“I’m a little drunky drunk,” bbymutha – aka Chattanooga resident Brittnee Moore – tells the crowd at The Creek And Cave Backyard midway through her lightning-fast set. The rising Tennessee rapper has spent the week playing two shows a day, as she points out, and her penultimate SXSW 2022 gig tonight (March 18) is something of an early celebration.
Pre-SXSW, bbymutha was already on a swiftly accelerating trajectory, scoring fans in the likes of Bree Runway, Erykah Badu, SZA and more since she first started uploading her tracks to SoundCloud in 2014. Holding multiple performances in Austin over the last few days can only have sped up that ascent, and the crowd tonight eagerly laps up her cool, chaotic energy with the knowledge that she likely won’t be performing in such lowkey venues for much longer.
Moore’s set is incredibly short at just over 15 minutes, but so packed full of savagery and sauce that it still feels like you’re getting your proverbial money’s worth. On ‘Frida’, she maps a blueprint to getting revenge on a shitty man, leading the outdoors crowd in chants of “Fuck his bitch, break his heart.” Later, on the skittering ‘Heavy Metal’, she lays out her claim to superstar status, cheekily rapping: “I’m a rockstar / Money make my cock hard.”
Such lines might make you think bbymutha is a product of this planet, but there’s something more mystical and celestial about her, too. ‘Blood Moon Glamour Spell’ invokes a witchy attitude, the rising artist rhyming: “Fix my makeup in the moonlight / Do a glamour spell / Shout out all the pretty bastard bitches / Out here raising hell.” “Happy Virgo full moon, by the way,” she interrupts herself midway through.
After a brief appearance from Texan MC TTBBY, Moore steps back on the mic to share an unreleased track and get one step closer to wrapping up her first SXSW adventure. “I do whatever I want,” she raps over the lively beat. It’s a sentiment she backs up graphically on her final track, ‘Bbymutha’s Body’, on which she repeats: “I’ma eat your soul, I’ma shit it out.” As mantras go, it’s perhaps not the most likely to manifest new positivity into your life, but it certainly seems to be working for the rapper. At SXSW, she’s eating up the competition with ease; next stop, the wider world.
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