In high school, Fenix Flexin and OhGeesy became cool through a life of tagging, skating, and hitting up L.A. area EDM clubs. They later went onto form the rap crew Shoreline Mafia, who in the late 2010s had a couple summers on lock with a few songs that I consider to be essential in the West Coast party rap canon. To this day—after a breakup and a reunion that trimmed the four-man group down to a duo—they remain massively popular regional rap stars with diehards who swear by them, a luxury that gives the dudes the freedom to just do shit.
Fenix has been taking full advantage of that free will. In a recent interview on Big Boy’s radio show, he previewed songs he was working up the confidence to drop, including John Summit-style festival EDM and punk rock with a live band which the comments section hilariously pointed out sounded like The Beets from Doug. To take it even further, he said he spent months walking around with a British accent to prepare for his new song “Rubberz,” his own version of a The Smiths song. For days now, the snippet has been floating across my Instagram feed, mostly because it’s ridiculous that an L.A. rapper known for twerk anthems and prescription drug punchlines now suddenly is pretending he grew up getting his heart kicked in on the streets of Manchester. That explains why the track has been getting hit with AI allegations, which he denied.
I believe him. Because even though “Rubberz” is incredibly goofy, the mash-up of Morrissey’s sadboy misery with Shoreline Mafia’s flexing feels far too strange for AI. “Gold rings on my fingers/Still your perfume lingers,” he sings, the tonal whiplash turning him into a character that could exist in the coked-out melancholia of an early Bret Easton Ellis novel. Despite the absurdity, I can’t tell if he’s treating it like a joke. When explaining the musical pivot to Big Boy he sounded really earnest. “It definitely is nerve-wracking,” he said, as Big Boy encouraged him like a little league dad. “Doing some music like that, not everybody will understand it for real.” He had a point there, because I don’t fully get it either. But fuck it—I won’t complain if this is what it takes to get one more Shoreline Mafia summer.
