The 2020s File Feature
Tell Em
Cochise and $NOT's "Tell Em": Underground Energy Meets the Hot 100 The arrival of "Tell Em" by Cochise featuring $NOT on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer …
01 The Story
Cochise and $NOT's "Tell Em": Underground Energy Meets the Hot 100
The arrival of "Tell Em" by Cochise featuring $NOT on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 2021 represented a particular kind of chart event that had become increasingly common in the streaming era: a track that originated from genuinely underground, niche-oriented communities achieving mainstream chart visibility not through conventional promotion but through the organic spread of digital content and algorithmic music discovery. The song's brief but significant chart run offered a snapshot of how the edges of contemporary rap culture were feeding the center in ways that would have been structurally impossible in the pre-streaming era.
Cochise, born Caleb Vinson, emerged from the SoundCloud-adjacent ecosystem of underground rap that had been percolating through the internet music world in the late 2010s and early 2020s. His aesthetic drew from punk, metal, and avant-garde rap traditions, blending aggressive guitar-influenced production with a lyrical sensibility that was irreverent, confident, and deliberately eccentric. He was not a polished major-label product but rather an artist who had built a following through the authenticity of his individual vision, appealing to listeners who were drawn to music that operated according to its own internal logic rather than commercial expectations.
$NOT, born Jonah Kasefair in Port St. Lucie, Florida, occupied a similar aesthetic territory, having built his reputation through SoundCloud and YouTube with a sound that blended melodic rap, punk energy, and a distinctive slacker charisma. His collaboration with Cochise was a natural meeting of complementary sensibilities, and "Tell Em" emerged from a creative chemistry that felt organic rather than calculated. The track was not produced as a bid for mainstream attention but as an expression of a specific subculture's aesthetic values.
The production on "Tell Em" incorporated guitar-driven elements that connected it to the early 2020s wave of "emo rap" and punk-rap fusion that was generating significant interest among younger listeners. The track's energy was aggressive and propulsive, built on a sonic palette that owed more to rock music's confrontational spirit than to the polished trap production that dominated mainstream rap in the same period. This distinctive sound was both the reason for the song's underground success and the quality that made its mainstream crossover somewhat surprising.
The song debuted at number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated June 12, 2021, which also constituted its peak position. The debut was driven by streaming activity that had been building through TikTok and YouTube, where the song's energy made it an effective soundtrack for a variety of content categories. The visual and sonic qualities that made the track appealing as TikTok audio, namely its punchy, immediate impact and its sense of physical momentum, drove the content creation that translated into chart-eligible streaming numbers.
The track's Hot 100 run extended to four weeks, with a descent from 64 to 92 on June 19, then a gap before returning at number 95 on July 3, and finally reaching number 100 on July 17 before exiting the chart. This intermittent presence reflected the nature of viral momentum in the streaming era, where the chart reflects fluctuating weekly streaming counts rather than a smooth commercial trajectory. The song's ability to re-enter the chart after initially dropping suggests that successive waves of TikTok content creation extended its streaming life beyond a single surge.
The success of "Tell Em" was part of a broader pattern of alternative and underground rap acts breaking onto the Hot 100 through digital channels in 2020 and 2021. Artists like Yeat, Ken Carson, and others from the same aesthetic ecosystem were experiencing similar chart moments, reflecting a shift in how music discovery worked for younger listeners. The algorithm-driven world of Spotify and TikTok was capable of surfacing niche music to mainstream audiences in ways that radio programmers and traditional label promotion infrastructure were not equipped to replicate.
The YouTube video for "Tell Em" accumulated approximately 69 million views as the song's viral moment extended its reach into new platforms and audiences. The visual presentation matched the song's aggressive aesthetic, reinforcing the raw energy that had driven its organic success. This consistency between audio and visual identity was characteristic of artists from the underground rap ecosystem, where aesthetic coherence was valued as a marker of authenticity and artistic seriousness.
Neither Cochise nor $NOT were signed to major labels at the time of the song's chart success, which made the Hot 100 placement particularly meaningful as a demonstration of what independent artists could achieve through a combination of genuine creative vision and effective use of social media platforms. The song charted entirely without radio promotion, relying solely on streaming and digital download activity driven by TikTok and YouTube content creation, a fact that underscored the structural shift in how hits were made in the early 2020s. The traditional gatekeepers of the music industry, including label A&R departments, radio programmers, and music video channels, had not been part of the song's path to commercial visibility. The audience had found the music directly, and the chart reflected that discovery.
The SoundCloud Rap Legacy and "Tell Em"
The cultural lineage from which "Tell Em" emerged traced back to the SoundCloud rap movement of the mid-2010s, which had produced artists like XXXTentacion, Lil Pump, and Juice WRLD and had demonstrated that raw, internet-native music could achieve massive commercial impact without industry infrastructure. Cochise and $NOT were part of a second generation of artists who had absorbed those lessons and were operating in an environment where the infrastructure of digital distribution and social media had become even more capable of bypassing traditional gatekeepers. "Tell Em" was in many ways a direct descendant of that earlier wave, carrying forward its spirit of aesthetic independence into a more mature and more data-driven music industry landscape.
02 Song Meaning
Confidence, Defiance, and Underground Identity in "Tell Em"
Cochise and $NOT's "Tell Em" operates on the direct and confrontational energy that characterizes the best moments of the punk-rap fusion genre from which both artists emerged. The song's thematic content is built around an attitude of unapologetic self-assertion, a refusal to seek approval from critics, gatekeepers, or the mainstream music industry, and a celebration of the underground aesthetic that both artists had cultivated independently before bringing their energies together on a single track. To encounter "Tell Em" is to encounter a particular strain of early-2020s youth culture that found its identity through opposition to convention and its community through shared investment in the margins of popular music.
The core theme of the song is confidence without permission, the assertion that validity as an artist does not require institutional validation or mainstream recognition. Both Cochise and $NOT built their careers in spaces outside the traditional music industry's approval structures, and "Tell Em" articulates the worldview that emerges from that kind of autonomous development. The title itself functions as a challenge, an instruction to communicate something to an unnamed audience or opposition, implying that the message being sent is not a request for acceptance but a declaration of presence.
The aggressive production that frames the song contributes directly to its thematic content. The guitar-driven instrumentation, with its punk and metal overtones, is not simply an aesthetic choice but a statement of cultural allegiance. By choosing production that connects to rock music's traditions of rebellion and anti-establishment energy, the song positions itself within a lineage of music that has always defined itself against conformity and commercial compromise. The listeners who responded most strongly to "Tell Em" were those who understood this lineage and felt its claims upon their own sense of identity.
There is a strong community dimension to the song's thematic work. Both Cochise and $NOT were embedded in specific internet-based music communities where the values of authenticity, aesthetic independence, and creative risk-taking were paramount. "Tell Em" functions partly as a communication to those communities, a confirmation that their values are being held and their aesthetic investments are being returned with interest. The song is not simply about individual confidence but about a collective ethos that finds expression through the two artists' individual voices.
The physicality of the song's energy is itself meaningful, addressing themes of presence and dominance in terms that are immediate and bodily rather than abstract. The momentum built by the production and the delivery style demands a physical response from listeners, whether through head-nodding, movement, or the general alertness that comes from exposure to music built on aggressive sonic energy. This physicality connects the song to a tradition of music designed for performance in communal spaces, even as its actual audience often encountered it through headphones and phone speakers.
The anti-authority dimension of the song's themes extends to its implicit commentary on the music industry itself. Both artists' positioning outside the major-label system, and their successful chart entry despite that positioning, gave "Tell Em" a meta-narrative quality in which the song's defiance of convention was simultaneously its subject and its method. The message to "tell em" could be read as a message to the industry gatekeepers who would not have predicted or facilitated this kind of success, a demonstration that their approval was neither sought nor necessary.
The youth culture that generated the song's viral success was characterized by a particular kind of restless aesthetic exploration that pulled from multiple traditions simultaneously without feeling obligated to maintain their boundaries. Punk, metal, Southern rap, and internet-native music were all legitimate influences for listeners in this community, and the willingness to synthesize across those traditions without apology was itself a thematic statement about creative freedom. "Tell Em" embodied this spirit of synthesis, combining elements that would not traditionally have coexisted in a single track and presenting the combination as natural and inevitable.
The song's relationship to irony and sincerity was characteristic of the broader cultural sensibility from which it emerged. The confidence expressed in "Tell Em" is real but also performed, the performance being part of the confidence rather than a contradiction of it. This kind of self-aware self-assertion, in which the posture is acknowledged as a posture while still being inhabited fully, reflects the sophisticated relationship to authenticity that characterizes much of the internet-native music culture from which Cochise and $NOT came. The song does not ask listeners to take everything at face value but instead invites them into a shared understanding of how confidence functions as both genuine emotion and cultural performance.
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