The video for Luh Tyler’s new song “First Show” is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a 17-year-old rapper to make as he lives out his dream of stardom. It’s both cheeky and earnest at the same time, filled with all the fantasies a teenager would think were the coolest things he could stuff into a music video, from a trio of models waking him up to a pool party packed with pretty women and water pistols.
Sure, it’s not groundbreaking stuff, but knowing the kid still isn’t old enough to vote takes it from being the cliched material it usually is and transplants it into the actual summertime activities of a high school junior looking forward to three months of vacation. Instead of coming off kind of grody, the way it does when rappers twice his age indulge their Peter Pan syndrome, it reads here as a kid being a kid.
It helps that he employs that distinctive Florida drawl of his toward tales of turn-ups rather than shoot-outs, filling his verses with perfectly-punned punchlines that make him endearing in a way a lot of his fellow party rappers fall short of. Between songs like this, “Stand On Biz,” and “Law & Order,” Tyler has set himself up as a completely unique specimen in hip-hop, half Curren$y and half Kodak Black, with just enough of IT (you know, IT factor) to be recognizable as something new and worth keeping an ear out for.
Watch Luh Tyler’s “First Show” video above.
Luh Tyler is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.