There is a specific kind of artist this site exists to cover, and Chris Crack might be the platonic ideal. He sits at 44.2K monthly listeners on Spotify. He has released somewhere north of twenty albums. He is unsigned, on purpose. He raps in what one writer called a “drive-thru voice,” which is somehow the most accurate description I have ever read. And he names his songs like he is daring you to take him seriously while making it impossible to look away.
If you are unfamiliar, the West Side Chicago rapper has been operating in his own lane for over a decade. Earl Sweatshirt loves him. Madlib loves him. Pitchfork eventually came around. The mainstream music industry has, mostly, not. Which is fine. He has been clear that he prefers it that way.
I want to talk about his song titles specifically because I think they are one of the most underrated bodies of comedic and conceptual writing in rap. Not the songs. The titles. As standalone phrases. As bumper stickers, as t-shirts, as text messages you might send a friend at 2 a.m. Crack has the kind of imagination that produces a phrase like “Air Mattresses and Machine Guns” and then keeps moving without explaining itself. That is a skill. That is, honestly, a worldview.
So here are twenty of them, ranked. I tried to balance pure shock-laugh titles with the more aphoristic ones, the imagistic ones, and the ones that quietly make a point under all the goofiness. I left off some of the ones that lean almost entirely on shock because, while they are funny, the titles I picked tend to do more work. Your mileage may vary. That is sort of the point of this entire exercise.
20. “Goals Only Exist in Soccer”
A perfect opener for the list because it is the kind of joke that sounds dumb until you let it sit for a second. Then it becomes a small, sad observation about how nobody actually achieves what they set out to do. It is also from Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans, which we will return to.
19. “Hoes At Trader Joe’s”
Specific in the way comedy needs to be specific. Not Whole Foods. Not Sprouts. Trader Joe’s. There is a whole social class implied here. There is a tote bag implied here. I have nothing more to add.
18. “Hypebeasts Ruined Bape”
Genuine cultural criticism in five words. He is not wrong. The Bathing Ape line went from a niche signifier to something you could buy at a kiosk in the mall, and Crack diagnoses the entire arc with the energy of a guy talking to himself at a bus stop. Which, again, is his lane.
17. “Going Out on Weekends Is Desperate”
Anyone who has ever gotten home from work on a Friday night, looked at the door, and decided the door was the enemy will feel seen. It also flips a default assumption about social life so cleanly that I have started believing it. I am 22 and I think he might be onto something.
16. “Discount Cocaine on Father’s Day”
The discount is doing all the work in this title. It is not just cocaine. It is discount cocaine. On Father’s Day. There is a whole short story embedded in there. Chappelle could not have written it tighter.
15. “Side Pussy Might Save The Marriage”
I do not endorse the thesis. I am only here to evaluate the writing. And the writing has the cadence of a self-help book chapter from a parallel universe where every motivational speaker also got divorced. The “might” is what sells it. The hedging.
14. “Wide Nose Watermelon Eating Silverback Gorilla”
This one is doing something complicated. It opens Sheep Hate Goats by stacking every racist caricature you have ever seen on a 1970s cereal box into a single phrase, then handing it to you. It feels confrontational because it is. Whether it works for you is its own question. I think it does, because the absurdity of saying it out loud forces you to hear how ridiculous each piece of it actually is.
13. “Hug Me Till I Smell Like You”
Tender, weird, almost romantic in a Tom Waits way. Most rap song titles do not aim for this register. Crack drops it into an album and never explains himself, which is the move.
12. “Cows Are Friends Not Food”
This is exactly what a Morrissey song would be called if Morrissey grew up on the West Side. I love that Crack is willing to do PETA bumper-sticker rap for one song and then turn around and write something disgusting on the next track. The whiplash is the point. He refuses to be one thing.
11. “My Ex Was a Garden Tool”
A title that does not sound like a title. It sounds like a sentence somebody finished at a barbecue right before everyone changed the subject. The visual is dumb and the metaphor is dumb and that is what makes it land. Plus, the implied joke about a hoe is so obvious he did not even bother explaining it. He trusts you.
10. “Sex Dreams About Platonic Friends”
The reason this one cracks the top half is because it is genuinely uncomfortable. Everybody has had this happen. Nobody talks about it. He named a song after the experience and tossed it onto an album like it was nothing. I respect that.
9. “Topo Chico DeBarge”
Pure pun, pure music nerd bait. Topo Chico is the cool kid mineral water. El DeBarge is the silky-voiced R&B legend. Crack saw two unrelated things, mashed them, and made a title that doubles as a reading list. If you do not get the joke immediately, you will go look up DeBarge. That is the function of a great title.
8. “Air Mattresses and Machine Guns”
Cinematic. The two objects could not be more opposed in temperament, and yet the second you read them in the same phrase your brain immediately constructs a scene. Probably a guest bedroom. Probably bad decisions. The image lingers longer than most album titles do.
7. “Recently Deleted Saved My Life”
This is a real one for anybody who has ever almost sent a regrettable text. The “Recently Deleted” folder on your phone, with all those emergency exits you thought you’d erased, is one of the great inventions of modern technology. He is right. It has saved lives. Mine included.
6. “Therapy Don’t Work, Try Drugs”
I am a psych major. I should hate this title. I do not. It is bait, but it is good bait, because there is a real conversation underneath it about the gap between what therapy actually does for people and what self-medication ends up doing for them when therapy is inaccessible or insufficient. I am not saying he is right. I am saying the title is doing more than it pretends to be doing, and that is most of what makes Crack worth paying attention to.
5. “Don’t Check Up On Me, I’m Good”
The most relatable one on the list. The exact phrase you have texted somebody after going off the grid for a week. Crack has a real talent for taking a sentence that already exists in everybody’s mouth and putting it in a place where you finally see it. That is the work of a writer, not a meme account.
4. “Beer Just Bread In A Can”
Stoner aphorism of the year. Of any year. It is technically accurate. It is also the kind of thing a friend says at 1 a.m. that you remember three months later and laugh out loud at on the bus. I have been chewing on this title since I first heard it and I still do not know what to do with the feeling it gives me.
3. “A Blunt Forced This Trauma”
The wordplay here is so clean it is almost rude. “Blunt force trauma” is an idiom you have heard your entire life without ever interrogating. Crack pulls it apart, slips a different blunt into the gap, and what comes out is funny and weirdly wise. It also frames marijuana as a thing that does damage, not just a thing that helps, which is more honest than most weed raps want to be.
2. “Chicago Don’t Make Industry Plants”
- “Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans”
This is a thesis statement. The whole reason I am writing about Chris Crack on a blog called under100k is because he embodies what this title argues. Chicago, in his framing, builds artists from the ground up out of necessity. Nobody is being parachuted in by a label and given a fake backstory. The city’s underground rap ecosystem, from Saba to Noname to Crack himself, has a different texture than what comes out of A&R offices on either coast. Whether you fully agree with him is up for debate. As a song title, though, it lands like a flag in the ground.
1. “Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans”
It had to be this one. It is the album, the song, and the entire Chris Crack worldview compressed into five words. It is funny on the surface. It is darker the longer you sit with it. It implies a philosophy about authenticity and survival that the more I think about it, the less ironic it seems. He is not actually saying drug addicts outlive health-food disciples. He is saying that pretending you can outwit mortality through performative wellness is its own kind of delusion. That a guy with nothing to lose, who is honest about what he is doing, may be more in touch with reality than the person curating their fridge for Instagram. You do not have to agree to recognize that this is a real argument, dressed up as a punchline. Most rappers cannot do that with an entire album. He did it with the title.