Moneybagg Yo. Photo by Austin Holden.
Rap Blog is a weekly showcase of a standout rap song.
Vikings are often depicted as coarse carnivores, tearing into hearty lamb legs over enormous tankards of mead, but these pillaging pirates of Middle Ages Scandinavia were “more farm-to-table locavores than meat-loving hunter gatherers.” And according to Moneybagg Yo, a “RICH VIKING” might also consume “every drop” of Wockhardt and the fruit snacks belonging to the children of a beautiful woman.
It’s a loose conceit for a song — “we some rich vikings, still fuck hoes on minimum wage” barely makes sense, if any at all — but it works because Moneybagg plays it absolutely straight. Vikings are hustlers “smoking this blunt to the fire,” shooters liable to “catch 'em on the interstate.” You can’t go back to your hood, while Yo and his fellow trappers just turned a mansion into “Vikeland.”
These notions are interlaced in a fairly straightforward song about bagging big freaks and “smelling like Baccarat mixed with the za,” but eerie extraterrestrial synths on the thudding Wheezy beat help to punch up the proceedings, as does Yo’s knack for idiosyncratic quotables. Boilerplate metaphors are syntactically twisted (“When the stars light up inside the foreign I get spaceship/Vibes”). Telling a woman his zodiac is “dollar sign” might be yawn-worthy, if it wasn’t preceded by the smirking “sumn must be wrong with the club lights, they pay me to come and shine.” Moneybagg announces a woman would “fuck in the car right now, no panties she ready,” then promptly adlibs “Hot-N-Ready, Lil Caesars!”
SPEAK NOW is littered with perfect one-liners — “Feeling like Ray J, if I had one wish I’d bring back Actavis” goes a particularly memorable zinger from “ON DET” — but the strength of Moneybagg Yo’s music has always been in its emotion. “When you play me, I want you to be able to get through anything you’re going through,” he said last summer. That sentiment tends to manifest better when he’s baring his soul on wax, but even in the middle of turning up, Yo recalls deceased family members and bygone days of struggle.
Still, that was then and this is now. “Shoot a thousand, if I lose it, up the bet and get back,” he laughs on the second verse. There aren’t too many problems a “RICH VIKING” can’t pay to fix.
