The most inescapable phrase in the online music underground of late is “burger music.” “Bro, Che is burger music,” the TikTok nanoinfluencer idkzxop said this week. “I’m not gonna elaborate. Because if you’re not a burger, you understand.” “This is just millennial burger music, fire video tho,” an X user wrote about Yung Lean’s recent campfire catharsis tune “STORM.” But what does “burger music” even entail? Is it Instagram Reels rap for people with no taste? A synonym for “coworker music,” itself a convoluted term that usually refers to bad pop songs your blandest colleague would fall for? For now, it seems to mean so many things to so many people that it ends up meaning nothing at all.
There’s no exact origin for the phrase. “Burger” and its sibling “ham”(burger) were big insults in Detroit around the turn of the decade; BabyTron has on multiple occasions said, “Yo boyfriend a burger.” The newest iteration appears to have been popularized by Twitch streamers Prince Cassell and Macc Danny, who use “burger” as a synonym for a musician who’s goofy but acts like they’re doing something impressive or edgy. Their earliest and biggest target has been Dax, a 32-year-old janitor-turned-rapper from Canada who spits overwrought motivational lyrics over rudimentary beats.
Over the last few months, “burger music” has expanded to encompass more unexpectedly creative styles. Maybe the biggest recipient of vitriol is an 18-year-old named Slayr, whose real last name, thanks to cosmic fate, is McDonald. Detractors portray him as a pixelated cartoon character, his torso replaced by a gleaming slab of meat. One tweet features an AI cover of a fake Slayr album called BURGERMAN that imagines him as a half-burger, half-human hybrid engulfed in a hellish flood of grease and cheese splatter. Type “burger” on Spotify, and Slayr’s profile pops up first (likely due to the many user-generated playlists titled “BURGER MUSIC” stuffed with his songs).
I’ve observed two “burger music” camps. The first camp thinks Slayr is just corny, contrasting the aggro music with his lowkey presentation and love of anime. These people believe Slayr has “negative aura”; streamer NickAtNite calls his aesthetic “GameStop worker.” Slayr’s ability to sculpt transitions between songs and puke out chord progressions in seconds, to the astonishment of PlaqueBoyMax, feeds into a sense that his music is for tryhards.
“Burger” used as an antonym for aura feels like an attempt to reassert the bounds of cool after it’s been so destabilized. “Cool” once had specific referents, enshrined in the collective consciousness through TV show, movie, and celebrity tropes. Jocks and mean girls relished in the mainstream, while the freaks and losers huddled over video-game music and alt weirdness. Obviously, this was never fully true, but over the last decade it’s become a lot easier to capitalize on less glamorous hobbies and make nerdiness your brand. SoundCloud rappers were weebs; DnD geeks became huge influencers. The sense of a cultural in- and out-group dissolved as niche communities grew and old-school ideas of coolness fell away. In some sense, the indiscriminate labeling of anything approaching cringe as “burger music” is an effort to laugh certain persona types into oblivion while elevating “real” music or whatever.
Yet there’s nothing immediately cringe about Slayr’s rage rap. He croons about heartbreak and Hellcats over synths that firehose sugar. The downside is it’s tragically consistent. Every song hits with the same indistinguishable gush of pleasant pixels. I’ve found myself reaching for Slayr on auto-pilot sometimes like a dependable standard, but it rarely stirs me into a state of Michelin star hype.
