CORRECTION - The shirt was worn BEFORE Lil Peeps passing...
A few years ago if you asked 100 rap fans who their
least favourite rapper was, you'd hear Russ 100 times.
The hate towards the guy was just immense, at one point
people would just fill his comments with hate.
"F Russ"
"Russ Sucks"
"Corny"
"Trash"
"The worst rapper of all time".
5 years on, Russ is now rarely mentioned negatively.
The public's opinion on his music and him as a person
has completely changed.
So how on earth did Russ go from possibly the most hated rapper
alive to one of the most respected?
Let's start with why he became subject to so much intense criticism.
In the middle of 2018, ignorant rap was at the absolute peak
of it's popularity. Untalented, novelty rappers were the biggest thing
since Fortnite, and the likes of Lil Pump and Smokepurpp were dominating
the rap scene, piling up hundreds of millions of streams on bass boosted,
somewhat ironic songs where their stupidity was celebrated.
Songs like "Gucci Gang" and "Audi" were being rinsed everywhere you
went, and it really seemed for a moment that rap music might permanently
be headed towards repetitive, simplistic songs that even a child could
perform.
Teenagers ate that all up, and in a weird way it was sort of inspiring.
Out of nowhere you had dozens of 16, 17, 18 year old's signing 7 figure
contracts from basically mumbling a few words on a 2 minute track.
There was this sort of "If Lil Pump Can Make It, So Can I" sort of mentality.
Stupidity and over the top escapades on social media became celebrated,
and the dumber the content, the more popular he became.
Now there were a lot of critics of Lil Pump and his questionable influences
on the younger generation, but two people stuck out as being the most vocal.
J Cole, and Russ.
Now J Cole got his fair share of hate at the time, but he was also clearly far more
successful and loved than Lil Pump outside of the SoundCloud circle, so he survived
without a scratch. There was a several month long period where he was constantly
the butt of jokes about being old and washed up though.
J Cole finally silenced the critics when he had an hour long chat face to face with
Lil Pump, where they set aside their differences and had a heart to heart.
From that moment on it was clear to anyone watching that J Cole was just a head and shoulders
above Lil Pump, and the interaction almost felt like a father trying to point his
son in the right direction.
I honestly think this was a pretty pivotal moment in both of their careers.
Lil Pump realised he needed to mature, and J Cole found a bit of common ground
with the newer wave of rappers coming up after him.
Russ, on the other hand, didn't get off so lightly.
Basically, Lil Pump no longer felt like trying to use J Cole as a punching bag on social
media, so went all in on an investment into the f Russ movement.
Exactly why he did so, no one really knows, but it was probably just an easy target.
Russ had already been coming under criticism after wearing this shirt while performing
shortly after Lil Peep passed away in 2017, and many saw that as extremely insensitive.
My assumption is Lil Pump simply went for the low hanging fruit and saw it as a way to bring
more Soundcloud Rap enjoyers onto his side.
He started things off with a tweet.
"Me and J Cole Cool Now So It's F Russ".
Clearly the then 17 year old was just playing around,
but his million plus army of impressionable children didn't really care.
They went all in on hating on Russ, and just went about
flaming the guy relentlessly.
Russ had also been very critical in the past of rappers who glorified use,
which apparently was considered "corny" at the time.
This, paired with the very outspoken statement on his shirt
probably made Lil Pump feel directly targeted, because a majority
of his music was about exactly that.
Now Russ didn't really help things with his VladTV interview either,
which was posted about a year before it really started to kick off.
He even went in on producers, stating that producers are making wack s***, and that you have to blame them for the terrible music that was being released at the time.
Now this made pretty much the entire music industry turn against him after
the video resurfaced in 2018.
Frank Dukes and Metro Boomin as well as several other hugely influential producers
all came out to criticise Russ for his fairly inflammatory comments,
which brought a whole other group of people onto the hate train.
There's also SmokePurpp, Lil Pump's considerably less successful clone.
He was also constantly disrespecting Russ and repeating the "f Russ"
narrative.
In September 2018, Vice posted this article,
titled "So, Why Does Everyone Hate Russ?"