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Gripe all you want about food pics and selfies. If you are a DMV hip-hop artist and you’re not on Instagram, you may as well be rhyming into an abandoned mine shaft.
D.C. rappers love Instagram like decor-loving yuppies love Pinterest. Follow just a few local MCs on the photo app, and your feed morphs into a DMV hip-hop news ticker. They post bountiful fliers, crew pics, clips of new songs (or old songs, if there aren’t any new ones), shout-outs to fans, photos of their own tweets, and above all, selfies—a parade of selfies. Also: If you follow any stoner rappers, expect to see 3,581 images of them blowing weed smoke. Trap rappers will upload 10,000 straight-faced crew pics. And unless he breaks up with her again, Fat Trel will post near-hourly pics of his girlfriend, Chrissy.
Followers of any hip-hop, local or not, already know that Rap Twitter can be overwhelming. (So many RTs!) Hip-hop Instagram is better. More wheat, less chaff—-unless you really hate photos of dudes holding Champagne bottles. In which case: I hear Tumblr is fun.
A handful of DMV hip-hop Instagram accounts worth scoping:
Rahiem Supreme @godzillasupreme Uptown rapper Supreme—he of the awesomely named Swag Genie EP—has an Instagram feed that’s more hipster than most. Recent posts show a fixed-gear bike, Instagrammed versions of Polaroid photos, and a selfie of him wearing a turtleneck. #swag.
Fat Trel @fat_gleesh Selfie, drank, Chrissy, crew, repeat. A recent signee to Rick Ross’ flossy Maybach Music Group, Trel keeps it on-brand, i.e. boring.
Shy Glizzy @shyglizzy If there is such a thing as a classic trap-rap Instagram, this is it. The mutton-chopped rapper nicknamed Streets Hottest Youngin’ posts endless pics of his stoic crew and stacks of cash. But a recent video of Glizzy giving food to a homeless man injected some much-needed softness.
Ras Nebyu @rasnebyu Ras Nebyu, the self-styled “Uptown Ethiopian Tupac,” trumpets his heritage, childhood, and family all over the ’Gram. There’s a photo of injera and stews. A pic of a lil’ Ras Nebyu next to his Lion King birthday cake. And an image of himself and his auntie, captioned “BY FAR MY FAVORITE AUNT.”
Kelow photo by Darrow Montgomery