Last week, Babytron fans expected new music for his birthday. Despite the anticipation for Luka Troncic 2, which is now scheduled for July 7, he did give fans “Lord of the Multiverse,” an 11-minute track where he raps over a beat representing every year in hip-hop history, from 1980 onward. He then paired the track with a video co-crafted by videographers Junk Food, Noahsocold, Rare Smoke, and 12 Mile Kyle that he says cost in the range of “$40 to 50,000.” The song is a sonic successor to tracks like “Prince Of The Mitten,” “King Of The Galaxy,” and “100 Bars,” where he raps over a variety of beats.
The latter track was accompanied by a Cole Bennett-directed video. Babytron was trying to figure out how to match that moment and came up with the idea to celebrate the breadth of hip-hop history. He recalls that producer Lotto sent him the initial structure of the song “two or three years ago,” and he steadily tweaked it over the past several years. The tedious process allowed him to take a break from the beat switch format after releasing several such songs in quick succession.
“When I dropped the other three, they were kind of back to back to back,” he tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “It was like, okay, he did it in ‘Prince,’ he did ‘King,’ he did ‘Emperor.’ They would’ve expected [this] right after that. So I tried to give it a shock factor; I sat a couple years on the sideline with all that multiple beat shit.”
He assures, “[This] wasn’t just no one-session song. That was some shit I started years ago, listened to in the car years later and was like, ‘I could do some shit with this. I need to go add some shit to this.’ And then it’s a rollout for my [Luka Troncic 2] album.” He added some beats and swapped out others to cover the bases of the artists and moments that best encapsulate hip-hop history to him. For instance, he tells me that for 2011, he added Wiz Khalifa’s “Black And Yellow” because he felt like the Pittsburgh rapper meant more to hip-hop history than Lotto’s original choice. Not every year is perfectly represented (“Wu Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M.” came out in 1994, not ‘92; Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s “The Message” was 1982, not ‘83), but the inexactitude likely stemmed from his desire to check all the boxes.
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“I got Drake on there, I got Kendrick Lamar on there. I’m not picking favorites or nothing,” he assures. “I’m just picking who I feel needs to be on there. That’s my representation of the history of hip hop and just showing I can rap with all the beats as well.“
He begins the song subverting “Rapper’s Delight’s” foundational opening bars with characteristic jest, rapping, “I sip—wock, I sip it, I’m sippin, sippin, sippin, sip wock and I won’t stop.” From there, he gives about 4 bars to each beat, switching up his cadence throughout. Over Bone Thugs N Harmony’s “Crossroads,” he’s tongue twisting, on “Dear Mama” he slows down with the beat, and he’s harmonizing over Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Life.”
“You evolve every day,” he says, noting that the vocals span from 2022 to 2025. “How I rap in 2022 isn’t how I rap now. So that shit does sound different. I had to do it exactly the way I did it or it wouldn’t have came out that way. I feel like it had to be a year-long process.” He finished the song in February of this year.
And while the song took years to craft, the video was done in just over a month. Production duties were split between videographers Junk Food, Noahsocold, Rare Smoke, & 12 Mile Kyle, who each took a decade. Babytron says he originally wanted to shoot in the actual spaces that each original video depicted, such as Compton for the classic West Coast tracks, and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn for Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.” But he realized he wouldn’t have the time to do that, instead relying on his videographers’ best green screen and graphic design work to superimpose him into each video. They do a good job, to comedic effect. For Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” his face is in a flip phone ala the original video. And during Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power,” his clean-shaven face is on a large photo in the background (where Malcolm X’s was in the original video).
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The video was a completely independent operation, which included a several-day process of getting an outfit for each song. “I had a Moncler, Amiri Jeans, some type of designer shoes…I have all this shit on [and] I’m only wearing it for seven seconds. I’m only rapping four bars. I’m never going to put this shit on again.” He adds, “All this money I’m spending for this video and these clothes and shit that’s coming out of my pocket. I’m rapping on all these [copywritten beats]…I could could catch 50 copyright strikes at once for that shit. I’m doing it for the love of music, bro.” He also clarifies, without getting specific, that “something bad” happened to the outfits, of which he only has about two left.
Babytron says the process of culling hip-hop history for the song made him realize how rapidly hip-hop tastes shift over time. “It’s crazy to hear how that shit just changes and changes. It just lets you know what rap sounds like right now. It’s not going to sound like that in 2030. It’s not even going to sound like that in 2028. Appreciate shit in the moment because it ain’t going to be that a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. You got to appreciate everything in the moment.”