Tupelo, MS · hip hop · r&b

Swae Lee

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Half of Rae Sremmurd and one of rap's most reliable melody writers — the falsetto hook is basically a genre at this point.

Swae Lee was born Khalif Malik Ibn Shaman Brown in Inglewood, California, in 1993, to a single mother who served in the US Army, and was raised in Tupelo, Mississippi. He started making music in high school with his brother Slim Jxmmi and a local rapper under the name Dem Outta St8 Boyz, and the brothers went through a period of homelessness, squatting in an abandoned house, before forming Rae Sremmurd in 2010.

Rae Sremmurd signed to Mike Will Made It's EarDrummers label, an Interscope imprint, in 2013. Their albums SremmLife, SremmLife 2 and SR3MM all reached the Billboard 200 top ten, built on trap production and sung, high-register hooks, with "No Flex Zone", "No Type" and the chart-topping "Black Beatles" carrying the duo into the mainstream.

As a soloist, Swae Lee's guest verse on French Montana's "Unforgettable" reached the Hot 100 top ten and went diamond, and he earned a Grammy nomination for co-writing Beyoncé's "Formation". His 2018 album Swaecation appeared as part of Rae Sremmurd's triple album SR3MM.

His falsetto has since carried other artists' records to number one: "Sunflower" with Post Malone, written for the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack, became the highest-certified song in RIAA history, and he appeared uncredited on Travis Scott's "Sicko Mode". "Close to Me" with Ellie Goulding and Diplo and "Be Like That" with Kane Brown and Khalid both went multi-platinum.

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