It's not the type beat it's what you do with it
MEDIA: HONESTAV (feat. Z) — “I’d Rather Overdose” (From the block performance)
EVENT: Zoomers are doing some truly fascinating things with Noah Kahan type-beats.
This is not a super-long post, but I’ve been fascinated by this Honestav kid, who is emerging as sort of the dirtbag alternative to the folksy, rolling-drums rock that stays winning on radio rock and is frequently made by dudes possessing a patina of authenticity that occasionally leads to laudatory coverage in The New Yorker.
These musicians feel like products of something i’m going to call the Zach Bryan Diaspora — a lot of them have made music with the human midpoint of alt-country and Barstool Sports, and most of them have completely ignored the DIY sensibility that helped endear ZB to people in the first place. There’s a lot of guys like this on YouTube, and most notably Noah Kahan, who lives on a farm in Vermont and treats Mumford and Sons the way Zach Bryan treats Nebraska-era Springsteen. He is hypothetically interesting in that he sings about “boy stuff” — drinking and doing drugs as metaphors for sadness, basically — but is a bit more elevated a writer than most. But also he’s corny af and his shit sounds like an LL Bean jingle. Very commercially viable, but extremely not for me.
Now back to Honestav, and a brief explanation of how I found him courtesy of my YouTube algorithm. My years of watching videos of rappers freestyling has trained it to serve me basically anything that appears to be a freestyle-style video. There’s this series called From the Block, which features rappers and rap-adjacent artists rapping outside into a mic that looks like the sort of thing a 1950s radio DJ would have talked into. To be clear, these videos aren’t freestyles at all — they’re all pretty obviously pre-recorded, and it’s usually just them rapping a song they’re already known for — but they’re often really fun nevertheless. Here’s one of That Mexican OT rapping in a cowboy hat while holding a chicken as one of his buddies rides a horse in the background. Here’s one with BigXthaPlug in Times Square, and here’s one of Sauce Walka rapping in front of a Mercedes on hydraulics, and also a bunch of portapotties. Also, you absolutely have to watch this one is of a white dude dressed like Peter Griffin rapping almost exactly like Lil Baby.
The point is, though, that you can see why a YouTube algorithm might view these videos, which lean heavily upon a sense of spontaneity, and decide they were similar enough to freestyles that I would at least like them. And they were right! In some cases, the system works.
Honestav is one such beneficiary of this system, to the extent that my years of watching old BET Rap City freestyles led to me being served From the Block videos, and the fact that I occasionally into Bob Dylan rabbitholes seemingly made YouTube decide that I would like this guy who kinda looks like Lil Peep (“hot dirtbag” vibes, hates shirts) and sings about drug abuse over post-Kahan instrumentals. It was completely correct, to be clear, just probably not in the way that YouTube hoped.
To be clear, “I’d Rather Overdose” sounds exactly like Noah Kahan, and I would absolutely hate the Noah Kahan version of this song. He’s hanging out at a craft brewery until 10pm while wearing an entire outfit you bought at REI personified. The hypothetical rock bottom that exists in his songs is pretty mid — it’s, like, getting a DUI and having to go to a rehab on your parents’ dime.
Honestav, meanwhile, makes music that exists in a world where the bottom is the beginning, all broken homes and shoplifted cargo pants and selling pills for skate decks. The official video of the song features shots of flowers laid upon a father’s grave, empty beer bottles on the floor, the type of ratty overstuffed couch in a rugless living room that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who had roommates at 21. It’s decidedly amateurish: Z, the dude who takes the final verse of the track, pogos from the perspective of an addict to the partner of an addict with no indication. Both of them sound way too happy to be singing about how fucked up they are. The frisson!
Another single, “Stuck on the Floor,” straight-up features a shot of the kid smoking weed in a trailer park. I don’t know anything about Honestav or his actual story beyond the few songs I’ve heard, so it could all be a contrivance (and if I were writing something about him for Pitchfork or whatever, I’d be obligated to google it, but the scant research I did indicates he has a bit on his TikTok where he plays the character of “your broke boyfriend”). It feels real in a way that steamrolls over any potential corniness.
