There are songs that suck. Then, there are songs about sucking. "Throat Baby," by BRS Kash, falls into the latter category. And over the past seven months, it has become one of the biggest songs in the country, continuing to climb to new heights in popularity — all while having some of the most vulgar lyrics, with an even more explicit remix, in recent chart history.
"Throat Baby" is a song that's pretty much about Tinder for throats. BRS Kash, who has a serious fetish for oral sex, spends the duration of the four-minute song campaigning for the chance to place his member between various women's jaws. His optimism is one of the song's defining traits. He's confident throughout — so much so, that he calls a woman a "head monster" and then, immediately after, says that his soul needs her holy "anointing." Somebody get this guy a fleshlight.
BRS Kash is arguably one of the hottest rappers in the world right now, with the song that keeps on giving (head). Born and raised in Atlanta, he realized that he wanted to make music at 12 years old when, needing a talent for a modeling contest, he started to record himself singing. Over the next three years, he worked on music — until the death of a friend in 2015 that led him to take a year off and reevaluate his career.
Upon returning to the microphone, he forged his path onward. What would eventually become his viral breakout single (now credited as his official debut) was inspired by a wild night in 2019 with a female friend. Kash was initially just messing around in the studio, but friends managed to convince him to release the track — even though he didn't want to. "I didn't want there to be a backlash coming at me, so I wasn't sure if we should be putting this out," he revealed to Audiomack last year.
BRS Kash released "Throat Baby" on November 22, 2019. It picked up traction as Atlanta-based TikTok users pulled it into their orbit and played a huge part in its virality, creating cradle-rocking routines to the song's melodic, extremely raunchy chorus. The song's success led him to sign with LVRN and Interscope Records last August, and the TikTok routines have continued to pour in — in October alone, there were 460,000 videos on the platform created with the song playing.
As viral songs do, their success tends to swell before faltering off as soon as the next trend comes. BRS Kash played the game smartly and, instead of letting that happen, released a high-powered and unexpected, remix featuring DaBaby and City Girls in January, alerting the world that the reign of "Throat Baby'' wasn't going to be limited to 2020 exclusively. With some juicy verses from City Girls, a now-infamous clip of DaBaby snowboarding on what looks to be a mouthful of snow that's supposed to be, well, you know, and a cameo appearance from the internet's favorite fellatio practitioner Teanna Trump, the remix blasted the song to even newer heights and confirmed it to be a culture-defining moment.
With all of the fervor surrounding "Throat Baby," its remix, and its video, it's no wonder that the song has amassed more than 194 million global streams. For the week of February 16, "Throat Baby" sat at the top of the Urban Radio charts and the week before that, it hit the Top 10 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. All in all, the song has more than 300 million streams and is also currently one of the three highest Shazamed songs in Atlanta.
As for BRS Kash, he released his debut project, Kash Only, in January, and just dropped a new track, "Kash App," featuring Mulatto. He's clearly moving on into the future. With the platform that he has now, anything's possible — but his legacy right now is that everyone, everywhere, knows exactly what a throat baby is.
Welcome to "Memes to Streams," a column by music writer Trey Alston about the light switch moment that turns a random song on the internet into a chart-topping phenomenon. Only in this age of virality are we able to see pop culture change literally overnight, often in ways no one could have predicted.
Screenshot via YouTube