LiAngelo Ball is the first breakout rapper of 2025, though up until now, he was better known as a basketball player. Def Jam, who reportedly signed Ball to a record deal (including his own label) worth as much as $13 million, is betting on that dynamic changing. The hefty contract came from the buzz of Ball, AKA G3’s breakout single “Tweaker,” a KUNICA & Glockiecheez-produced track with the kind of earworm hook that either amazes or annoys you but refuses to get out of your head either way. Its viral rise over the first few days of 2025 catapulted the song to no. 29 on this week’s Hot 100 chart with 12.4 million streams in the U.S., according to Luminate.
The song first went viral when Ball played a snippet for streamer N3on, exemplifying streaming’s increasingly vital role in hip-hop discovery. Presciently, Ball played the song’s hook, with its elongated “whoooa” that evokes fanfiction of Nelly crooning a track from Boosie and Webbie’s 2004 classic, Gangsta Musik. The verses are animated but pretty ordinary; the main moment here is the chorus, which feels plucked straight from the tall tee era. While there are plenty of recent rap songs that sampled early 2000s sounds, they mostly rip a loop and put it under modern drums. “Tweaker,” with its NOLA bounce-inspired percussion and kitschy hook, sounds like a 2004 approach to modern rap. One might wonder what artists like Ja Rule, Nelly, and Ludacris are thinking of the chance to bring the sound of their artistic prime back onto the main stage.
Social media has helped vaporize the notion of new and old music; there’s simply music that you have or haven’t heard before. For a 15-year-old, the next entry into their rotation could come from another high schooler or from a 20-year-old Project Pat song that’s catching fire on TikTok. Ball, who’s been rapping for several years as G3 and G Honcho, and who dropped a joint tape with his brother Lonzo in 2020, expertly played into this dynamic. No matter where people fell on the side of seeing him as a novelty, they were sharing the music and talking about it.
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The Ball family has been going viral for a decade and had a five-season Facebook Watch reality show amid Lonzo and LaMelo’s rise through the basketball world. Lavar Ball, the patriarch of the family, is a blustering boxing promoter of a personality, and brothers LaMelo and Lonzo Ball are successful NBA players who will be in the public consciousness for the foreseeable future. LiAngelo had three short stints in the NBA, but his brothers’ presence in the league has made it the song of the moment in NBA circles. There are videos of players all over the association playing and singing the song, mostly enjoying it. However, fellow baller-rapper Stephen Jackson expressed that he isn’t the biggest fan of “Tweaker,” echoing rapper Curren$y’s dismay that people unironically enjoy it.
But a polarizing song can help its growth as much as being universally loved. We’ve seen it before with artists like Pop Smoke, Lil Yachty, and Blueface, whose breakout singles mystified traditionalists and impressed open-minded fans. Several times a year, hip-hop gets a viral moment that some see as harmless fun, some perceive as the decline of hip-hop tastemaking, and others view as a little of both. And while those aforementioned artists’ breakout songs represented an eye to the future, “Tweaker” may just be a pastiche one-off — though LiAngelo’s teased a second single coming soon. Regardless, the song going from a viral would-be joke to the catalyst for a record deal shows where the industry is going.
Some of the song’s most ardent critics are decrying the reality that some artists would never get such a lucrative deal from a major label despite being more lyrically gifted than LiAngelo. They feel like the industry’s propensity to jump on every viral wave instead of signing and developing talent is why the major label hip-hop orbit is so redundant and underwhelming. It feels unfair to see deserving artists have to fight so hard for exposure while a former (for now?) NBA player was able to parlay a fun hook into a financial windfall.
But, to quote The Wire’s Snoop Pearson, under capitalism, a system that prioritizes profit above all, “deserve got nothin’ to do with it.” While the stereotype is that label offices are solely stocked with out-of-touch number crunchers, that’s not entirely true. Some A&Rs may want to placate hip-hop heads, but with mass layoffs all over the industry, they have limited capacity to keep the essence alive when they’re simply trying to keep a job. In 2025, every industry, especially entertainment, relies on cold, hard numbers to determine what gets greenlit. LiAngelo went undrafted in the 2018 NBA Draft, but as a viral personality with a chart-topping hit and a household name, he’s what amounts to a blue-chip prospect in the modern music market.
