Bhad Bhabie and Alabama Barker’s Rap Beef Warrants Column on Pitchfork

Solely, wait, let me rephrase: the rap beef of the yr to this point options one such woman, after which one other one who appears to play the half on-line. The latter, 19-year outdated Alabama Barker, is at present an influencer who made her showbiz debut the identical yr she was born (2005) on the second and remaining season of Meet the Barkers, her household’s actuality present. “It exhibits every little thing from us principally fucking on the Playboy Mansion, to our son’s first steps,” pitched her father, Travis, Blink-182 drummer turned resident unc of the cursed pop-punk revival of the early 2020s. He and his second spouse, former Miss USA Shanna Moakler, bought their daughter’s identify from an amazing film, 1993’s True Romance, through which Alabama Whitman, call-girl with a coronary heart of gold, proclaims winningly to her husband-to-be: “I need you to know that I’m not broken items! I’m not what they name in Florida ‘white trash!’”

Since December of final yr, Alabama Barker has been feuding with 21-year-old Bhad Bhabie, the sometimes-rapper and high-dollar OnlyFans mannequin who lived a previous life as a meme, having debuted within the public eye alongside her distraught mom in a 2016 Dr. Phil episode titled, “I Need To Give Up My Automobile-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Yr Previous Daughter Who Tried To Body Me For A Crime.” By 2017, the South Florida teenager had remodeled right into a rapper (an Atlantic A&R referred to as her the day after the episode aired) whose songs have been nowhere close to as unhealthy as they may have been. At the least they have been on the extent of the opposite SoundCloud rap songs that beset the Billboard charts in 2017, the yr that memes overtook music by means of social media stars and TV personalities.

I can admit I’ve had a comfortable spot for Bhad Bhabie ever since I profiled her within the fall of 2017. She was 15 on the time, and strikingly candid in a method that each impressed me and made me profoundly unhappy. In a nail salon in Brooklyn, she casually admitted she’d had no designs on rapping till Atlantic referred to as. “I’ve this platform, being well-known. I can see how I need to use it,” she’d shrugged, choosing at a bacon-cream cheese bagel. However she’d all the time been inventive when it got here to storytelling, and her truest expertise, as she cheerfully instructed me, was deception. “I’m a extremely good liar, so I find yourself snitching on myself,” she stated. Did she like the sensation of being in hassle, I questioned? “I don’t know if I like the sensation of being in hassle, or if I similar to the sensation of you realizing that I simply tricked you,” she answered with a smile.