Never has there been a more curious case behind an artist in hip-hop, from recent memory. Kid Buu, real name revealed as Markquez Lao Santiago, is a rapper who has experienced a massive surge in popularity recently, but perhaps not for the reasons one would expect, or particularly want.
Buu, formerly known by the stage name 'Humungous the God', is a stereotypical SoundCloud rapper, adorned with bright pink shoulder-length dreadlocks, tattoos everywhere including his face, and a taste for all things high-fashion. In recent months his following has boomed and you could even argue that he has finally 'blown up', although the story behind this is far beyond that of your average rapper nowadays. There are a number of different sides to the shape that is Kid Buu. Without beating around the bush, there's cover-ups of a shady past, the allegations of domestic violence, the almost-blatant copying of other artists and the desperation to be famous. So, sounding almost like the plot line to a golden-era Hollywood thriller, let's get right into it.
First of all, if you've clicked on this article and continued to read on, assuming that Kid Buu is in the clique of 'young, up-and-coming rappers', you can immediately through that preconception out the window. Buu has lied about his age. He originally claimed to be born in 1994, which isn't that far-fetched, considering the average age of the new-era rappers nowadays - it would put him at 24/25 years old at the moment. However, Kid Buu is actually 31 - the same age as Kendrick Lamar, Meek Mill and Big Sean; three stalwarts of the rap game. Now, Buu hasn't exclusively talked about why he lied about his age in the first place, but the reason why is widely assumed to be because of the accusations surrounding him.
In late 2018, Miami-Dade court records surfaced online, along with a mugshot of a more average-looking Buu, regarding a 'Markquez Lao Santiago', who had pled guilty to charges of child abuse, robbery, obstruction of justice and criminal mischief. In an interview with XXL in December of 2018, after being questioned on his criminal history, Buu explained that he was wrongly reported to the police and accused of intimidating a witness with a firearm, and that the victim was a minor at the time, apparently set to testify against his friend. The victim was unharmed and so decided not to press charges but the case was picked up by the state of Florida anyway, which added the child abuse charge.
Kid Buu told XXL that the child abuse was labeled 'child abuse with no harm'. He says he was 18 at the time of the incident and that the victim was either 16 or 17 years old. Buu was put on probation after the case, according to legal documents. He then adds that by pleading guilty to all of these charges, he figured it would allow him to 'move on with life.' His controversial past was then sent into even further disarray after these revelations though, as model and YouTuber Sarah Penman posted a 49-minute video on YouTube detailing her past relationship with Buu, and accused him of being a compulsive liar, after lying about his age and the fact that he had a daughter, and that he was emotionally abusive. Buu once again denied the claims and defended himself to XXL, stating that he only met Sarah through Tinder, and that girls on Tinder are "willing to do anything, even if it's dishonour someone who was a kind friend in the past".
Whether you choose to believe Kid Buu's claims and justifications is entirely up to you. As a big fan of XXXTENTACION, and considering his history, I am a great believer in not defining someone by their mistakes, and that given time, people can change if they're willing to make the effort to do so. However, Buu's approach to his past is so shady that one finds it increasingly hard to believe that he so innocently wanted to 'move on with life'.
This brings us to another point of Buu's persona that links to his past allegations. Buu claims that he is in fact, a second-generation clone, escaped from a Canadian company named Clonaid. He even went as far as to showcase himself sitting alongside his apparent clone and admittedly, it is an exact copy of himself, tattoos and all. However, this has widely been dismissed as fake and put down to photoshop and editing techniques. Clonaid's founder though, is Raël, also the founder of the UFO-based religion Raëlism, which Buu now also alleges himself to be a part of. The rapper claims that a UFO encounter led to him joining the religion, which believes that life on Earth originated from alien lifeforms, and that his memory was mostly wiped in a hypnosis therapy that acts as an apparent brainwashing - which conveniently explains why he can't recall some details of the stories behind his accusations.
All of this and we've not even gotten to the controversy behind Buu as an actual artist.
Songwise, I can't lie, Kid Buu does have some highly replayable tracks in his discography. Probably his most well known at the moment is 'death 2 soundcloud ', which sits comfortably at about 3.39 million plays on the named streaming service. The song is a classic 'Florida bass-heavy' tune, which thanks to the excellent production from duo Oohdem Beatz, comes very close to the extreme hyper-aggressive style of X's 'ImSippinTeaInYoHood' (WARNING: Headphone users may want to turn your volume down a bit before clicking that link). This is where Buu's controversy as an artist arises though. The style is extremely similar to X's early SoundCloud days, and the backing track sounds almost as though X himself would have handpicked it. On top of this, if one listens to Smokepurpp's 'Audi.' (released on 17th May 2017) from his Deadstar mixtape, and compares it to 'death 2 souncloud' (released on 28th July 2018) it's hard to deny that the flow sounds very similar, leading to many writing 'death 2 soundcloud' off as essentially just a copy of 'Audi.'. That being said, I admittedly do enjoy 'death 2 soundcloud' more than I do 'Audi.'
However, we then move on to other songs of Buu's, namely 'dead roses (never wanted you)' (released 13th February 2018), which even upon the first time of listening, you can easily deduce to be a blatant rip-off of NAV's 'Wanted You' featuring Lil Uzi Vert (released 3rd November 2017), from NAV's 2018 debut album RECKLESS. From the very title, right down to Kid Buu's flow, you can tell it was copied from NAV. The saddest part is that to try and defend himself, Buu supposedly even changed the date he uploaded the song to SoundCloud, to try and prove that NAV had in fact, copied him.
All of this and I won't even go into detail on the lighthearted ad-lib style he has taken from X on his song 'momma', or the flows and styles he seems to have snatched from Ski Mask the Slump God, Trippie Redd and Lil Uzi Vert on his songs 'poppa', 'Misery Needs Company' and 'curtis', respectively.
Now, controversially I'm going to make a case in defence of Kid Buu here; admittedly not a very strong one, but a case nonetheless. First of all, despite the claims (and evidence) of style-biting and copying, it is almost admirable how much diversity, vocally, that Buu does have in his locker, regardless of whether it's original or not. The man singing on 'Misery Needs Company' sounds like a completely different person to the artist shouting throughout 'death 2 soundcloud', and this is the type of versatility that artists like X, Trippie Redd and Childish Gambino get so much praise for, and winding back a few years, acts like Andre 3000 and Lupe Fiasco as well. I do believe that often in hip-hop, we have to separate the art from the artist and recognise when someone has done a good job in proving that they're not just a one trick pony. This is of course under the assumption that it is Buu doing all the singing/rapping himself, and that there is no foul play with other unnamed artists doing the recording for him.
On top of this, if one looks into Kid Buu's name, which he claims he came up with whilst he was 'on shrooms', it is also the name of a Dragonball Z character - Kid Buu, one of the forms of the series' main antagonist, Majin Buu. Also, some of Kid and Majin Buu's noteworthy powers in this series include not only the ability to clone oneself, but the ability to mimic another characters power after seeing it performed only once. Now, if you take into account Kid Buu's (the rapper) stories of cloning himself, and the copying of other artist's styles and songs, you have to begin to wonder if perhaps this is what Buu has been setting himself up for all along - to deliberately become the antagonist of the rap world, and not only steal the styles of others, but create songs out of them that admittedly do come off better than the originals at times. If this is true, and Buu has indeed set out to portray himself in such a way, through these techniques, then he could well have devised one of the greatest marketing techniques hip-hop has ever seen. Either this, or he could be a complete idiot who shadily covered up his past, stole his name from a TV show, hopped on other artist's styles to get attention, and continually comes up with absurd lies about himself in a desperate attempt to remain relevant. I'll let you decide.
Overall, in my opinion, I just don't trust Kid Buu. I remain true to my belief of allowing people time to prove they've changed, but I just don't think Buu really has - he's far too sketchy of a character. If he truly did commit these crimes and pled guilty to 'move on with life', then with such a relaxed attitude about it all, surely the best way to go about this would be to acknowledge you did the crime, serve the time, and look back on it as motivation to make a change. Instead, Buu seems to have covered it up, and changed who he was both physically and literally, by lying about his age, and tried to fit in with a generation almost a decade younger than him. I acknowledge that yes, he does have some good songs, and I admire his tenacity in managing to make his way into the relevance of the hip-hop world, but sometimes, not all that break through into the mainstream are truly meant to. I think that Buu is just desperate to be famous and regardless of what it takes to get there - even abandoning morals and changing everything about yourself - he seems to have no second thoughts about doing so, purely in order to remain relevant. It seems to be just a sad, and extreme, case of attention-seeking.