{"id":312282,"date":"2026-02-27T02:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T02:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/312282\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T02:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T02:32:11","slug":"luci4-unleashed-a-generation-of-glitchy-underground-rap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/312282\/","title":{"rendered":"Luci4 Unleashed a Generation of Glitchy Underground Rap"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I heard Luci4, I wasn\u2019t sure if it was a man, woman, Vocaloid, or some gremlin who plucked a damaged laptop from lost-and-found purgatory. \u201cAll Eyez On Me<\/a>\u201d took the sped-up edit style of nightcore, a remix genre I\u2019d been obsessed with for ages, as its starting point. Across 84 seconds of stuttery-gurgly indignation, he squeals about getting head and compares his haters to ticks and fleas (really, he\u2019s the one who sounds as shrill as an insect). The comments on YouTube lyric videos were full of people like, Wait he says actual words? Damn.<\/p>\n

This was during the first year of COVID, when a generation of kids were locked inside and rotting on Discord VCs. I had fallen down a chasm<\/a> on SoundCloud and found my way to Luci4\u2019s page. His occult<\/a> ritual<\/a> craziness<\/a> reminded me of the thrill I felt discovering cloud rap nearly a decade prior. Over the next few years, the underground would slowly warp itself in his phantasmal image.<\/p>\n

Luci4\u2014who died on February 22 at the age of 23\u2014made at times astonishingly weird music. But his journey to producing wasn’t super far off from other mortal beings. He told the blog 108 Mics<\/a> that he started making drill beats as a tween after getting his first laptop for Christmas and cracking FL Studio. Before he made a name for himself as a solo artist, he received attention as a teenager when Tay-K jacked one of his beats off YouTube for his 2017 track \u201cGotta Blast<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he was based in California, Luci4\u2014who also went by 4jay and Axxturel at points\u2014descended<\/a> from Memphis horrorcore and SpaceGhostPurrp<\/a>\u2019s shadowy strain of Florida rap, and was a member of SGP\u2019s collective Black Money Boyz Deathrow. Eventually he formed his own, Jewelxxet. The Gothic alchemy<\/a> of Luci4\u2019s music cut across image and text: There were the kitschy fantasy sprites of the cover art, culled from the defunct GIF website Blingee, and the cryptic titles that RYM heads teamed up to decode. His standout 2020 tape Noktifer\u2019s Symphony<\/a> was the work of a prince banished from society, hiding away in a frayed palace<\/a> whose degraded walls echoed with bass thuds and threats<\/a>. The music<\/a> seemed to obey no laws of song structure, tunefulness, general relativity, or anything conceived by puny humans. Tracks sputtered<\/a> and rang out with rah-rah rattlesnake sibilance<\/a>. Their alien rhythms<\/a> and waterlogged chants<\/a> reflected a deep hatred for pop production and the mainstream. He was a tinny trace of an MC, a sliver of megabytes<\/a> banging inside the glass of the screen. Sometimes the thrill came from the way he dissolved luscious samples into hyperspeed haze, like summery Florida fast<\/a> anthems compressed<\/a> and dessicated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Luci4 came up around the turn of the 2020s, the online underground was splintering every which way, from wailing digicore to bitcrushed hexD. Alongside a select few groups like Reptilian Club Boyz and Flexxcult, Jewelxxet<\/a> became the nexus for a new vanguard of dudes addicted to Trueys, distortion, and blood emojis. The misanthropic<\/a> music<\/a> matched the bleak unreality<\/a> of the antisocial pandemic world. Every member unleashed<\/a> their own mayhem: sellasouls<\/a>\u2019 anti-ASMR nightmarish<\/a> hissing<\/a> and MajinBlxxdy<\/a>\u2019s monstrous<\/a> growls<\/a>, Bacleo<\/a>\u2019s bolts of eerie electricity<\/a> and nd the heavenly susurrations<\/a> of prostiiitutiiion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first time I heard Luci4, I wasn\u2019t sure if it was a man, woman, Vocaloid, or some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409,156400],"class_list":["post-312282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-rabbit-holed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}