1900Rugrat sees the same thing you see. He’s FaceTiming me from the Warner Music Group building in Manhattan with a Chrome Hearts beanie, a cran-apple Geek Bar and an uncommon level of self-awareness. “I knew [once] I go on, it’s no stopping me, cuz one, I know how to rap, two, I’m funny as shit, and three, I’m white,” he laughs. “It just throw them off guard. Everybody be judging a book by they cover.”

Half a year ago, Rugrat was a 21-year-old aspiring rapper living in Limestone Creek (pop. 1,534), a South Florida enclave whose biggest claim to fame was a 52-acre nature preserve. Then, viral freestyles snowballed into trending music videos, followed by a label bidding war. Now signed to Remain Solid/300, he’s relishing his latest business trip to New York City. “I'm hanging out the window today. I'm just yelling at folks like, ‘I'm fucking Wolf of Wall Street! I'm fucking Leonardo DiCaprio, bitch!’”

The trajectory isn’t unique, but the sheer momentum of these milestones feels dramatic even among his peers. Consider the September TikTok behind his breakout single “One Take Freestyle,” recorded straight into the phone camera as the beat plays: Cracka got an AR / Like he shooting schools up / Yellow widebody, Hellcat look like a school bus. Every few lines his eyes dart to the side, where his verse must have been written out, but the energy stays up. It helps that the instrumental, a stammering rework of “U.O.E.N.O.” by Rocko, has a hypnotic melody and thudding drums, but Rugrat himself is magnetic, his lithe flow folding together the cadences of Chief Keef and Kodak Black. When he spits, “Glock got a red dick, sumn like a dog do,” the metallic crimson tail of an extended clip dangles at the top of the frame.

That was on September 8 — 1900Rugrat hadn’t even laid the vocals down in the booth yet. When it was released five days later, his initial verses were largely unchanged, but he had adjusted his pocket, landing on downbeats as opposed to skipping over them. There was a Cybertruck-spotlighting music video a couple weeks later, then an On The Radar Radio appearance at the top of October, which pushed online chatter into predictable overdrive.

All the while he was taking label calls and visits, recording new music at a furious clip in sponsored sessions, leaving the days of scrounging up money to hit the studio for a couple hours a month far in the rearview. A few short weeks later, he popped out with an enormous numerical neck tat.

He explains: “I could either be that white boy that blew up, or I could be 1900Rugrat. And you’re not gonna remember 1900Rugrat unless you could tell that’s 1900Rugrat.

“I could have been that or that, and I chose what I wanted to be.”

1900Rugrat was born Miles Spiel in 2003. He doesn’t know his biological parents. He was adopted around two weeks old and grew up in Limestone Creek, FL, roughly 30 minutes north of West Palm Beach.

“Jupiter’s like a suburb, and then there’s two Section 8’s right by the interstate, and that’s Kennedy Estates and Limestone Creek,” Rugrat tells me. “Police be all on our dick over there — they got a whole police station right next to our neighborhood ducked off in the woods.”

“Our shit sheriff jurisdiction — the rest of the town is Jupiter jurisdiction,” he continues. “So they got a whole police station just for us. That shit throwed.”

1900 had a “regular childhood,” though he admits to being a bit of a “bad kid.” When he was six years old, Rugrat met Rick, aka Rickfrmdacreek, at the tutorial center, “a little aftercare right in the hood in Limestone.” The pair became fast friends. “I really known cuh all my life,” Rugrat says. “I’ve known cuh in memories a bitch prolly don’t even got no more, that’s how long we go back.”

“I got real close with cuh and his family to the point where he was like my second family. I was doing a bunch of shit, getting kicked out of school, all type of shit, and my folks who adopted me kicked me out the crib [at 14]. So I ended up moving in with cuh right down the street, and cuh family went from being my second family to being my family for real.”

Rugrat grew up listening to Keef, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, and Gucci Mane, though he’s quick to mention he enjoys Jackson 5, Bobby Womack, and Pink Floyd as well. He started rapping around 2016, just before he moved in with Rick.

“My wordplay was crazy, I just wasn’t talking about shit, you feel me?” he says of his early songs. “I was like, I’m saucing on these hoes, ketchup, no mustard… My brothers pull up you frozen like custard.”

“I wasn’t no Lil Wayne at 13, I wasn’t no Bow Wow at 13. I was ass,” he laughs. “That’s probably why I ain’t blow up. But now shit elevated. If people like, ‘You ass, keep pushing,’ you’ll get better.”

In a YouTube appearance the same week as our interview, Rugrat will credit Rick specifically, saying, “Cuh really the reason I’m real nice with freestyling. He always used to tell me, ‘You not no real rapper if you can’t freestyle, you not no real rapper if you can’t rap on any beat.’ So I just be freestyling on anything, commercials, all type of shit.”

And 1900Rugrat can really rap. Keef and Kodak are audible enough in his flows, but there are also glimpses of Wizz Havinn’s unvarnished tough talk and the murmured stylings of Veeze. Lyrically, his rhymes land closer to Lil Wayne’s punchline heavy approach, so his verses are littered with instant-rewind quotables: “The opps ain’t tryna feel that belt, they hand over they booty” (“Auntie Ain’t Playin”), “brand new stick, wave the bitch like Selena, I do magic” (“Clean & Dirty”), “Up the stick and get to clickin like I’m Adam Sandler” (“Demure”).

Rugrat’s improvement over the past eight years is the result of diligent study and practice. “I listen to NoCap and Rylo [Rodriguez], and I was like, I can't rap for shit, I need to get better. That was a few years back, and I really switched up how I be writing my shit,” he says. “For example, the way they be doing their metaphors — like, I'm in the Warner Building right now. I don’t want no industry bitch/told her she gonna be fucked up bout me/I had to warn her. That’s how they do it. They don’t just be like, ‘I’m high like a kite,’ similes. And I was stuck on simile rap until I had peeped the way NoCap and Rylo be rapping.”

Like Eminem and Paul Wall before him, 1900Rugrat doesn’t shy away from his whiteness — he says “cracka” more than a starving parakeet — and creates music with undeniable technical skill. But he rarely markets his race in the same fashion as ian and Lil Mabu, contemporaries 1900Rugrat might be unfairly compared to. Those artists pull on street rap aesthetics as a troll, playing up an ironic contrast with their appearance and backgrounds. Even when the songs are good, the marketing leaves a foul aftertaste, as if we’re supposed to be charmed by a white boy acting like he doesn’t really need rap.

White rappers often seem fine-tuned to appeal to Caucasian fans at the margins who otherwise wouldn’t listen to similar music from Black artists. By contrast, 1900Rugrat is laser focused on hip-hop’s mainstream center, at least as seen from the peninsula: the South Florida commercial universe, where Kodak Black and Bossman Dlow hold so much weight their mere presence distorts reality. And Rugrat is keen to separate himself from his peers by lyricism too, proving and reproving his bonafides via endless freestyles on SoundCloud.

Just shy of five years ago, The FADER sat down with Mac Miller and Vince Staples to discuss the position of white rappers in hip-hop. “Being in a certain social situation and being of a certain kind of class has nothing to do with what color you are,” Vince said. “They couldn’t understand Kreayshawn because they never been to Oakland.” 1900Rugrat presents a similarly distorted version of white America’s self-mythologies.

In a livestream this past fall, 1900Rugrat said he was locked up with one of the Island Boys, before they got their signature tattoos. When I ask how long he was inside, an off-screen handler says, “we’re going to move past that.”

In that same livestream, 1900Rugrat said he doesn’t say the N-word anymore, although he had previously. “I was mad bullheaded about that shit cuz the family that took me in is black, so they always told me like, ‘If a bitch tell you you can’t say it, just tell they ass, “Bitch you can ask my mama, I can say what I want.

“And that’s how I was for a few months when I got locked up until a oldhead had sat me down and he was like, ‘When a bitch see you, they don’t see your family and who raised you, they seeing your color.’”

It’s a frank if unflattering response to a thorny question. Rugrat is by no means the first to face this sort of scrutiny: Eminem rapped the N-word frequently in his teenage years, and others like NAV and V-Nasty have said it on wax well after blowing up. For some listeners, any explanation of his past behavior will be written off as PR fluff, but his answer on-stream struck me as candid.

When I ask 1900 for more details of that penitentiary conversation, an off-screen voice says, “we’re going to skip that one too.”

“White boy with a big stick, call me Cracker Barrel;” “Groovy-ass cracker I feel like Elvis;” 1900’s self-professed comedic chops could keep him from being corny forever, and they’re not just in his music. At the end of 2024 he starred in “Young Crackas,” a two-minute short that transmutes “Young N***a” memes into something out of an old Looney Tunes gag. Problematic, no doubt, but ambiently so, like “Chinatown” by Migos or White Chicks (2004). Hip-hop toys with stereotypes: sometimes twisting, rejecting, or breaking them down, but also mimicking, exaggerating, and amplifying. Under that lens, “what the fuck in the YC shit they got going on over there,” is not only mildly subversive, but part and parcel with genre conventions.

There are signs that 1900Rugrat is creeping closer to the mainstream. Two days after Kendrick Lamar swept the Grammys with “Not Like Us,” Drake posted a black and white Instagram reel of himself on stage in Australia, “smoke” pouring out of faux-bullet holes in his hoodie. In the back, a bass-boosted remix of “One Take Freestyle” plays as Rugrat raps, I’m already white ho, I don’t need no white bitch.

“I had probably jumped out the bed when I seen that shit,” 1900 says. “That shit blew my mind. I seen that, I was just freaking out. I woke my bitch up, I’m shaking her like, ‘Babe! DRAKE POSTED ME!!’”

Despite the heavyweight endorsements, his debut mixtape Porch 2 The Pent, out now, sidesteps the hype, expanding 1900Rugrat’s sound without compromise. There’s the Lex Luger-channeling “Way 2 Geeked” and the starry-eyed sway of “Wtf.” He sounds like Lil Uzi Vert at their most yearning on late album highlight “Molly Girl” and bounces across “Never Dat” like prime Gucci Mane with a Zaytoven pack. There’s a loose narrative arc, from jumping off the porch to making it big, that threads the album’s harder-hitting gangster raps to its plusher, more aspirational cuts.

Lil Yachty, Bossman Dlow, and Skrilla feature, as does Kodak Black on the “One Take Freestyle” remix, though the best collaboration is clearly “Dyin Bout Respect” with Rickfrmdacreek. “Red and blue E pill, look like Clark Kent / They said I wouldn’t make it bitch and I ain’t stop since,” Rugrat snarls. Rick seizes the moment on his verse, stuffing racks in the pockets of his Purple jeans and sliding the Maybach “like a wheelchair.”

The album pivots around the two-thirds mark, swinging from trap bangers to more soulful instrumentals. These songs lean towards the passion and intimacy of Thot Breaker-era Keef, romantically-inclined if not quite vulnerable. My favorite of these is “Tender,” where Rugrat’s nasal Auto-Tune pierces through a hazy soul chop. “Girl you pressure I been tryna blow some steam off / Got way too comfortable, I’m fuckin her with my chains on,” he croons.

“I like being able to cater to all audiences, because I like all types of music. [And] I want to be able to listen to myself when I'm in whatever mood, too,” Rugrat says. “If I'm in my feelings about a shorty, I want to be able to put my music on and be in my feelings about the shorty [...] Being able to cover all that and put all different types of emotion into your music is important to me.”

His goals for the year are simple, though not quite modest. “I want to make a million dollars. I want to have my album go #1,” he says. “Meet Adele, you know. The usual goals.” And when it comes to how he hopes listeners hear the album, he turns motivational.

“For anybody that knows what it's like to have nun’, [or] is still in that position — it's better days coming. I wasn’t nobody with no daddy's money, I wasn’t no nepo baby, like I didn't have no connections, I don't got no famous relative. Anybody could do that shit, bro. Ain't nobody in Palm Beach ever blew up. But now I bet it's a lot of people that feel like they can.”