“You sit and pray for things to happen and then when it’s finally happening you just got to grab your nuts and run with it” According to him, the song was produced by his “homeboy” and the video was directed by RMR’s “team,” although the video is credited to someone named Gabe on YouTube. By his estimation, “Rascal” was made three months ago, but he’s wary of sharing many details behind the song’s creation. I’m Kobe Bryant with it.”īefore the ski mask and the moniker, RMR says he was a behind-the-scenes figure in the studio, producing or engineering for his friends until he decided to write and perform for himself. This is how people are going to go about things. I’m what people are going to be in the next two to five years. I’ve been listening to him for so long.” Blink-182, the 1975, John Mayer, Kanye West, Drake, and Jay-Z are also among RMR’s influences, but he’s wary of classifying what type of genre he belongs to. “Also, shout out to Rascal Flatts, one of my favorite things ever is Gary LeVox, because he just got that voice. All of them, like I been listening to them since ‘06,” he says. He credits traveling between the two locales for inspiring his love of country.
According to RMR, he grew up between the Buckhead district of Atlanta and Inglewood, Los Angeles. At one point, he says he is 24 years old before backtracking to state that he’s actually 23, mentioning that he sometimes gets “confused” since he’s so close to being 24. When I dropped it, I expected some people to gravitate towards it, but the meteorite-type of effect that it had, like ‘boom,’ it just hit. You sit and pray for things to happen and then when it’s finally happening you just got to grab your nuts and run with it,” RMR tells Rolling Stone over the phone on Thursday. Ryan Hemsworth remixed the song immediately, while artists, as varied as Timbaland to Lil Aaron, have commented about their love for “Rascal” on Instagram. Its jagged, quick rise felt the same way: Originally a sponsored post on Elevator Mag, the video quickly disseminated to social media. 'Silence of the Lambs': The Complete Buffalo Bill Storyįrom its juxtaposition of country music with hip-hop aesthetics (Lil Nas X, Post Malone) to the anonymous artist arriving seemingly out of nowhere (The Weeknd, H.E.R.), “Rascal” seemed engineered for viral success. Meet the Beatle: A Guide to Ringo Starr's Solo Career in 20 Songs In RMR’s rendition, it isn’t a song about how divorce and God can eventually lead to true love, but how the women who’ve broken his heart turn into the “hoes I scam.” Eventually, his falsetto settles into a simple declaration: “Fuck 12,” a slang term for the police. Unlike most other rap videos, though, RMR begins the song by breaking into an impressive a cappella rendition of Rascal Flatts’ “These Days.” After that, he launches into an interpolation of “ Bless the Broken Road ” - a 1994 country classic written by Marcus Hummon, Bobby Boyd, and Jeff Hanna, first recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and subsequently popularized by Rascal Flatts.
It’s stylish, but similar to countless other music videos that become popular every single day. In its video, a mysterious man in a ski mask named RMR - pronounced Rumor - wears an Yves Saint Laurent bulletproof vest over an Off-White long-sleeve camouflage T-shirt, showing off gold grills and an impressive variety of firearms wielded by a similarly masked crew.
Last Wednesday, a song called “Rascal” went viral after it was uploaded to YouTube.