PPG Paints Arena will take a departure from its regularly scheduled programming of septuagenarian legends on Saturday to bring you something from the swamps that’s darker, edgier and newer (but not new).
$uicideboy$ will make their Pittsburgh arena debut on the “Grey Day Tour” with a host of warm-up acts.
But who are the $uicideboy$ and how and why are they playing such a large venue?
They are the white rap duo out of New Orleans consisting of two cousins — 34-year-old Scott Anthony Arceneaux (Scrim or $crim) and 33-year-old Aristos Norman Petrou (Ruby da Cherry) — who grew up together in low-income areas of Louisiana.
Inspired by T-Pain, Waka Flocka Flame, etc., Scrim gravitated toward DJing and production, while Ruby started in the punk scene, playing drums in a band called Vapo-Rats. On the side, Scrim was dealing drugs and used furniture; Ruby was waiting tables at his dad’s restaurant.
Frustrated with his band’s lack of progress, Ruby called upon his cousin’s production skills and in 2014, they came up with “Kill Your$elf Part I: The $uicide $aga,” the first of 20 EPs in that series. (The third would be named “The Budd Dwyer $aga” for the Pennsylvania state legislator who shot himself on live TV in 1987. Scrim has since used that alias as a producer.)
Oldsters will know that going back to the mid-’80s, when Ozzy Osbourne was sued (unsuccessfully) for the song “Suicide Solution” by the parents of a teenager killed himself, suicide themes have anathema in popular music.
So, how and why did this duo employ them?
The cousins, apparently, made a strange blood pact upon their launch.
“It was pretty much like cutting the hand, bleeding, and making a pact that there’s no plan B, that if this doesn’t happen by the time we’re 30, I’m blowing my head off,” $crim told the website Mass Appeal in 2017.
Over trap beats, the duo backed up the name with songs laced with violent imagery, drug/addiction references and suicidal ideation. For the icing on the cake, they threw in some satanic imagery as well.
The idea wasn’t to promote self-harm or turn fans into maniacs. It was to find some release, some connection through the shared pain.
“A lot of people take it as emo, or depressed music, or negative music... it's really just connecting. It's therapy, through music,” Ruby explained in that Mass Appeal interview.
“When we first started, we wanted to do the exact opposite of what everybody in rap was doing,” he would later tell Billboard. “We didn’t have nice cars or gold chains, so we just flexed that we were losers, and mixed in some shock-rap and stuff about our mental health issues. We’re just trying to catch people’s attention.”
The first glimmer of hope toward beating that suicide pact was their 17th EP, 2015’s “$outh $ide $uicide,” a collaboration with South Florida rapper Pouya that connected in the underground rap world. It was followed a year later by “Radical $uicide,” a project with EDM artist Getter that went to 17 on the Billboard Rap chart. That’s also when their national touring began to take off, and some cash came pouring in.
In 2017, they launched their own label, Grey*59 or G*59, with Virgin distribution, on which they released their debut album, “I Want to Die in New Orleans,” featuring one song produced by their mentor Juicy J, of Three 6 Mafia. It debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard album chart and sold 49,000 in the first week.
In the midst of that, the cousins were both dealing with hard drug addictions, telling Billboard that Scrim kicked it in February 2019 and Ruby in October 2020, after their team launched an intervention.
“I was kicking, fighting, cursing them out,” Ruby said. “I said I’d never talk to them again. Then I did go and it was one of the best experiences in my life. It made me realize I had my head so far up my own ass. I thought I knew everything. I’ve been trying to rebel my whole life because I hated myself so much.”
In 2018, they indulged their more metal side by hooking up with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer for the six-song EP “Live Fast, Die Whenever.”
In 2021, $uicideboy$ played Pittsburgh for the first time, at Stage AE, touring behind second album, “Long Term Effects of Suffering,” which debuted at No. 7. They returned in 2022 on an arena/amphitheater tour that included Ski Mask The Slump God, $not, JPEGMAFIA and Code Orange.
Their second stop supported a third album, “Sing Me A Lullaby, My Sweet Temptation” (also #7), that marked a change in tone for the duo.
"In the past, a lot of the music was about heroin, oxy, hating your life, and wanting to kill yourself,” Ruby said, in a statement, upon the release of “Lullaby.” “You think achieving your dreams will solve every problem in your life, but it doesn’t. The problems that were there don’t go away. We’ve learned a lot. This album is more positive than anything we’ve ever done before.”
Scrim added, “The message is, ‘As hard as life gets, which you know it does, don’t ever give up. We hope we can serve as examples because we don’t come from s--t. On tour, I would grab the mic and say, ‘Hey dude, I’m a drug addict. I was suicidal. I was a couple of months away from death, and it’s the same with Ruby. We’re here to tell you life does not have to be like that. There is another way to live.’ Nobody ever said that to me, but I’m going to say it. We can show people there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
For an act that is anything but a household name, the numbers are impressive. In 2022, the duo ranked in the Top 30 list of most-streamed artists across all genres and into the Top 100 most-streamed artists of all time, amassing 15 billion career streams. And that’s with having a warning pop up at times when attempting to stream them. (As I write this and Google stuff, I’m waiting for the Facebook ads to pop up offering me suicide prevention help.)
As for the current show, The Times-Picayune described a production with a multi-tiered DJ platform, pyro, tombstones flanking the backdrop and “minimal” and “unsettling” video content.
“Throughout the hour and 20-minute set,” they wrote, “[the duo] were confident and comfortable on the big stage as they blended their voices or alternated verses and choruses. Arceneaux was the stronger rapper and more nimble and animated in his movements; Petrou did more singing and was the more forceful personality.”
In a recent thread on Reddit’s r/rap, posters were asked their opinion of $uicideboy$, prompting an interesting array of responses from the tough crowd. Among them:
“I liked them when I was 16 and depressed and edgy. Now that I'm in a better place, they fell out of my rotation.”
“Pretty much hip-hop for people that wouldn't usually listen to hip-hop.”
“They’re like ‘Suicidal-Thugs-n-Harmony,’ but I love em.”
“Never pro-suicide, but kinda wish they would just go ahead and kill themselves.. or just stop making music.”
“They make music for kids who wanna try to be all edgy, but don’t wanna listen to actual hard music like hardcore or metal, but they don’t wanna listen to normal rap music.”
It’s at 6:30 p.m. Saturday with Ghostemane, City Morgue, Sematary and Ramirez; $57; ticketmaster.com.
First Published: September 12, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: September 12, 2023, 6:31 p.m.
