Shout out to PETA.” On one Sr3mm song he raps, absurdly, about “whipping up checks like tofu.” “The vegans are gonna fuck with that line,” he tells me. Anyone fucking with wildlife, poaching them, they need to be taken out. I wanna go in the jungle and see elephants and shit. “She recommended the pigs, and I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m rich.'”īut Swae says he’s an animal lover, too: “I like wildlife. “They ran around my old crib, biting everything, tearing up couches.” I ask how he grew interested in pet monkeys and pigs, and he nods at Marliesia.
The pigs are “on a farm out somewhere towards the desert so they can be happy and terrorize stuff,” he says. Swae also spent $15,000 on a baby Capuchin monkey named Naya, who’s elsewhere in the house, and he owns two dogs and two mini-pigs, too. Lil G, who cost Swae $20,000, is “two, three months old,” he says, and wearing a tiny monkey diaper that members of the Sremmurd entourage are tasked with changing during my visit. “You don’t have gentle hands.” She sighs, accustomed, it seems, to his needling. Swae’s seeming girlfriend, Marliesia, is standing beside him, braiding his hair.
As he talks, his pet spider monkey, Lil G, curls up against his stomach. Swae is barechested, wearing camouflage shorts and a necklace made of linked gold-and-diamond fish skeletons. I don’t think he knew our music, but he was chitchatting with us, dropping all this game, telling us to stay true.” “I actually met him years ago at Coachella,” Swae says of McCartney. (The duo are part of a music-making collective called Ear Drummers, presided over by the Atlanta superproducer Mike Will Made-It, and their name is the collective’s name spelled backward.) The new album will come on the heels of the biggest success of their career – the quintuple-platinum 2016 single “Black Beatles,” featuring Gucci Mane, which topped the Hot 100 for seven weeks, soundtracked the viral “mannequin challenge” and earned an endorsement from none other than Paul McCartney, who’s name-checked in the lyrics and who uploaded his own version of the challenge, posing motionless at a piano while the song played. on a March afternoon and Rae Sremmurd are putting the finishing-touches on their imminent third album, which has a working title of Sr3mm. “But I couldn’t feel anything, ’cause you’re in shock.” “I could see the meat in my leg,” he recalls. “I’m like a stuntman for real,” he tells me, hiking up the right leg of his blue boxing trunks to show off a gnarly horseshoe-shaped scar on his thigh. In 2015, minutes into a Governors Ball set, Jxmmi jumped off the stage and split his leg open.
You can hear the difference in their personalities in their music – Swae slipping into silky, lover-man melodies Jxmmi rapping with scowling aggression about haters – and you can see it in their live shows. He tells me he’s got a baby on the way, but impending fatherhood clearly hasn’t slowed him down. If Swae seems unflappably laid-back, Jxmmi is wilder, more intense. Singer Paulette McWilliams on Her Years With Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and Steely Danįor the brothers of Rae Sremmurd, “Sremmlife” is an all-purpose motto connoting a nonstop whirl of partying, thrill-chasing, money-spending and, on occasion, vehicular death-tempting.