“It was fun!” Jimmy responded instead, and waxed nostalgic for their days of throwing parties in abandoned houses and playing their self-recorded demos as the soundtrack. In a recent interview, a journalist asked Lee and Jimmy about a period in their teens when they were homeless, clearly expecting them to answer with the kind of gravitas that would square with a traditional rags-to-riches narrative. The Tao of Sremm is almost exclusively about partying and having fun - a concept succinctly summed up in the song title “Safe Sex Pay Checks” - but they wield their positivity so assertively that it takes on a quality of defiance. Much like fellow Atlanta weirdos Migos, Rae Sremmurd’s sound relies on a kind of ecstatic repetition, where a single word or phrase ( unlock the swag lit like Bic up like Trump) is chanted so many times that it moves past annoying, transcends catchy, and takes on the glow of some kind of divine if spiritually questionable mantra. The two used to make music in Mississippi under the name Dem Outta St8 Boyz until they moved to Atlanta and linked up with ubiquitous producer Mike Will Made It their current name is Mike Will’s label “Ear Drummers” spelled backwards. Both dress like Willow and Jaden Smith the day after they Google Image–searched PM Dawn. Lee has a lilting, candy-coated croak Jimmy sounds like a bullfrog with emphysema.
Rae Sremmurd is actually two people, brothers Slim Jimmy and Swae Lee. That plinking, four-note hook made every car bumping it at a red light this summer sound like a very swagged-out ice-cream truck. It’s bouncy, irreverent, and playfully childlike.
The charms of “No Flex Zone” are obvious and immediate. (For the record: “SHRI-murd.”) For the past six months, the pair’s giddy, hypnotic “No Flex Zone” has been inescapable, from the A-list to the underground (as in: whether you heard it at Solange’s wedding or just followed along on the internet). It was one of 2014’s great, unexpected success stories: At the beginning of the year, you would have been hard-pressed to find someone who could correctly pronounce the name of Tupelo, Mississippi, hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd, and by the end … well, that was still true, but there were a lot more people trying.