As a member of the Unapologetic collective, A Weirdo From Memphis, aka AWFM, typically recognized in his natural environment by his pink bunny ears, stays busy. The camaraderie of the group often spurs individual members to greater heights. “We all compete against each other,” says AWFM, “so that’s always fun. We’ve got a group text where we’ll say, ‘Yo, I just accomplished this,’ or ‘I just did that.’ And it keeps us all focused.” In this way, new material is always being created. But AWFM’s latest mixtape, Sellmore, was never on the agenda.
“Sellmore wasn’t supposed to exist,” AWFM confesses. Over the course of 2020-21, “I was just cooking with C maJor because he was the most available at the time. And I wouldn’t even rock with what we were recording while we were making it. I would just drive home in silence thinking, ‘I’ve got to get better. I haven’t been in front of the microphone long enough.’ And then one day C maJor hit me up and said, ‘All this stuff is crazy! This is like an album.’ So I listened back with a stranger’s ear because I’d forgotten what I’d written. And I was like, ‘Yo, this might actually be something, man!’”
It’s an unexpected genesis for an album that hangs together so well, but that coherence may just be a measure of this era’s ubiquitously dire circumstances. Certainly for AWFM, the pandemic has been fraught with struggle, all the more stark because, on its cusp, he was poised to take his art to the next level. “I quit my job January 25, 2020,” he recalls. A tour with MonoNeon, sponsored by Red Bull, was in the works, and leaving his job was the first step toward that goal.
“We all went out to dinner and we toasted. MAD [IMAKEMADBEATS] was like, ‘I’m really proud of you for making this move. I know it’s going to be really successful, and it’s going to be hard, and confusing at times, but we’ve built an organization so you won’t have as hard a time as I did, trying to make that transition.’ Because MAD rose from being an unpaid intern to being one of the top engineers at Quad Studios in New York. And right as he was arriving at crazy success, the recession happened.”
Similarly, as AWFM prepared to launch a tour, the coronavirus struck. Jobless, he turned to the grind, driven by one goal: Sellmore. He was hustling any skill he could to get by. “I have to DoorDash for a lot of my income. And if you’re driving everywhere, dropping off food, you have no choice but to be where bad things happen. So I’ve seen death. I’ve been robbed of a whole car. And your eyes develop differently to see things. Like, ‘A’ight, I’m not going to go down that street. I see what this setup is.’ Things I never saw or knew about, sitting in a cubicle at International Paper.”
On the track “Broke,” he rhymes, “Money fucked up so I guess I gotta move shit/If I can’t sell it for you, got some partners that could do it/Above the speed limit n*gga I ain’t never cruisin’/So what are you doing AWFM, mane, I’m movin’.”
A similar vibe permeates the rest of the album, over dread beatscapes produced by Unapologetic mainstays C maJor or Kid Maestro. And yet AWFM’s wit gives the dark milieu a humorous twist. “Y’all better leave me alone or I’m gonna motherf*ckin spazz!” he sings on the album closer, and it comes off as a winning tactic. Reflecting on his pandemic life, he notes, “You’ve got to find humor in this stuff, man. There’s a very fine line between humor and that crazy Joker laugh, where you go stand on the edge of a building. You’ve just got to laugh and say, ‘Okay, I took a loss today.’”
Ultimately, AWFM appreciates how his pandemic experiences have informed his art. “I don’t regret any of this happening,” he says. “It’s been torture, but I don’t regret it. All of this misery just made me start crapping out great music effortlessly. Because so much of it isn’t fantasy. And that gave birth to Sellmore.”