Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
The trend for rappers calling themselves ‘Lil’ truly never ends. Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert brought it back over the past year, and now we have another success story in Lil Pump (not to be confused with emo rapper Lil Peep). Lil Pump is the pseudonym of 17-year-old Gazzy Garcia from Miami, a high school dropout recognisable by his pink braids, also known by his nickname, Jetskii. His music grew a large following on Soundcloud, while he went viral on social media with ridiculous videos like this. Last week, he debuted at no.3 on the Billboard 200 with his self-titled album, which features Rick Ross, Gucci Mane and 2 Chainz. He achieved this mainly thanks to streaming – 38k of his 46k “equivalent album units” were made up of streams. Meanwhile, his biggest single Gucci Gang rises up the Hot 100 to a new peak of no.32. The short, repetitive and foul-mouthed track also just entered the UK top 100 on Spotify. In total, it has been played nearly 50 million times in under two months.