Belgian artist 3000 €uro Money Bags first caught my attention three years ago through pure chance. The rapper, 17 at the time, was just beginning to make a name for himself in the Antwerp underground scene when he showed up on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist. The track, “Uyghurs in Paris”, was a breath of fresh air in a time where manic depressive trap music seemed almost formulaic, lacking vision or ambition. Undulating synths and pulsing 808s – gangsta rap but more elastic, a rebellion against the formatted march of hi-hats that characterised Belgian rap nouveau – combine to create a melancholic reflection on internet culture and our place therein. He croons, in an almost forced baritone, “I popped a pill, I hope it’s not fentanyl”, “money in my wallet and depression on the docket”, “my thang is like a worm, warm and squirming in your socket”.
Of course, the ensuing year was a rebuff to the excitement surrounding his rise. For starters, there came the allegations made by an ex lover, the Walloon actress Marie-Anne Haute Cuisine. As she released troves of screenshots and videos alleging the rapper was a “chubby chaser” who was fattening her up “like a chicken “, 3000 €uro Money Bags retreated to the darkest place in the universe – his own mind. In one particularly disturbing video, we see the young artist sneak into a kitchen at 3am to inject her food with trans fat. In another, she wears leggings and a sports bra, tying her running shoes as he fakes a stroke. She identifies this moment in a Twitter thread as the turning point in her perception of him. The doctors told her that, apart from “holes in his heart from vaping”, there was nothing wrong with him. After the rapper took accountability, blaming his own demons (“I enter my thoughts with a sword and a helmet”), the two made peace, though the relationship would never be restored.
Money Bags’ meteoric ascent quickly resumed and the rapper’s debut album, “sad 2 the bone”, topped the European charts for almost half a year. On it, he displays a more mature and spiritual side, meshing with his new professional production to dramatic effect. Many of these songs became part of common discourse, the universal language of alienated youth. The music video for ‘Tie Die Pussy’ quickly racked up more than 20 million views on YouTube. His song ‘Homer Simpin’ becoming an ever present refrain on the Japanese social media site TikTok. In anticipation of his sophomore album, “cry me a uyghur”, I sat down with the rapper in his rented Miami villa. Our conversation was like a big cave, deep and dark. Here’s what the Belgian MC had to say:
Logan: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, I really appreciate it. I can’t imagine you’ve got much spare time this close to the album launch.
3k€MB: No worries man, this is all part of a press circuit so it’s basically my job to talk to you, haha.
Logan: Sometimes everything feels flat, when I hear something it seems far away. When I do something it’s like I’m watching it on a screen. When I touch something it feels dull, like I’m underwater. I’ve been underwater so long that I don’t even feel the ocean, I’m used to it, and my hands are withering away so that, even if I were to escape to the surface, my grasp would still be alien. But when I become aware of this it’s like noticing you’re in a dream, everything screams in you to wake up and it’s near impossible to resist the fear. I panic and want nothing more than to feel the breeze on my face, feel the sea as cold again and laugh when a passing wave sprinkles my face. I cannot smile lest the water enter my mouth – I would not drown, rather the intense feeling of artifice would only double. I smile, pretending to be happy, only for the ocean to dull the inside of my mouth too, showing me how foolish I was to even attempt to feel joy. Trying to feel joy and encountering only numbness multiplies the feeling one hundred times and, as I sit watching myself from a command centre inside my brain, the fuzz and static on the monitors obscures my vision further. I’ve not listened to your album yet, is this something you reckon with?
3k€MB: I guess so. I mean I’m talking about actual screens and phones and shit.
Logan: These are one and the same. The more we dive into the internet, the more we perceive life without experiencing it. Life becomes psychological first and foremost, which might be why everyone talks like a therapist now.
The philosopher of science Karl Popper famously argued that falsifiability distinguishes science from pseudoscience. When critics argued that evolution is something unfalsifiable yet obviously true, the Austrian said that Darwin discovered a non-empirical truth – like a theorem in mathematics. When traits are hereditary, subject to mutation, and competition limits what traits are passed on, evolution is a logical consequence. This holds in all things, makes intuitive sense, can be demonstrated through computer simulation. As such, evolution can be proven by establishing the truth of a theory and then showing that the world adheres to its premises, the opposite of any scientific method.
Taking this insight, reproduction and death are the origins of life. There is no love without murder, there is no happiness without blood. Every time the universe evolves a new creation – say a fish with legs – the universe responds to itself by creating a beast that eats fish with legs, is uniquely good at it, that torments the weird creature and gives the carcass to its young so that they may play with its entrails and train to kill the next generation. The fanged predator walks around with blood on its face, a bit of prey still smeared on its mouth before it goes to the water whence the fish came and washes it off. Land was a refuge from the monsters of the sea and the other fish can only watch as the creature’s guts drip down to the floor from its presumed salvation. In my most infantile moments, I think to myself “none of this needs to happen”. We exist for like ten seconds, spend two of those filling out forms and seven worrying about the forms we are supposed to fill out. Wars are so stupid, politics so untethered from the ground I stand on. It seems like the only hope we have is that aliens come down and smoke us out with alien weed and the occasional moment where we realise we are all just guys hanging out actually sticks for longer than ten seconds and we make peace.
When I’m feeling smarter, I recall the massacre from which life got its start. I remember how terrible that fact is, how we exist only by chance and that pain exists only to keep us alive long enough to pass the pain onto our kids so that they might feel the thrill of being hunted by something larger. Animals are hunted by other beasts, we are such apex predators we could only ever be hunted by ourselves and turned into meat in sacrifice to abstractions, godlike fetishes like money and race we invented so we can feel there’s something lording over us – that we are not at the top of the chain, that nothing this stupid is fit to shape the world. There is something larger than ourselves, larger than the joy of laughter and the taste of a good feast that justifies us being cannon fodder for cannons we designed and built.
I guess I’m asking if you agree, if you feel that these facts shaped the direction of your new project?
3k€MB: Yeah, for real. That’s crazy.
Logan: Pandas have no natural predators, are vegetarian, hurt nothing. Their only food is famous for how fast it grows, so they’ve never had to face hunger, at least until we came along. They only mate when they feel a deep connection so there’s never too many pandas kicking around at one time – out of a profound and singular love they don’t have to compete with each other, they just roll around with soulmates and stuff their mouths. The worst bit of any of this is that I believe we could still be pandas. There’s no reason we can’t be, we were given the power of thought and compassion but the smart and respectable idea is that we can’t because competition is at the core of our existence. We’re told time and time again that this is how it has to be, that we have to be hunted by ourselves, but this line comes from the very people hunting us. Homeless people cannot have homes, we are told, because the ways we are preyed on wouldn’t allow it. Our system would collapse because someone gets something for free, empty buildings are necessary because otherwise we’d all have the gall to think our housing should be free too.
But to want to be a panda is to waste your life trying, to waste your free time pursuing a ridiculous dream. You can’t help but get angry at the people who don’t think we can be pandas, forgetting that most of the time they want to be pandas too. This spite consumes you and then we’re back where we started; a violent and meaningless clash.
We can only imagine the profound sense of awe early humans felt when looking up at the nighttime sky, the stars singing of ecstasy, something beyond our comprehension but ultimately kind and anthropocentric. We were at the centre of the universe, everything we did was important. Capitalism is tacky, too on the nose, blocking most the sky with the smoke of industry, our sense of wonder disappearing with it. Nothing can be sacred, meaningful, when it’s defiled by ash. After that, we went to a continent where people still gazed at the stars and eradicated all of them for the sin of looking up instead of down, not focusing on the tools in their hands.
This is, I suppose, all a roundabout way to ask if you deal with the idea of suicide on your album?
3k€MB: I….
Logan: I think about it all the time, almost every single day. And what’s funny is that it’s not serious, I rarely get to the planning stage. I just like knowing I can, I think. Ultimately, it’s not a result of any of this, if anyone is going to be happy under the present situation it’s a middle class white man. I don’t know what causes it. I am happy, really, but there’s something so overwhelming, so annoying about everything and that’s my problem. The black void that constitutes the base of our existence does not help. The job market, the pain of relationships, the constant drone of the internet and the way it stokes my hatred against absolute strangers, the way this hatred gets turned on myself at night when I realise I’m annoying too, a loser who always expected great things and who’s annoying because he expected great things when he shouldn’t have.
Anyway, that’s all the time we have today. Thank you so much again for speaking with me and I wish you all the best on your album launch.
3k€MB: Alright.
Streaming for 3000 Euro Money Bags’ new album starts on the 9th of August, support a genre breaking artist by purchasing your music directly from his website www.3000eurosidontevengiveafuckk.com
