Why Are So Many New Rappers Named After Osama Bin Laden?

The rise of Shawny Binladen is, in many ways, nothing new. Shawny’s part of a small scene: he’s a young drill rapper from the far reaches of Queens. He’s got a crew: YTB, a.k.a. Yellow Tape Boys. He, like any number of on-the-margins up-and-coming musicians, legit could blow up. Last year he released both a mixtape called Sliickladen and a mixtape called Drippy Christ. (This year he dropped Shawn Wick, named in honor of only a slightly lesser historical figure). On his recent single “Yellow Drill,” Shawny makes excellent use of an urgent stage-whisper flow: “I’m Binladen, bitch, get on your knees / Bitch, you know Binladen fuckin’ your niece.”

Of course, there is one difference between Shawny Binladen and any of his rap-world predecessors: as best I can tell, none of them were named after Osama Bin Laden.

And Shawny isn't alone.

No, Really!

Fat Dave is a rapper from North Carolina. In 2018 he put out an EP called Slime Osama, and in 2019 he put out FatDave Osama. This year he followed it up with Street Taliban. On the cover of that one, Fat Dave has a rifle strapped to his back and the Palestinian-style black and white kaffiyeh covering all but his eyes while he diligently pours cough syrup into a soda bottle. (Not that I need to tell you this, but the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden are two very separate geopolitical entities. Then again, Fat Dave is clearly playing fast and loose with the symbols here.) Last year he got some internet attention, understandably, for rapping over the Full House theme song (“House fulla opps, fuck it / slide in the block, go shoot the shit up”). I prefer the elegiac “Letter To My ******,” on which Dave pays tribute to the estranged family members and the close friends that have provided him foundational support over the years.

Then there's Lil Zay Osama, who is from the southwest side of Chicago. Signed to Warner Bros., he sings more than he raps, and has a clear commercial appeal. (He grew up listening to Justin Bieber.) He has a song called "White Friends" where he pitches his voice up into a pop-punk whine for a very amusing emo-rap impersonation: "They're all cool, they're not rude, they off shrooms / I'm high don't kill my mood, Harry pass the Juul."

What? Why?

Why not? In an interview with the overbearing YouTuber DJ Vlad, Lil Zay waved off questions about his name:

Osama comes from Osama Bin Laden—why name yourself after someone like that?

“I ain't name myself that. The streets … started calling me Osama.”

Basically—you’re a terror in the streets?

“If that’s what you call it. You gotta go to Chicago and ask. I don’t know, I can’t tell you — you gotta go to Chicago and ask.”

Is This a New Thing?

Sort of. Years ago rappers used to love to dance around the thing. For a few mixtapes there in the 2000s, Jadakiss re-branded as Al Qaeda Jada. Juelz Santana once grandly, unbelievably boasted, “I'm the realest thing poppin’ since Osama Bin Laden.” Now dudes are just fully going for it.

There is an MC Bin Laden: he’s a baile funk artist from Sao Paulo, and he’s huge. He’s been putting out music for a half a decade and he literally named himself MC Bin Laden, full stop, so he probably deserves some credit for pioneering the trend. 

But it’s tricky to chart the actual development of the trend. It’s everywhere and nowhere: Dex Osama was from Detroit (he was tragically killed in 2015); JB Binladen is from Chicago but, as far as I can tell, not affiliated with Lil Zay Osama; Blanco Bin Laden is a guy I just found on the internet ten minutes ago. His label is called Taliban Music Group and he has a song called “Fuck 2020” that has 124 views on YouTube and is raw and auto-tuned and honestly pretty undeniable. “I don’t even know what to say,” he says on the intro, before spilling his guts. “I love y’all. Bin Laden.”

I Have to Ask—Does Anyone Name Themselves After [Whispers] Hitler?

No, but Griselda’s Westside Gunn does have a whole mixtape series called Hitler Wears Hermes. As Gunn explains it: “I wanted to come with, you know, some of the grimiest but flyest shit I could come up … [something] that soon as you hear it, you be like, ‘Yo that shit’s crazy, but fly at the same time.'” Which reminds me of the kind of beguiling free-associative logic that Supreme Clientele-era Ghostface was employing with tremendous skill. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but it’s not necessarily supposed to.

What's Next?

Lil, Young, MC, Big, Kid: hip hop has always loved a “prefix.” Baby is the most recent version of the classic trope, though the babies—DaBaby, Bhad Bhabie, Sada Baby, Sahbabii, Lil Baby—mostly utilize the term as a suffix. Kash Doll, Asian Doll, Dream Doll, and Cuban Doll, and Ivorian Doll are all on the suffix wave too. Is using some version of Osama Bin Laden in your name just the newest version of the prefix/suffix tradition?

Lil Baby, dramatically, named himself using only prefixes and suffixes. The aforementioned Lil Zay Osama pairs the classic rap prefix Lil with the much newer rap trope of naming yourself after Osama Bin Laden. Do they foreshadow a time where there will be a rapper named Lil Baby Binladen?

What Does It All Mean?!?

In HyperNormalization, his trippy, it's-all-connected 2016 documentary, the cult filmmaker Adam Curtis presents a fascinating theory about the former Libyan strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi. In Curtis’s reading, Qaddafi was a minor figure who US foreign policy turned into a major threat to global stability. Qaddafi’s grandiose claims of his own danger were amplified by the Reagan administration, Curtis argues, because it made for a cleaner narrative: the Western world vs One Bad Man. Qaddafi was willfully misinterpreted as “the head of a rogue state … an archcriminal who wanted to terrorize the world,” Curtis says, which meant “violence born out of political struggles for power became replaced by a much simpler image.” Domestically, it was politically beneficial to consolidate the manifold dangers of the world into Qaddafi alone.

For a generation of kids born in the years just before and after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, too, was detached from the historical record and fashioned into a nearly-fictional supervillain. A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s new memoir of his presidential years, ends with the killing of Bin Laden, which has a grim logic. Bin Laden's death is made to represent a genuine historical shift—it’s turned into a pat literary climax, a fantasy of good triumphing over evil. 

And once the lines between the real and the fantastical are blurred, anything can happen. Years ago, now-Charlotte Hornets point guard Terry Rozier tweeted one iconic sentence: “Osama shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell!” On TikTok, the same meme lives. A photo of Osama photoshopped onto Russell Westbrook’s body reads, “Bro was playing with the wrong kind of Rockets.”

Hyper-referential, hyperproductive, happily subversive: rappers are unparalleled when it comes to utilizing the real world in their art. They consume it all and churn it in their image, in their liking, in their ways.

I Repeat: What?

What what? Yes. It’s happening. Don’t ask so many questions. Or, to quote a wiser man than I: “I don’t even know what to say. I love y’all. Bin Laden.”

Originally Appeared on GQ