Fatboi Sharif and Driveby on the Music They Want to Soundtrack Their Funerals

Existential Playlist is an interview series where artists tell us about the music they want played at their own memorial service, delving into some of life’s biggest questions along the way.

One of the only things that rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Driveby enjoy more than making music is going to the movies. Sharif, who used to work at a theater near his hometown of Rahway, New Jersey, leans more toward the experimental and macabre—Alejandro Jodorovsky’s The Holy Mountain and Rozz Williams’ 1998 minimalist horror Pig are among his favorites—while Driveby, also a native New Jerseyite, leans more toward sci-fi like Blade Runner, the recent Dune reboot series, and Alien. Sharif and I go to the movies together often, seeing a healthy mix of new films and re-releases of classics and rarities. And on a breezy night in late April, the three of us head toe IFC Center in lower Manhattan to see a screening of Sharif’s pick for the evening: the Norwegian satirical body horror film The Ugly Stepsister. 

The movie is essentially a brutal retelling of the Cinderella story, where a young woman named Elvira is put through physical turmoil to be seen as conventionally attractive enough to be married off to a rich suitor. Lots of other things happen as well, but outside of the visuals—Elvira has to endure having her nose broken, swallowing a tapeworm to lose weight, and having her toes amputated to fit into dress shoes—none of us could understand the dialogue because the film, spoken entirely in Norwegian, was inexplicably shown without English subtitles. 

The screening devolved into a guessing game, with Driveby passing bags of candy and Deep River potato chips down the aisle to Sharif and I as we quietly giggled amongst ourselves. With no dialogue we could understand, we gave in and embraced the spectacle. A movie about grisly body torture that walked the line between camp and true horror felt like the perfect segue for us to eventually talk about death.  

In the best possible way, the music Sharif and Driveby make together embodies that same parallel between camp and horror. Calling Sharif’s raps and Driveby’s beats “abstract” is an understatement—they both start from points listeners might recognize as hip-hop or industrial or synth-based electronica and gradually melt into each other like room-temperature ice cream. But dig a little further into their latest project Let Me Out, their collaborative album out now via Deathbomb Arc, and the depths of Sharif’s poetry and Driveby’s scuzzy productions reveal themselves with time. You have to meet songs like “Elvira’s Wedding Ring” or “Zeitgeistic Psychosomatic Measurements” halfway and be willing to get lost in them before they begin to make sense. There’s a concept at play, one that stretches at least as far back to Sharif’s 2016 album Age of Extinction, but both are tight-lipped about what it might be. Let Me Out, like all of their work, doesn’t hold hands and demands to be unpacked on its own terms.

Over diner food later that night, Sharif and Driveby spoke about the music they’d like to be played at their respective funerals. Sharif’s mostly revolve around music that inspired his craft and that would elicit reactions out of his service-goers, while Driveby’s largely focus on music that plays to his emotions. The respect they have for each other is palpable as they take down their pancakes and chicken tenders. “There was a time I was gonna quit music, and Sharif cursed me the fuck out,” Driveby admits. “That’s what made me realize, Oh, this dude is a true friend. He cares enough to hop on your tracks and to curse you out if you’re thinking about quitting.”