THE ECONOMY IS SICK. AWFM MADE THE SOUNDTRACK. AN UNCOVER ARTICLE.

AWFM in UGLASS FREESTYLE • Video by Jackson Hendrix and LizBot at OUTERSPACE. • Still via Memphis Flyer

Five years after Sellmore, A Weirdo From Memphis returns August 1 with Recessionary Indicator, a mixtape about what happens when the American economy stops being an abstraction and starts breathing down your neck.

There is a version of the AWFM story that is easy to package. Pink bunny ears. Red eyes. A four tooth grill engraved with a word most publications would replace with asterisks. An artist from Memphis who chose the name A Weirdo From Memphis before the city had fully decided what to do with him.

That version is real. It is also the costume department. The deeper story is about a person who spent years learning what instability does to the mind, what humiliation does to ambition, and what happens when a supposedly responsible life proves no safer than the strange one you were warned against.

Recessionary Indicator is the report from inside that reality.

THE RECESSION WAS NEVER JUST ON TELEVISION

In January 2020, AWFM left a career in IT to make music full time. A national tour with MonoNeon was being assembled. Years of writing, waiting and arriving at the studio absurdly early were finally beginning to look like a life.

Then the world shut down.

The tour disappeared. The traditional job did not politely return. AWFM moved into delivery work and other forms of survival income. The cubicle had insulated him from parts of Memphis that gig work made impossible to avoid. In previous interviews, he has spoken about seeing death, being robbed of a car and learning to read streets and situations differently. These were not scenes imagined for a record. They were the terrain between one delivery and the next.

That rupture helped produce 2022’s Sellmore, recorded largely with C MaJor and shaped by the nervous energy of an artist trying to make the month add up. Memphis Flyer writer Alex Greene heard the humor living beside the dread. AWFM explained the mechanism simply: “You’ve got to find humor in this stuff, man.”

Recessionary Indicator arrives five years later, but the emergency never completely ended. Rent climbs. Work becomes less dependable. An overdraft fee can become a character in your day. DoorDash customers become bosses for twelve minutes at a time. The stock market can be described as healthy while everyone you know is tired.

The mixtape’s title takes the clinical language used by economists and drags it into ordinary life. AWFM is not interested in the chart by itself. He is interested in the person underneath it.

AWFM • Photograph by Jackson Hendrix • Via We Are Memphis

INTERVIEW, CONTINUED: WHAT DOES FAILURE SOUND LIKE?

THE QUESTION: What changes when the fear is no longer theoretical?

THE ANSWER, ACROSS YEARS OF AWFM INTERVIEWS: The art gets less interested in pretending.

AWFM grew up loving RAP before he felt safe calling himself a rapper. As a child, he was an early internet kid, indoors with headphones, video games and strangers on IRC channels while other children were outside. At school, bullying taught him to hide the things he wanted to try. Drawing. Freestyling. Skateboarding. The humiliations accumulated until normalcy began to look like camouflage.

At the University of Memphis, he studied software engineering and kept encountering the feeling that the responsible future he was building belonged to somebody else. A trip to Columbus to see Tyler, the Creator open for Kid Cudi in 2013 turned that discomfort into a decision. He saw a field full of kids who understood the same obscure references and wanted to be on the stage instead of watching it.

Back in Memphis, he wrote over MF DOOM instrumentals and recorded wherever he could. Skip Fearless introduced him to IMAKEMADBEATS. Later, Kid Maestro saw AWFM performing on top of a chair at Crosstown Arts and called MAD. The artist kept returning to OUTERSPACE. He has recalled parking nearby as much as six hours early to write before studio sessions. In 2016, he officially became part of UNAPOLOGETIC.

That history matters because Recessionary Indicator is not a sudden costume change into darkness. AWFM has always used discomfort as material. The difference is that the outside world has moved closer to his frequency.

UGLASS, ADHD AND THE UGLY TRUTH

The first public window into the tape is “UGLASS FREESTYLE,” produced by Splish Splash. The title reads like an accusation and a mirror. The video, shot by Jackson Hendrix and LizBot at OUTERSPACE., keeps the frame close to AWFM and lets the performance do the disturbing work.

Memphis Flyer called it a change of tone and described the song as AWFM grappling with troubled times. That description is accurate, but the shift is not toward seriousness. AWFM has always been serious. It is toward exposure. Less distance between the joke and the threat. Less fantasy between the landlord and the locked door.

“ADHD,” another entry point into this era, moves with the speed of an overcrowded mind. It jumps between medication, sex, rent, food, bravado, exhaustion, prayer and the need to keep moving. The comedy is not relief from hardship. It is one of the tools used to metabolize it. A listener can laugh and still recognize the panic underneath.

That is AWFM’s enduring trick. He says the ugly thing before the room can use it against him. He exaggerates the private fear until it becomes public theater. He can sound completely out of control while remaining exact about what the song is doing.

A WEIRDO FROM MEMPHIS • Photograph by Catherine Elizabeth Patton • Via UNAPOLOGETIC.

A RELEASE SHOW BUILT LIKE A WORLD

On August 1, the tape leaves the headphones at RED AT THE BLACK, AWFM’s release show at Cxffeeblack. Doors open at 7 p.m. with the show at 7:30. The night includes an AWFM performance, a limited AWFM x Cxffeeblack garments release, physical copies of Recessionary Indicator, and the release of THE MEDICINE, a Cxffeeblack x UNAPOLOGETIC. coffee collaboration.

The setting makes sense. This is not a campaign pretending that a streaming link is the whole world. The music, clothing, coffee, stage design and bodies in the room are all parts of the same argument: independent culture becomes durable when it can build its own places, products and rituals.

AWFM has spent years turning weirdness from an insult into infrastructure. Recessionary Indicator extends that work into a period when more people are discovering that the structures advertised as normal were never especially stable.

The bunny ears are still there. The jokes are still dangerous. But on August 1, AWFM is not presenting an escape from the economy. He is holding up the evidence.

Reporting context: Memphis Flyer, We Are Memphis, UNAPOLOGETIC., VoyageLA and Choose901. All quoted statements are from previously published AWFM interviews or coverage.