1月にリリースしたアニメ『マッシュル -MASHLE-』のテーマ曲「Bling-Bang-Bang-Born」が、国内のみならず世界的なストリーミングチャートで首位を獲得した Creepy Nuts。日本一三連覇のラッパーと、世界一に輝いたDJの2人組だ。
1Hip-hop duo Creepy Nuts love to keep their music a little bit strange and with a hearty sense of humor. That approach has helped them score the most surprising global hit of the year so far.
2The pair’s high-energy Bling-Bang-Bang-Born serves as the opening theme to the popular anime Mashle: Magic And Muscles. While certainly helped by that series, Creepy Nuts’ song has blown up even bigger, topping streaming charts and becoming an ever-present bop all over social media. It’s a statement of the group’s playful approach to sound, one that has made them prominent in Japan and now an attention-grabbing outfit abroad.
3Creepy Nuts came together in 2013. Even while working together, the individual members of the group focused on their own musical growth simultaneously. MC R-Shitei competed in various free-style rap contests and appeared on popular hip-hop competition TV shows. He even won the nation’s top rap contest for three years in a row. DJ Matsunaga, meanwhile, won the DMC World DJ Championships in 2019, after years of honing his craft.
4Together, the two drew from hip-hop while also adding an eccentric, at times funny, atmosphere to the music they made. DJ Matsunaga samples a wide range of sounds — including obscure swing songs and older funk tracks — in creating beats, while R-Shitei rapped in many different voices, like he was becoming new characters with distinct deliveries. While getting silly, Creepy Nuts still brought a lot of energy and dexterity to its hip-hop.
5The group’s ability to incorporate unexpected sounds and humor into its music helped them connect with listeners across Japan. Songs like Nobishiro and Daten use guitar as a base to deliver fast-paced rhyming. Other tracks found Creepy Nuts playing with club sounds, among other styles. While silly, the pair were quite educated about a wide range of genres, and their joy at playing around with them comes across in the music.
6That’s the case for international breakout Bling-Bang-Bang-Born. Creepy Nuts use popular, uptempo American dance genre Jersey club as inspiration, but put their own spin on it with myriad vocal deliveries and mutations on the style’s sound. The group found a new angle on something that has become very popular worldwide, and because of that listeners all over have been drawn to its novel interpretation. It helps that the speed of Bling-Bang-Bang-Born makes it ideal to dance to, which is what many on TikTok and other apps have done with it.
7The song’s surprise success has helped Creepy Nuts reach a whole new audience, one appreciating its oddball approach to hip-hop.