#13 - Yeat - "Still countin" & "Out thë way" (tie)

Dec 17, 2022

It’s so easy to meme on Yeat’s music, but its popularity obviously says a lot about our generation and the kind of music we want to spend our days hearing. Consider it another extension of Carti’s fetishization of the voice-as-texture, a mode where no word or zany inflection is too silly to spew out of your mouth as long as it sounds electric and makes fans want to go crazy, a mind-numbing distraction from the chaos swirling everywhere. It’s an anti-politics of vibes and mosh pits, silly slang and gleaming ad-libs, the musical form of corecore’s surreal realness. He has enough memorable one-liners and suddenly vulnerable, reflective lyrics, and a commitment to the craft and his own sound, that fans respect him and feel like they can relate.

There’s also an alluring facelessness to Yeat’s music, the way he rarely posts online and has done barely any interviews (and in them, said very little of note—his demeanor is like someone who mostly chills at home, grinding on music). His languor in these interviews creates such a stark contrast with the throttling charisma of his music. It’s like Yeat is really just an empty vessel or a conduit for astral noises from another dimension.

Choosing favorite Yeat songs feels counterintuitive since a lot of his music is amorphously similar. But in my head Yeat has two main categories of songs: the hypergloss banger rampage that’s become a template for new-gen rage rappers, and the stranger, more eccentric songs—all his unexpectedly funky and vividly eerie tracks. So here’s one of each.

“Still countin” is the archetypal Yeat rager: a pleasure-calibrated machine of evil synth and unhinged mouth mayhem, an assault on the ears with the sky-high grandeur of arena rock.

“Out thë way” has got to be one of the goofiest songs I’ve heard this year. I dunno if it was meant to be goofy, but the Snapz & BNYX beat’s squelches and sloshes make me think of cartoon animals belching. It sounds like Brobee from Yo Gabba Gabba or Wow Wow Wubbzy hopped on the track. The fact that Yeat is seriously rapping and flexing his panoply of riches while these gastrointestinal moans ripple endlessly in the background makes it even funnier. The song also inspired maybe the best TikTok dance of 2022 (so viral they even got cats doing it).