In a new interview, the rapper and producer talks his own ego, social media, virality and much more
SEBii’s lyrics are playful, but his songwriting process is meticulous. Every beat sent to his email deemed worthy of mixing is twisted, flipped, and freestyled over before being uploaded to SoundCloud. Here, his audience is met with one of his latest releases, a seven-minute-long track titled “a self portrait of my EGO” that challenges the conventional two-minute runtime favored by emerging artists. Thanks to its unconventional formatting, SEBii is able to thoroughly explore his egotistical internet persona with lyrics that boil down to “yeah I just make songs / and I just be so good.” His braggadocious lyrics, however, don’t always line up with his offline lifestyle—understandably, it’s easier to rap about stacks, racks, and bands than it is to spit bars about quarantining with your grandma. However, as a major player among his contemporaries, SEBii’s exploration of ego is always fun, always relatable, and always catchy, even if he claims to be better than you.
“Music gives me the space to play different characters,” says SEBii from the apartment/studio he’s currently sharing with producers vvspipes and kimj. A month ago he was living in his grandma’s basement and spent the summer in The Middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts. Though SEBii claims to have been less inspired during quarantine, he still managed to release a slew of hits, drop his own merch line, and produce a music video for his most-streamed song “Play Poker (w/ Maple) Remix”—with cinematography by his grandma, of course. Though SEBii leaned into the role of doting grandson over the summer, that’s not the only character he was meant to play.
Days after moving out of the basement, SEBii released his latest single “BONErr,” which, unsurprisingly, was not made for his grandma’s ears. Produced by his roommates, “BONErr” is a tongue-in-cheek track inspired by Smokepurpp’s infamous “ZEZE Freestyle.” Smokepurpp, visibly embarrassed, ends his freestyle with a seemingly unintentional amount of phallic references, but when SEBii sings, “I feel like I’m Smokepurpp / cause I got a boner,” he is cocky, to say the least. SEBii’s “BONErr” is, in his own words, a “banger,” but more importantly, it’s a song that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
This playfulness is what makes SEBii so fun to listen to, as well as to collaborate with. Soon after releasing “BONErr,” SEBii dropped an acappella version of the track and asked his fellow producers and fan base to remix the song. Within hours, SEBii was sharing his favorite remixes on SoundCloud and championing the collaborative efforts of his peers. But SEBii admits that he isn’t actually great at collaborating one-on-one with other artists (unless they happen to be his roommates). “I’m not, like, a social person,” SEBii claims. “I feel like I’m on social media a good amount, but I don’t really talk to people, like even in the [SoundCloud] scene. I’ve kind of been away from the internet more.”
Despite his social aversions, SEBii’s music is undeniably based in online collaboration. The majority of his songs start as instrumental beats sent to his email from varying producers. From there, SEBii chooses the beat that “catches his ear,” regardless of the producer’s name attached to the file. Oftentimes, though, this is as far as his collaborative efforts go. SEBii is content to dissect and mix most of the tracks on his own: laying down his signature high-pitched vocals to match the original beat, only to remix the beat to match the vocals, and then rearranging the song’s elements to create something else entirely.
“When it’s finished, the beat’s never how it sounded when it was sent to me,” SEBii says, elaborating how he often samples sections of the beat rather than playing it in full in order to create a more compelling sound. “I try not to overthink things—and even when I do I mess things up—but I’m 100% thinking about song structure, syllable amount, if it’s catchy…my process is super intuitive now.”
While song structure is integral to an infectious SEBii track, he admits that his weakness lies in the lyrics. Oftentimes, SEBii just raps about whatever’s on his mind—or his stomach. Be it PINKlemonade, WASABii, or any RECIPii, SEBii has an obvious affinity for rapping about food, so long as the lyrics act as a double entendre for flexing. SEBii is big on bragging, but it’s easy to forgive him when his biggest flex is treating life like a buffet.
While SEBii’s lyrics are more about fun wordplay than a coherent storyline, he still manages to reveal bits of his character with each bar. Lyrics like, “yeah this is a new sound / I call it an update / I fix it with C# / you’re still using duct tape,” are catchy and clever, but they also speak to SEBii’s musical origins as a kid who used to pirate tons of software before eventually stumbling across a pirated version of Logic Pro. As a self-proclaimed “Pro at Logic Pro,” SEBii explains that he’s a super logical, scientific person, which is why he thinks he’s so effective at using DAWs to make music.
“My love for music comes from my love for software,” SEBii says, though he admits that he’s not totally invested in all digitized musical ventures. Like many other artists during quarantine, SEBii has performed in several online venues, including Lavapalooza, a two-day Minecraft festival that was dominated by his contemporaries. SEBii’s performance, however, was less a performance and more a pre-recorded DJ set emailed to the organizers. SEBii’s Minecraft avatar never made it to the show. “I don’t get these online concert things,” SEBii laughs. “Actually, I wasn’t even there when I performed [at Lavapalooza]. I totally forgot it was that day. I guess I didn’t realize how important these shows were until after they happened.”
Despite being more focused on producing music in real life, SEBii recognizes how much of his success is owed to online spaces, even if he’s still learning how to navigate them. Recently, SEBii DJed at PUNK URL, a Zoom party hosted and attended largely by TikTokkers—a social media demographic that has influenced the success of SEBii’s most-streamed song, “Play Poker (w/ Maple) Remix.” Thanks to the flood of TikToks that are using SEBii’s work as their soundtrack, the track recently hit over one million streams on Spotify. SEBii believes that TikTok is a great place to grow a following, especially for independent artists, but it’s hard to have control over what content becomes popular. “A lot of the underground scene has been ‘put on’ by TikTok, whether the scene likes to admit it or not,” SEBii says, “but I think everything is really temporary. Stuff blows up and then goes away.”
Unlike the virality of his fans’ TikToks, SEBii is not going away anytime soon. He is currently focused on working with vvspipes and kimj to produce a major project with a consistent sound, while also preparing for his senior year of college as an illustration student. Here, he hopes to flesh out the iconography of the SEBii brand—specifically his mascot, VV—by collaborating with visual artists. In the meantime, SEBii just wants to make catchy flex anthems for SoundCloud, even if he’s much more modest offline and off the track.
“Music is just something I do—I don’t talk about it too much in my real life,” SEBii admits, though it’s getting more and more difficult to deny his growing notoriety. “It’s almost like I have two lives.”
Listen to SEBii’s “a self portrait of my EGO” below.