Photo credit: Kellan McCullough
The most memorable rap collaborations tend to be the unlikeliest ones, the projects that pair artists whose work seems to exist in almost entirely different worlds. That conventional wisdom proved true this spring when one of Milwaukee’s most broadly popular rap stars, IshDARR, released a collaborative EP called Ali Boys with Marratedr, a rapper and producer whose own music, to put it gently, isn’t nearly so accessible.
For IshDARR fans being exposed to Marratedr for the first time, there was a good chance they didn’t like what they heard. Between his groggy voice, terse wordplay and dank, disjointed beats, Marratedr is one of the Milwaukee rap scene’s great acquired tastes. His songs are all bone and gristle. Most clock in around two minutes—many well under—and few offer anything that could be considered a chorus. At its most approachable his music is odd, and at its most avant-garde it can be outright distressing.
Like most rappers these days, Marratedr works fast. Each month he posts new tracks to his Soundcloud page, some as standalone curios, others bundled as EPs. Some songs are so brief and abstract they almost feel incomplete, but there’s a sense of humor at work—the more you listen, the more his extreme minimalism begins to feel like a joke, each song’s abrupt end a kind of punchline. The best ones leave you wondering what the hell you just listened to.
As Marratedr sees it, there are two paths for rappers who want to build an audience, play to the masses or play to a base. He’s opted for the path that involves the least compromise. “I just want to make the dopest shit, the coldest shit,” he says. “Some people fuck with it. Others are whatever.”
Marratedr began rapping in high school during the early 2010s, the era when the internet was leaving its first real mark on hip-hop, encouraging ever-weirder and more adventurous styles. He devoured releases by acts like Odd Future and A$AP Rocky, and listened to his fair share of Travis Scott, too, which may be where some of his music’s darker edge comes from, but he raps with an orneriness and brevity that’s all his own. Travis Scott never recorded anything quite so outside the box.
With its vaporous synths, one early standout on his Soundcloud page, “HO I WOKE UP INA DREAM,” plays like the score to a horror movie that’s become tangled in a VHS player. On “DEAD***,” a track from this winter, Marratedr raps in a grim, crypt-keeper rasp over bass that sounds like it’d been filtered through an asylum’s padded walls. And even his hookier recent tracks, like “FLEXXX***” from this summer’s kinetic MUDD*** EP, play like he’s toying with the listener’s synapses.
That EP, along with its sequel THIS YEAR*** EP from August, show that Marratedr has some real pop instincts—loopy pop instincts, but pop instincts nonetheless. IshDARR returns to cameo on THIS YEAR***’s opening track, “GRID***,” and it’s surprising how seamlessly the two lock into the same wavelength. The track suggests that the two rapper’s worlds may not be all that far apart after all, and Marratedr says that although his music may tend toward the more iconoclastic end of the spectrum right now, that doesn’t mean it always will.
“That’s what’s crazy; I could make that stuff, too,” he says, pointing to IshDARR’s more accessible, party-ready style of rap. “I don’t give myself boundaries, so you might be surprised. I might switch it up one day and make the craziest radio hit! I could make it clean. I could do all that stuff, depending on how I’m feeling.”
Marratedr’s music is streaming at soundcloud.com/marratedr.
