One day and about two hours late for his scheduled interview, Rob49 is feeling pretty at home in Okayplayer’s Williamsburg office. Or maybe he’s just exhausted. “We’ve been working so hard, as soon as work’s over, I gotta go inside to go to sleep,” he tells me, situated somewhere between our chocolate leather couch and a daydream. He’s calm and courteous, but his laconic tone makes it sound like he could fade into sleepy time at any minute. But for now, he’s kicking it, and we make time to reflect on important matters — like the greatness of Paid in Full. We both lament Wood Harris not getting an Oscar.
“I could tell it was supposed to be a low-budget film for them, but it wound up being good,” he tells me. “[Critics] didn’t understand,” he adds. “That’s because they didn’t expect that much from that movie.” Rob’s never been able to avoid big expectations. After dropping out of nursing school at Southern University and recording his first few rap songs, the now 26-year-old almost immediately took over his city, using a Soulja Slim-ish baritone and Hot Boys-adjacent energy to become New Orleans’ proverbial next-up. Tracks like “Vulture Island” (which earned him a remix with Lil Baby) helped make him an emerging superstar by late 2021, and by 2023, he’d even landed a spot on Travis Scott’s 21 Savage-assisted Utopia anthem, “Topia Twins.” That one’s got over 319 million Spotify streams to date.
After consummating that momentum with a 2023 XXL Freshman spot, Rob49 looked to crystallize his star status with 4God II. But it was far from the climactic level-up the world expected. Now, just about two years later — a literal eternity in rap years — he’s returned with Let Me Fly, a debut album that makes good on some of the promise he showed at the start of his career. The LP has some slaps, but none more potent than “WTHelly,” a frenetic single that went TikTok viral and got his career back poppin’ again. If he’s not flying yet, he’s definitely like… levitating. That elevation is something he ties to removing the extra weight of any musical opinions… well, any besides his own.
“What I think is hard is what I’m going to put out,” he says of ignoring industry trends when recording his debut album. “I think this is my best project because it’s one of the only projects where I’m being me on it.”
You can go and check out the LP to see for yourself whether he’s changed — he never dropped that Justin Bieber “WTHelly” remix after it got flamed on social media — but the underlying philosophy of artistic and personal individuality is something he seems to take seriously when we’re speaking.
“There’s so many different people with different ideas that you think are cool that you’ll be like, ‘Oh man, I won’t do that, too,’” he tells me. “But then you got to step back and like, ‘Man, what’s my idea?’”
Drowsy, yet reflective, Rob’s not offering a whole lot of those ideas at the moment, so I kind of just lapse into some theoreticals. Because I like basketball a little too much, I ask him about which hooper he’d compare himself to, using the analogy Jay-Z = Michael Jordan to make my point. The zeitgeist — and, perhaps a lack of self-awareness — dictates that rappers are pretty much guaranteed to list any one of Kobe, LeBron, Kevin Durant, or any other sacrilegious comparison they can conjure in the moment. Rob49’s player comp is a decidedly earthbound sky-riser; a gargantuan leaper whose talent has only ever been grounded by his work ethic and the biological anomaly of his 42-inch vertical and 6’6” 280-something frame.
“I’d probably compare myself to Zion [Williamson],” Rob tells me of his fellow New Orleans superstar who dominates the NBA when injuries and his own conditioning issues don’t keep him on the sideline. “He’s the one when he gets his chance.”
Rob49 has yet to dominate in Zion-esque fashion, but “WTHelly” remains one of the more infectious — and possibly annoying — singles of the year, even without a Hot 100 placement. He’ll have a chance to generate more buzz for his album when he embarks on his first solo headlining tour for Let Me Fly this October. Then, he’s still got plans to drop a joint mixtape with G Herbo. Whether this and his album yield true stardom will be up to his own ingenuity and all-around consistency. For now, he’s getting his shots up, and when he gets into the open court, he can still tear the rim down the way he’s supposed to.
“This is just the beginning,” he says. “I’m flying now.”
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