good album. Viper will never again reach the levels of enthusiasm he brings with Hustlin' Thick. This can be heard on tracks such as the upbeat Bring The Noise, which involves two bouncy features from Rasheed and 211, presenting much-needed deviation from Viper's vocal monotony. Or the mystifying Baller Made, where Viper's voice somehow sounds even deeper than before. Despite this, Viper's flow is aggressive on this track, and the chorus is comparatively catchy and hilarious ("balling" would be a common motif throughout Viper's discography).
Hustlin' Thick is Viper's most accessible project, and listeners who can't latch on to Viper's later releases might find solace in the infectious grooves that never takes itself too seriously.
The Dawn of Cloud Rap?
What defines cloud rap? In a genre that essentially encompasses the majority of the underground hip-hop movement, it can be hard to set a standard to examine. However, many of the overarching themes include its 'cloud-like' production, which is typically lo-fi and relaxed, along with an abstract vocal delivery.
While some people would attribute the origins of this movement to Clouddead's incredible 2001 self-titled album, I find it hard to see the parallels between its soundscape and the cloud rap of the present. However, with Viper's sophomore mixtape in 2006, Ready and... Willing, I can absolutely draw the comparison.
It would be naïve for me to depict Viper as the founder of cloud rap since at the time he was releasing his initial albums he had zero influence on the direction of the hip-hop movement. That being said, Ready and... Willing is one of the purest forms of cloud rap I have heard, and with its shockingly early timing, I believe it makes sense to include Ready and... Willing as a crucial component of cloud rap's inception.
Ready and... Willing represents the shift in Viper's discography towards his iconic experimental sound, and excels from multiple angles. Viper's voice is hard to ignore and is a necessary part of what makes Viper's music so intoxicating. But if Ready and... Willing had a completely normal vocal approach, it would still be a fantastic album. This is because the production is what makes Ready and... Willing the album that it is.
Viper ditches the simple grooves of Hustlin' Thick for an ethereal aesthetic with a much slower tempo. The beats in tracks like They Can't Fold Me sound as if they are running backwards through a wormhole: it's impossible to pinpoint what direction the sound is moving in. Other tracks like Ball By The Mall are bright and towering, with only Viper's voice anchoring the sound to the ground.
Compared to Hustlin' Thick, there is real variety in Ready and... Willing. While many of the beats are elaborate, Viper still shines on tracks such as Feel, where the softer sound is offset by innovative uses of 808s that sound 10 years ahead of their time.
Lyrically, Viper reflects on more of the same but seems serious and thoughtful on Ready and... Willing. He speaks with authority, like the morbid ultimatum of You Gone Die. On this track, Viper breaks the 4th wall by speaking directly to the listener. He calmly describes exactly how he will kill you as if he was sitting right in front of you giving a lecture.
The only complaint I have with Ready and... Willing is that it suffers desperately from pacing issues, which is unfortunate because it drags down an otherwise immersive experience.
I can't begin to imagine what Viper was thinking while creating Ready and... Willing, and I find it hard to believe that he would have thought it were to be reveled as a cloud rap cult classic 10 years later. Instead, Ready and... Willing feels intimate; an experiment that came out of an authentic passion for his artform.
Becoming an Internet Meme
Viper is one of the most prolific artists of all time, having released over 1500+ albums over the past 20 years. At one point, Viper released 347 albums in one year: the most any substantial rapper has ever released. However, most of these projects are either rushed or remixes of early songs.
After Ready and... Willing, it can be hard to follow Viper's journey as it becomes saturated with these rushed albums. Therefore, I have come up with a few "core" albums that properly depict Viper's discography. While the first two of these core albums were Hustlin' Thick and Ready and... Willing, the next one would be Viper's breakout album in 2008, You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack.
At this point in Viper's musical career, there had been very little response to his music, with no critical reception. You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack would be the only one of Viper's albums to receive any attention from news outlets, and this would still take another 5 years from its release when the meme started to take over the internet in 2013.
The recognition would come in the form of a short Vice interview with Viper via text message about the album, which would provide insight into Viper's experience in jail as well as the influences behind Viper's chopped 'n screwed sound. This opened Viper's music to a wider audience, many of whom were impressed with Viper... and many who were not. Therefore You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack is somewhat of a controversial release, with a small community of loyal followers bravely defending Viper's creative liberties while being barraged with negative comments from the vast majority of listeners.
In some ways, I agree with the negative reception that the album received: the production lacks the novelty that Ready and... Willing had, or the depressive atmosphere. You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack is immature and childish, from the misspelling in the title to the fuzzy synths and simplistic lyrics. This was the first Viper album I listened to, and I couldn't help but laugh out loud at Viper's lyrical capability. However, I did finish the album on the first listen, which says something about Viper's ability to capture a listener: that is all that matters in the end.
A popular complaint of Viper's critics is that he doesn't have any skill and that his appeal is pure novelty. While I agree that Viper does not have any education in musical theory or lyrical content, that's what makes outsider hip-hop so intriguing: they see the instruments differently than everyone else. Viper is essentially discovering music for the first time, and in turn is not confined to any predefined rules. While You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack is not Viper's magnum opus, it continues to prove that Viper is not afraid to be himself... balling included.
The Final Act
You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack is the album that grabbed the attention of the internet: and that's unfortunate, given that an album Viper released the same year happened to be his greatest work. The Hiram Clarke Hustler is often overlooked given its release proximity to You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack, but it is also the ultimate representation of Viper's skill and development up until this point. This is Viper's slowest, darkest, and most repetitive project. It is also heavily bloated. While this sounds like a slog of a listen so far, The Hiram Clarke Hustler somehow leapfrogs these traits to create an album that is both engaging and anthemic. Viper's face on the album cover describes exactly what Viper is for its entirety: suave. Viper is so smooth with his delivery, it's almost seductive.
It is impossible not to sing along to the first track, I Gots To Ball because the chorus is simply comedic genius in its frankness. The second track follows the balling theme, They Want To See Me Dead Because of My Hops, and it is impossible to distinguish where the first song ends and the second begins because the beat and lyrics are practically the same. Despite this, every chorus on this album is unmistakable, even while the transitions blur the songs together into one solid form.
At the same time, the album is not normal nor accessible. Just consider the features on this album, which somehow achieve at making Viper look like the normal one. Cobra on the track You Got Yo Gat sounds like an alien lifeform attempting to communicate in human language, not to mention the beat, which drills its way into your brain without mercy. Meanwhile, Diamondback's chorus on Quick Blast is so horrible it's hard to understand how they even came up with it, but it's also one of the catchiest on the album.
There are moments on half of these tracks where Viper will randomly turn up the volume without warning, assaulting my ears for what seems like no reason. And of course the song Hey, Maybe One Day You'll See Me Again is authentically well-written but manages to stand out because of it.
Even with its faults, The Hiram Clarke Hustler is Viper at his best and has infinite replay value because of the earworm that is every song here. Viper is a loveable character because he feels genuine, and everything he says comes back to the same purpose: Viper just wants to ball. How can you say no to that proposition?
The Hiram Clarke Hustler concludes the "core" album saga that displayed Viper's original songs that he would then remix for the next decade. This would begin his descent into madness where he would release nearly daily albums to essentially no fanbase. However, this is not where Viper's story ends. In fact, in what is probably one of the biggest plot twists in hip-hop, Viper started his vaporwave era.
Post-Insanity
It seems that even with the meager success of You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack, Viper was eventually able to afford producers... for better or worse.
Viper was probably confused, as these producers didn't specialize in hip-hop. Instead, Viper raps over gimmicky dance and vaporwave beats produced by critically renowned vaporwave producers such as Nmesh. Viper would release many albums with this new aesthetic, but one would stand out: 2020's They Hate Me Cuz I'm Vaporwave. This appropriately titled album is Viper fully embracing vaporwave in what is his most inconceivable work. While his earlier works may have had a slight chance of being serious projects, Viper is clearly capitalizing on his meme success with this album. Except in true Viper character, the music is also really freaking good.
Given that Viper probably paid his producers in shares of his fraudulent furniture moving company (this is a totally different story), they put a lot of effort into the detail of these beats. There are actual beat switches in some of these songs: something that was noticeably absent in Viper's previous projects. Imagine Hotline Miami but if Viper was rapping over the soundtrack. The only thing I'm surprised by here is that nobody had thought of this genius idea before, but I'm glad it was Viper: he deserves it.
The video for this on youtube has over 100k views: a massive listening fanbase for someone who had released projects in silence for most of his career.
It's hard to analyze this album because it's so ridiculous, but it needs to be mentioned as proof that Viper can still create original albums when he wants to.
Let's just hope that later this year, when Viper plans to release the long-anticipated sequel to his infamous meme album, spelled almost correctly as YA'LL COWARDS DON'T EVEN SMOKE CRACK II, it carries with it the same charismatic silliness that keeps listeners coming back over and over again.
Ratings and Links:
Hustlin' Thick
Spotify
Ready and... Willing
Spotify
You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack
The Hiram Clarke Hustler
They Hate Me Cuz I'm Vaporwave
You'll cowards don't even follow me on Instagram - https://instagram.com/1milliondecibels?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=