Rob49 arrived fully-formed, as though he’d been practicing for his first studio session his whole life. The deep-voiced New Orleans artist just started rapping in April 2020, but you wouldn’t know it—already people are calling him “baby Soulja Slim” for his magnetic presence and confidence on the mic. Rob’s pure bars are caked in Louisiana slang and delivered in the kind of gruff, musical cadence you might have heard over Mannie Fresh production 20 years ago, but they’re also refreshingly modern—shot through with the head-spinning velocity of contemporary trap styles.
Born in New Orleans in 1999, and growing up at the intersection of projects in the 4th and 9th Wards (that’s where the “49” in his rap handle comes from), Rob had to adapt to the harsh realities of his environment on his own. His parents were in and out of his adolescence serving jail time, and in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina tore through the city, the whole family fled to Houston in Mom’s broken-down Impala. “The windows didn't go up. We had no brakes in the car,” Rob remembers vividly. “We was doing 60 on the interstate with the doors open.”
What kept Rob going was his charm and confidence. In school, he was the popular kid, and in stars like Future, Meek Mill, and the Weeknd he saw models for sustained greatness. He also discovered a talent of his own. “I knew I could rap ’cause I used to be listening to Future,” Rob says. “You know how at the end of the song they got a little beat left? I was punishing him!”
Throughout high school, his peers would discover he could rap, too, but it wasn’t until April of 2020, several months after dropping out of college for nursing, that Rob recorded a song. He stumbled into his friend’s studio session, and at his partner’s behest, stepped inside the booth. “They put a beat on and I just went flashin’! They were like, ‘Yeah this getting played in the car,’”.