Kevin Gates. Photo via Atlantic Records.
Rap Column is a column about rap music by Vivian Medithi and Nadine Smith for The FADER.
Kevin Gates is a weird rapper. He’s not “weird” in the way that a Lil Uzi Vert or a Young Thug is weird: his beats skew a little more traditional, and you’ll probably never see him with a gender-bending outfit. But on almost every song and in almost every interview, Kevin Gates is guaranteed to say something completely out of left field that you could never predict — few mainstream rappers have ever been so resolutely committed to being themselves, even when that self is at odds with the dominant trends. His sing-song flow might have earned early comparisons to Drake and Future, but he’s never played the pop game like them. He’s a devout Muslim who regularly voices his spirituality, but his songs can often border on pornographic. He started wearing traditional Native American feathers in his hair — claiming in one interview that they were a gift from a chieftain he had performed “sacred ceremonies” with — despite not being Native American. His favorite novel is The Notebook.
Though Gates has been grinding since the mid-2000s, it’s been about a decade since he emerged on a national level; last year, he reissued 10th-anniversary editions of his breakout mixtape The Luca Brasi Story and major-label debut Stranger Than Fiction. Before “emo rap” was a recognizable phenomenon, songs like “Don’t Know What To Call It” were essentially emo rap, giving voice to an uncertain despair that can’t even be named. His music from that era remains resonant: 2013’s “Thinkin’ With My Dick” was added to the tracklist of his 2022 album Khaza after it went viral on TikTok, with five other older songs also becoming newly popular on the platform. Gates may not have the critical cache he did ten years ago, but like so many rappers who came up in tight-knit regional scenes, he’s maintained a loyal following: 2022’s “Super General” freestyle has racked up over 100 million views, making it one of Gates’ most popular tracks despite not being available on most streaming services, evidence of the deep connection he’s developed with his closest fans.
Gates’ new album Ceremony doesn’t reach the same level of raw emotion or pure hunger as his early work. Still, it’s a reminder of how singularly the Baton Rouge native has paved his own lane. When I first heard Kevin Gates, I was drawn in by his distinctively throaty vocals and the heart bleeding so visibly on his sleeve. What stood out to me was his love of reading — Gates is hardly the first rapper to cite self-help books like The Master Key System as formative influences, though I’m not sure there has ever been anyone else in the game willing to go down on record as a fan of Nicholas Sparks. Aside from The Notebook, Gates’ greatest literary love is vampires — in a 2014 interview with XXL, he named Interview With A Vampire novelist Anne Rice as one of his favorites: “I like vampire novels, probably just 'cause of where I’m from. Like, Transylvania, Romania, is the vampire capital of the world, and New Orleans is the vampire capital of the United States.”
While none of his music exactly fits the description of “horrorcore,” Gates’ love of an iconic supernatural villain brings to mind, say, Bushwick Bill’s fascination with Chucky or Three 6 Mafia’s obsession with all things that go bump in the night. On some level, it’s a way of taking back power from a society that demonizes you: If you’re going to say I’m a monster, then I’ll be a monster. That identification with the monster shows itself most visibly on “Twilight (War With God)” from The Luca Brasi Story, which to me remains the definitive Kevin Gates song for the simple reason that no one else could write it but Kevin Gates.
As the title indicates, the song imagines Gates himself as one of the sparkly heart-throbs of the Twilight franchise, as his undying love for a mortal woman conflicts with his inability to age. Even aside from the slightly absurd premise, the song is filled with phrasing that no one else would probably think of, like when he gives a shout-out to an ancient fertility goddess: over a decade later and I’m still trying to figure out what the hell “The will of the universe, including the Willendorf” even means. What makes the song’s premise work at all is how sincerely Gates delivers it: you can tell that this is a man who genuinely found something of himself in the tragic love story of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan.
It can be difficult to listen to his music around other people because of how often he presents himself as not just emotionally naked, but literally naked.
But unlike the adolescent love depicted in Twilight, or even in The Notebook, Kevin Gates is anything but chaste. Despite his conversion to Islam in 2016, Gates’ music remains fairly sinful, pivoting wildly between the sacred and profane — it can be difficult to listen to his music around other people because of how often he presents himself as not just emotionally naked, but literally naked. For better or worse, Gates is a certified freak, who has stirred up controversy in the past by claiming to have slept with his cousin; there was also that time he allegedly kicked a woman out of his house because she refused to go down on his dog.
One of his most successful singles, “Hard For,” is essentially about erectile dysfunction. On the “Super General” freestyle, he speaks about his beliefs and even throws in a little Arabic, only to start describing his nasty fantasies about Beyoncé a few bars later. The rather gratuitous track “Eater” from Ceremony — which features the sound of Gates imitating a woman giving him head as its hook — is immediately followed by “Speed Dial,” which is about how he has Allah on speed dial. The exacting detail with which Gates extols his sexual exploits, as well as the straight-faced seriousness of his delivery, makes it all the funnier — there’s an inherent absurdity to how he talks about analingus using the same flow that he does to unpack his trauma.
Kevin Gates came up with fellow bayou legends Boosie and Webbie, but prison sentences kept the collaborators apart and he ultimately emerged as a lone wolf rather than being recognized as part of a larger scene. He’s clearly provided a roadmap for artists like YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Rod Wave, not just in their similarly bluesy and heartbroken sound, but in how they’ve also positioned themselves as outsiders. There’s something that even strikes me as rather Gates-like about YoungBoy’s flirtations with Mormonism, an arc that almost no one could have predicted. Whether or not YoungBoy is actually baptized into the church remains to be seen — he recently name-dropped Joseph Smith’s infamous bodyguard in an interview — but at the very least, he seems to have found some solace in the tenants of a religion whose rules he constantly breaks, not unlike one of his heroes.
It can often be difficult to tell whether Kevin Gates is bullshitting or telling the truth, like the time he claimed to have performed the minor miracle of starting a car battery with his bare hands. As he once put it, “I like to hear a lie every now and then.” Regardless of whether or not he’s playing a character, the sincerity that drips from his tongue speaks to a core emotional truth, like a novelist who invents scenarios to better understand reality. But on the other hand, it might be the fact that he’s so completely honest that makes his music so singular: the truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.
