Comethazine’s SoundCloud bait-and-switch

Comethazine was part of a digital bait-and-switch occurrence last year, which some say helped boost the career of the 21-year-old rapper known as Frank Childress to his family and squad back home in Illinois.

In January 2018, his song “Bands” was uploaded into fellow-rapper YBN Nahmir’s spot on the SoundCloud music sharing-app and website.

When I first heard about this song replacement narrative, I couldn’t understand the technicalities and ramifications of doing so on the SoundCloud app — so I looked it up and broke it down into my analog world.

Imagine listening to Kasey Kasem on the local station in 1988. Then, imagine someone commandeered the station’s controls before Kasem announced the number one song. And instead of the station playing “Roll with It” by Steve Winwood, the number one song on Kasem’s top 40 list — the hijacker switches the sound source, and plays a “joint” by San Diego-based rappers instead. Furthermore, the perp then locks himself in the control booth and the program director can’t control the signal from the outside.

Fast-forward three decades later onto the SoundCloud app where YBN Nahmir was ranked number one with his “Bounce Out With That” track. The thing is, the song was uploaded by an impostor with the “sound_clout_xxx” handle that reportedly even utilized the then 18-year-old rapper’s photo. Many SoundClouders didn’t know sound_clout_xxx was an impostor, or maybe they did, and didn’t care. The authentic YBN Nahmir camp, which is “nahmir205” on the music app, did not upload the “Bounce Out With That” song on SoundCloud after its initial release. Instead, on January 23, 2018, they dropped a music video to the song on YouTube, which garnered “around 20 million views in the first two weeks” of its upload.

After the YBN Nahmir song gained traction on the SoundCloud app, sound_clout_xxx replaced the song with Comethazine’s “Bands” song.

This replacement feature on the SoundCloud app is usually utilized by artists who update their songs with improved renditions of the original song. But at the same time, the song would keep its statistics, including the likes, comments, and shares — intact for business purposes, and bragging rights.

“u/snoozamusic” on Reddit has been a Comethazine-fan for a while, even before the “SoundCloud-ish trap banger” was swapped into the number one slot.

“I go and look and sure enough his new song called 'Bands' is number one on SoundCloud,” he said on the Reddit website shortly after the song swap transpired in 2018. “..... 10 million plays in the last 15 days, and 3.5 million plays this week. That is really strange, especially considering that his [Comethazine] new song 'Fuck Me in My Jag' was dropped with a music video on Worldstar five days ago, and currently sits at 75k views .... you can find that one of these random SoundCloud accounts has your song positioned on the SoundCloud charts. The first person to post the song on SoundCloud can gain traction and some power over the song’s position on the SoundCloud charts.”

After word got out of the swap, Co’s (short for Comethazine) song that was uploaded by sound_clout_xxx, was deleted from the app.

“I wish we could take credit for this because it got Co a lot of looks, but we think this was just the case of a fan that really wanted Co to get plays by anyway possible,” said Chad Carrington of Comethazine’s label Alamo Records — in a Complex interview.

In January, “the real” YBN Nahmir dropped a snippet of his new song, Co x Quad Studios B2 1* — featuring “the real” Comethazine. Two months after the teaser dropped, YBN Nahmir performed at Bassmnt downtown.

Comethazine is considered by some fans as a trap and horrorcore rapper, where he samples and plays background sounds that are ominous and dark as he raps about death. He’ll perform at House of Blues on December 20.