Arizona Zervas

 One Liner: Massively viral "ROXANNE" song, ends up kinda Post Malone-ish

Wikipedia Genre: Hip hop, R&B, emo rap, trap
Home: Hagerstown, Maryland

Poster Position: 8
Both Weekends.

Saturday at 5:20 on the Miller Lite Stage.

Thoughts:  ONE POINT ONE BILLION STREAMS!  The opening words of this song are about Instagram.  And I've never been older ever.  Without looking it up, I guaran-freaking-tee that "ROXANNE" was a big TikTok song.  

This guy is on the eighth line of the poster!  Without a single album to his name!  All for the GRAM!  Loogit that throat tattoo!  My sweet lord I bet that was painful.

Dammit.  Let's find out who the weirdo is.  The Wikipedia entry just says that "ROXANNE" was heavily featured in Spotify playlists.  That is wild to me.  It was the first ever track by an unsigned, fully-independent artist to hit number one on the Spotify Top 50 chart.  But otherwise his Wikipedia entry is pretty empty of facts.  Found an article saying that he got kicked out of middle school and started making music then with a friend.  He also called Rhode Island "more ratchet than Maryland," which is such a lame ass thing to say about those two states.  But, that track got him nominated for Best New Artist at the VMAs, so that's an actual real accolade, which is cool.

Do you ever start to write a strangely obsessive blog about every band coming to a music festival, and then make it about 20 bands in before realizing that you have made a very large mistake with the way that you use the limited number of hours on this planet?  Oh, no? Yeah, me either.  Yeah.  No, I'm super happy to be listening to this auto-tune drizzled idiocy right now.  It's all good over here.  

I say all of that, but if I'm being honest, this garbage is pretty damn catchy.  It's deeply idiotic - "24" being a prime example - but the guy has a real knack for adding memorable hooks over the top of these beats.  Dammit.  But lyrically it is definitely bottom of the barrel stuff.  Lots of very predictable lines and auto-tune.  But the beats are pretty fun and his tunes are also a good time to groove along to.

"NIGHTRIDER" sounds like he has Travis Scott on there, but I think he's just copying.  The entire experience reminds me of the Post Malone experience - sing-song, semi-rapping, a little bit whiny, too much auto-tune.  "Drinking Problem" is a little terrifying if I consider that TikTok may have led my thirteen year old to this music, so that she's hanging around singing about drinking until she can't feel her face no more.  "FML" is the second biggest hit, with 209 million streams.

I'll also let you hear this one, that adds a touch more of guitar and something slightly different from those other two.  Man, he really likes the Hennessey.  "Nightrider."

I wouldn't ever plan to go see a show like this. This is just so far away from anything that I normally enjoy.  But with the way a lot of these lower bands are shaping up, I might not have much of a choice of things that I would normally aim towards.  So I might end up with this guy, repeatedly saying the words "keep it on the low" and "Henny" and "the Gram."