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Edward Skeletrix’s compelling Museum Music gives conceptual art a bad rap

Memes, rage rap, performance art, commodity fetish. Welcome to Skeletrix Island.

January 28, 2025
Edward Skeletrix’s compelling <i>Museum Music</i> gives conceptual art a bad rap Cover art for "Fun" by Edward Skeletrix  

In the final days of 2024, Edward Skeletrix put on a show. A popup art gallery in New York City featured AI-generated memes, work by frequent collaborator Brennan Jones and Chinese rapper Jack Zebra, and Skeletrix himself on display in an acrylic box, echoing Marina Abromavić’s 1974 work Rhythm 0. Fans poked and prodded at the rapper, dousing him in water to provoke a response. Later, a couple enterprising individuals began dropping lit pieces of paper into Edward’s enclosure. The exhibition shuttered early, with Skeletrix posting, “My own fans tried to light me on fire at the event, that’s why you guys couldn’t get inside.” Abromavić would later say of Rhythm 0, “If you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

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Where Abromavić’s performance considered the interpersonal relationship between humans, Skeletrix’s zooms in the expectations and entitlements of the entertainment industry, his perspective sharpened by his years orbiting the worlds of rap, fashion, and modern art. The Florida-via-Atlanta artist spent the early 2010s as a producer working with artists like Night Lovell and XXXTentacion under the name cight, and in late 2018 founded the fashion brand syckli.

The subsequent year, he generated a massive wave of attention for a bizarre aesthetic on TikTok, equally informed by lo-fi artificial intelligence and TikTok’s brain-rotting algorithm. Where most AI-based art attempts to transcend its uncanny valley attributes, Skeletrix’s work here aggressively leaned into the medium’s blatant unreality. These creepy “Skeletrix Island” memes quickly took off, a clear precursor to the CGI-gore of emerging videographers like paintingdemons. His mid-2019 rechristening as Edward Skeletrix, paired with an ahead-of-the-curve visual grammar, quickly netted him the micro-viral success that permeates our present era.

Edward Skeletrix’s compelling <i>Museum Music</i> gives conceptual art a bad rap Cover art for "Life Got Dark" by Edward Skeletrix  

Deploying his contemporaries’ typical sound kits to avant-garde aims, Skeletrix’s skewering of the hip-hop ecosystem would come across contrived or reactionary if the music wasn’t so engrossing. On his new double album Museum Music/Im a Monster, Skeletrix traces the veins of capital crisscrossing our 21st-century lives with wry aplomb over beats ranging from melancholic to malevolent. Playboi Carti and Kanye West are the clearest inspirations for their auteurism, but Museum Music is equally indebted to the mutated operatics of Trippie Redd and Travis Scott, digicore’s glitched out chaos and Death Grips’ unabashed aggression. Drugs, designer, fast cars, OnlyFans: when he labels himself a hedonist, it’s less “life of the party” than “downward spiral.” If hip-hop occasionally allows you to forget the root of all evil, Edward Skeletrix is here to remind you — just watch him hit this money spread real quick.

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Skeletrix’s trollish impulses make deeper readings of his work thorny at best. Intricately composed and aggressively dumb, Skeletrix’s work deliberately obscures its intention where another artist might choose to proselytize. The music is placed at the center of a toxic circular critique: If you think Museum Music/Im A Monster is an insightful commentary on the current state of rap, then you fell for the shtick, and if you think it’s a bad joke, you’re not smart enough to get it. But there’s a more interesting, less irony-sick creative tension animating Skeletrix’s songs, bearing a meticulous detail suggesting despite his cynicism, Skeletrix still has a complicated hope for the future.

Take “Label Meeting,” a lucid nightmare about the constellation of businessmen and hangers-on orbiting teen phenom Nettspend. Skeletrix is serious about his distaste for industry exploitation, going so far as to call out DJ PHAT by name. But the song also “features” Brennan Jones, a white rapper who is a flagrant Glokk40Spaz clone, once said in a joint interview with Skeletrix that he likes Kanye West because he likes Hitler, and doesn’t actually rap anywhere on “Label Meeting.” Is it a long con to force fans of lowest common denominator slop-trap to grapple with the moral and cultural implications of their consumption? Or simply an easy way to game streaming algorithms and gin up some more plays? Inscrutable and bewildering, Skeletrix’s affiliation with Jones, as well as “crashout” rapper HOLOTTACHEESE, complicates his critique. But rejecting easy reading in favor of “postmodernist irony” is probably the point, colliding high-brow conceits and low-brow sounds with an exaggerated wink.

On the surface, these songs can be silly or superficial, melodramatic or downright pretentious. They diffract the tropes and palettes of rage, trap, and cloud rap, sometimes elaborating, sometimes simplifying, but always stretching towards something peculiar and serrated. As a lyricist Skeletrix tends towards straightforward syntax and direct images, but this belies the music’s thematic complexity, even if he defaults to defensive snark. A line like, “fuck the art, I’m tryna get rich like Zuck,” is a punchline with no setup; juxtaposed against a maelstrom of sardonic flexes (“These n****s broke as fuck with likes”), vulnerable flashes (“Life’s so funny it gotta be a joke”), and willfully boneheaded bars (“I don’t give a fuck / big black truck”), it’s both raison d’etre and existential complaint. The ambiguity serves as a head fake and a spoonful of sugar: casual listeners can enjoy the rumbling 808s and die-hards can plumb the fragmentary lyric sheets. Unbelievers will be turned away at the door.

Preaching isn’t really Edward’s thing. His rebukes of contemporary culture are part and parcel with his participation in the same — he’ll rap “I can’t give a fuck about some clothes,” one song after specifying he’s wearing Hedi Slimane. For every track grimly detailing economic exploitation and the corrupting influence of plastic surgery, there’s another littered with brand-names and violent threats. Even at his most blatantly satirical or disdainful — “Bitch I’m on a yachty with my lil uzi,” goes one line on “Typical Rap Song 12;” “Know you wanna be like Ari, bounce somе titty for your checks,” he raps on “Blue” — you never quite get the sense that Skeletrix is critiquing other people so much as the air they breathe.

The album is presented as two identically titled records, one credited to Edward Skeletrix and the other to Im A Monster. The album under his proper name is sparer, more experimental, while Im A Monster hews closer to mainstream rage, though the distinction can be fuzzy. Both halves are prone to hairpin turns, like when the jet engine rumble of in-demand snippet “God” abruptly segues into the Tamagotchi chirps of “Smoke” on Monster or when the giddy synths of “OnlyFan” give way to the dejected 8-bit melody of “Yo Bro Will Kill You For A Band.”

One imagines most listeners will hear the album under the Skeletrix name first, yet the official “Museum Music (Full Album)” playlist starts with the more readily digestible Im A Monster (There’s a possible hint of Frank Ocean business savvy besides — Skeletrix’s side project was uploaded to YouTube via DistroKid, not UMG). These albums are very much of the same cloth, but the split seems to reflect a flexibility in Skeletrix’s artistic vision; imagine a diptych whose halves are placed in separate rooms.

Four years after his TikTok boom, Edward began releasing singles under the Skeletrix moniker in spring 2023, culminating in December’s Skeletrix Language. Here, key sonic motifs from Museum Music were already hard at work, from the heaven-sent Clams Casino tones of “Skeletrix Island 4” to the Carti-everting “Rappéur FW 24 SS 24.” The bulk of the album comprises 11 tracks named “Typical Rap Song,” poking fun at the incessant churn and regurgitation of the genre’s most commercialized sounds. Skeletrix Language came with a convoluted rollout of its own, a digital scavenger hunt bouncing from YouTube to SoundCloud to LinkedIn.

This semi-opaque, multiplatform campaign evoked the cultish mania of standom in miniature, a schizophrenic collage of details forming an artificial whole. Skeletrix’s elaborate stunts can scan as gauche, or worse, distracting, but you might say the same about Playboi Carti’s “ongoing” “rollout” for I AM MUSIC, or Charli XCX’s multipronged brat blitzkrieg, or simply the way musicians have to promote themselves on TikTok and Instagram these days. If we’re already considering the marketing before the music, Edward says, “why not make the marketing art?”

Skeletrix’s music toys with meaning, but that shouldn’t be confused for meaninglessness. When he raps, “Why should I even try on this song? … Fuck this song, makin’ art for the money,” on “Sunny Days In The A’,” it’s self-evident Skeletrix is trying very hard. These songs are not jokes or skits, even when they devolve into terribad puns (“She play with my heart and my balls, Lonzo”) or campily hypermasculine boasts (“I don’t even beat my meat!”). The production is crisp and kooky, with a predilection for squealing metal and engulfing low-end, or somber piano and seraphic vocal pads. Skeletrix’s raps themselves are vapid but never lifeless, his delivery ranging from muted growls to singsong cadences and slippery melodies to roaring bangers. The net effect is hyperreal, emphasizing the nihilism and misogyny of rap as a microcosm for the moral rot that pervades society at large. I see blood in the Cullinan; there are bones beneath these bourgeois delights.

Edward Skeletrix’s compelling Museum Music gives conceptual art a bad rap