NLE Choppa. Photo by Jimmy Fontaine.
Rap Blog is a weekly showcase of a standout rap song.
A month ago at Rolling Loud California, NLE Choppa demanded the crowd get their phones out. “Y’all might want to save this snippet, cuz I’m finna give y’all a sneak peek to ‘Slut Me Out 2,’” he announced. “It’s a little different, but it’s all the way the same.”
Released two years ago, the original “Slut Me Out” is the highest-charting song of NLE’s career to date. The first half of the hook briefly became a TikTok trend, but the track is perhaps best remembered for visceral couplets like “Play with my gooch while you suck me/Eat the dick like you was ugly” and “Ever sucked a vegan dick? Baby, come taste me/Promise that my nut taste like sugar gravy.” Naturally, NLE tapped Sexyy Red and Sukihana, two of the least coy rappers alive, when he remixed “Slut Me Out” last year. How could he possibly get any sluttier?
The answer has arrived. Combining chipper chords and insistently throbbing 808s, “Slut Me Out 2” is more immediately danceable than its predecessor, obviously indebted to the wave of club rap that has swept the nation in recent years. “If I was a bad bitch/I’d wanna fuck me too/I’d wanna suck me too/I’d wanna slut me too.” To listen is to reenact the Jay-Z head nod meme in real life. Where another rapper might deliver these lines with winking irony, or instead say, “if you were a bad bitch, you’d wanna fuck me too,” NLE Choppa is blissfully unencumbered by traditional hip-hop hypermasculinity.
He’s more hedonistic than feminist, but that hedonism encompasses mutual pleasure — “Bitch sit on my face… Suffocate me til I die” — and even a modicum of respect from one slut to another. In that sense, NLE Choppa fits neatly alongside a number of contemporary female rappers like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, whose lyrics understand sex as an erotic activity, not just a trophy for success. And there is a clarity in NLE’s pornographic bars that pushes beyond the merely sexual into a realm approaching genuine sexiness. After all, sex is messy and weird and funny too. ”Mmmmm/smell like badussy… I’m tryna eat that ass and the pussy.” Spoken like a true gourmand.
