On a recent October night, I’m listening to Spotify’s Rap Caviar when an aggressive line erupts into my headphones:

Man it’s 2023 and Big Dick Randy coming back
And on Halloween night he gon’ be lookin’ for a snack
If you see that n*gga coming better run like you in track
He a big, scary n*gga, man he seven foot and black!

I press pause. What the hell did the algorithm just serve up?

The artist’s profile reveals multiple tracks with millions of streams each. Their titles: “4 BIG GUYS,” “BIG DICK RANDY,” and “3 BIG BALLS.” I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to fall down a rabbit hole of explicit, hypersexual, homoerotic rappers whose lyrics have netted them millions of passionate fans. Who are mostly straight guys.

As I browse related subreddits and YouTube comments, enjoying the ever-more outrageous lines as I go — “I took a bite of his ass, it tastes like lemon pepper chicken” — I realize these rappers have somehow created a community more organic, and more genuine, than perhaps any other in mainstream rap today.

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Rap used to be thrilling, but now it’s fake, corporate, and boring. It’s been over eight years since rap trio Migos released Culture, which debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, and which pundits responded to by declaring that Migos — and rap culture writ large — had completed its conquest of American pop culture. Culture, maybe, marked the end of rap as ‘outsider’; now, rap was fully assimilated, fully pop culture.

80s rappers like NWA could hardly imagine someone like Megan Thee Stallion headlining a rally for the Democratic nominee in 2024. The genre that began as a subversive, in-depth indictment of America’s treatment of black people, policing, and wealth disparity is now so mainstream that its artists headline liberal political rallies. Forget being controversial — the days of rap catalyzing organic protest movements like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” are long gone.

Historically, rap has been defined by artists who pioneer subgenres and lead them to cultural prominence: drill, trap, SoundCloud, gangsta, and emo rap have all come and gone, characterized by hypermasculine lyrics about violence, sex, and drugs.

Sus rap fits this pattern. Fixated on storytelling, with ironic disses, comedic rags, graphic sexual imagery, and actually politically incorrect lyrics, sus rappers have been growing in popularity — and going viral.

Tracks from the leading artist Digbar (or Digbargayraps) have run up over 99 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music. His breakout hit was in December 2021, with the single “4 BIG GUYS,” which describes a group of men who “blow up [his] guts like the Fourth of July.” Digbar then breaks out in rapid-fire verses praising and dissing the guys, including one who he thought “was George Floyd, cause I always leave him not breathin’.” The song now stands at over 35 million streams on Spotify and almost three million views on YouTube.

Another Digbar song, “2 Lil Dudes,” broke two million streams, mainly on the back of reaction videos. And, recently, Digbar co-wrote theme music promoting the world’s first sperm race, in which competitors race their sperm on a microscopic track.

On r/DigBarGayRaps, the subreddit for Digbar fans, and the comments sections of his YouTube videos, listeners praise Digbar for his lyricism, humor, and creativity:

“Dig the Eminem of gay rap”

“We makin’ it out the closet with this one!”

“Digbar is the best storyteller of our era”

Tonally, the comments on Digbar music are ironic and playful — essentially, fans love the comedy. YouTube commenters, at least, don’t seem to be listening because his lyrics are gay, they listen because his lyrics are funny.

I wanted to test this assumption, and to find out whether any of Digbar’s fans follow other sus gay rappers like Zigbay, Jake Hole, or KolossalKocks — especially since these artists are often prominently featured in Digbar’s tracks and have wildly different styles, ranging from Hole’s R&B soulful crooning to Kolossal’s screaming diatribes.

I messaged 30 members of the subreddit for Digbar fans, as well as listeners who frequent sus rap Discord communities. Most told me they listened to Digbar for the storytelling and comedy, but some of his gay fans told me they listened to him because they didn’t like what one called “fruit music.”

“I really hate all the over the top gay songs,” he said. “Like yeah, they funny but it’s all sparkly pink gay shit. Digbar is gay and tough, something u don’t hear everyday.”

But gay fans of both Digbar and sus rap as a genre seemed to be the exception, at least among Digbar listeners I talked to. Out of all the fans I managed to reach, only about 20 percent told me they were gay.

The majority of fans were straight men who thought Digbar, Zigbay, Jake Hole, and Kolossal were hilarious storytellers first and sus rappers second. “The stories are just outta pocket, it’s wild what these guys can get away with” one told me over Twitter DMs. “Ain’t really any rappers telling funny stories now, right? Normal rap is repetitive,” another user told me. “It’s just different bro… Digbar and all his booty gang bringing the rap game back,” said someone on Discord, “I listen to this shit at home, at the gym, everywhere.”

Fans also like to speculate about Digbar’s identity (and that of his sus rapper entourage) and whether he’s actually gay. Theories vary, though most fans agree his sexuality doesn’t matter. Digbar has never gone on record about his identity.

What’s most striking to me is how Digbar and the artists surrounding him are building loyal, organic fanbases, while mainstream rap/pop culture now supposedly dissents from cisgender, white, heteronormative America (think Lil Nas X, who — since his hit single “Old Town Road” — has come out as gay, which generated nothing but media interviews praising his courage, and now releases music videos of himself stripper-grinding on Satan, for example).

The contrast is what makes Digbar, Jake Hole, KolossalKocks, and other sus rappers so appealing: they refuse to push an agenda while poking fun at a society that puts niche sexual communities on a pedestal while simultaneously elevating hypermasculine rappers whose entire appeal is murder, assaulting women, and celebrating crime. “I’m just rapping and fuckin around / I do this shit for the fans,” Digbar raps in the song “<3”.

The community around Digbar and “sus rap” is strange — but it’s also doing something genuinely radical. While mainstream rappers like Drake, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Lil Nas X carefully navigate brand safety and cultural boundaries, Digbar’s lane is pure chaos: taboo-breaking, line-crossing, and aggressively unserious. He calls himself a “comedic artist,” but what he’s really doing is dragging rap back to the edge — where it started. If sus rap keeps rising, it won’t be because it’s polished or marketable, but because it’s fearless in ways the mainstream no longer allows.

—Alex Petrov

Feature image includes art from Midjourney user heyiguess043.