Who is 4Batz?
A video montage attempts to answer the question in front of a sold-out crowd at the Echo Lounge during the 20-year-old rapper’s Dallas stop on his Thank U, Jada tour on August 7th. A stripper pole, a bed, and a couch set the scene for his “hood musical” to play out each act of his latest mixtape u made me a st4r.
You hear voices of influential hip-hop media personalities like DJ Akademiks and Joe Budden, trying to understand how 4Batz came out of nowhere and how he rose to prominence so quickly. “Somebody tell me if 4Batz is A.I.,” Budden says. The video transitions to his first major interview with Apple Music’s Nadeska Alexis, telling her he “wasn’t the best kid” growing up. “I can’t really go down that path because there was nothing else to live for,” he says. “It really wasn’t nothing else out there outside of music.” It cuts to clips of him with Drake and Kanye West, all vibing to his music, his high-pitched vocals manipulated from his baritone voice. He’s seen walking the red carpet at this year’s BET Awards.
All this success isn’t without a message for Jada, the ex-girlfriend who he says cheated on him and inspired the mixtape. “Every time you hear my song, I want you to think about how bad your stupid ass fucked up. ‘Cause bitch, you made me a star!” he says, shouting into his phone.
Dressed in an all-black Nike sweatsuit and his signature shiesty on a hot summer night, 4Batz starts his musical in “act iii”. In this song, 4Batz and his love interest go back and forth, the dance sequence miming an argument escalating, until she starts packing her bags and exits the stage, leaving him alone. On the screen is a large Batman logo outline with the number “4” inside. The Dark Knight of Dallas has arrived.
“Oh, we home tonight!” 4Batz exclaims to a crowd of cheers. “You know I’m from here, right? So you know we gotta come sweet and real special. You know every love story starts with a beginning.”
Hours before the show, 4batz, born Neko Bennett, tells me he’s going on dates again. Sort of. In different cities on the tour, he’s been treating fans to bowling and the movies for a “date @ 8 series.”
“I ain’t gonna lie, it is fun because there are so many different personalities,” he says over Zoom. “They all just want to have a good time, so it’s a vibe.”
4Batz’s bounce back after a break-up has him embracing the single life and his new star status. When D named 4Batz Dallas’ best rapper in this year’s Best of Big D, it was just the latest accolade in a year full of them, which also included being nominated for Best New Artist at the BET Awards and named a 2024 XXL Freshman with fellow Dallas rapper BigXThaPlug. He has over six million Spotify listeners and streaming numbers in the millions, the byproduct of 4Batz being the product of the TikTok-superstar-to-mainstream-artist pipeline. He’s earned co-signs from artists like SZA and Timbaland. Kanye West and Usher have hopped on his songs.
The speed at which he’s resonated with a wide audience has drawn accusations that 4Batz is an industry plant, a term used to describe an independent artist who doesn’t have an organic origin and was secretly manufactured by a record label or industry connections. He’s paid attention: the merch stand at his hometown show features a shirt of his face and the words “industry” and “plant” across his eyes.
It’s a savvy move for an artist who is still getting used to performing live. Prior to the Echo Lounge show, 4Batz was last spotted outside of his Batz cave on a stage in Dallas when he came out as a special guest during Summer Walker’s headlining set at TwoGether Land during Memorial Day Weekend. That was only his second performance, after making his debut at his album listening party back in mid-May. Recalling the club show at The Garden, u made me a st4r was maybe out for a week but everyone knew the words to songs like “act v: there goes another vase” and “act vi: mad man.” He’s as shocked as anyone about how quickly everything is moving.
“This shit is still unreal to me,” he says. “It feels like it happened yesterday. It’s weird because I’ve been fake performing with my remote my whole life since I was five, so whenever I perform it’s like I forget that it is new. I forget that this is my first time doing it. I’m doing it like I’ve been doing it for years. But when I stop doing it, and I get off the stage, and I’m decompressing about everything, I’m like, ‘Damn, this is really my sixth show ever.’”
At the Echo Lounge, 4Batz goes full R&B heartthrob, performing shirtless. The custom rose gold Batman chain sparkles in the light as he sings the original “act iv: fckin u (18+)” and its remix, featuring Usher. Next, he brings out his first surprise of the night, Dallas rapper Yella Beezy, who performed local favorite “That’s On Me.” It’s a gesture designed to showcase his love for his city.
“Honestly, there was a part of my life where I thought Dallas was everything,” he says. “I thought Dallas was Chicago. I could’ve sworn I’d seen Chief Keef when I was seven. I just thought Dallas was the world because I had never been out of Dallas before. And that just goes to show how much Dallas means to me because it is so big in my heart. I will always love Dallas.”
How did 4Batz go from never having an opportunity to leave Dallas to his first headlining tour, which also happens to be his first serious run performing on a stage?
In his own words, he says “I got here by doing something that nobody has ever done before.” As a rapper, he searched for an R&B beat on YouTube and thought, “What if I just sing on this shit on some different shit?”
“Before it was pitched up, I sang on it and I showed it to my brother,” he says.” This was ‘stickerz.’ He was like, ‘Bro, I ain’t gon’ hold you, this shit hard. But you sound like a girl.’ It was up from there.”
4Batz’s style is designed to subvert expectations. When he requested a mic-up visual for his first song “stickers ‘99’” and second song “date @ 8”, a type of performance video traditionally set in an artist’s neighborhood with them rapping, he took viewers to his hood with his friends but thought “outside the box” and sang spacey R&B. His “From the Block Performances” for songs on the Atlanta-based 4 Shooters Only YouTube channel were just a set of uploads for subscribers in 2023, but the juxtaposition of him wearing a balaclava to sing instead of rapping street rhymes caused people to hate it online. He didn’t care.
“At first people didn’t fuck with it, which I knew,” he says. “I didn’t give a fuck if people didn’t fuck with it. That was a point in my life where I was like, ‘Listen, I’m just trying to put this shit out there.’ I know one thing it’s going to do is cause conversation, right? And that’s all I want. I just want y’all to talk about it. If y’all talk about it, that means I’m talked about.”
He became a hype train running with no stops. But there’s a version of himself that remembers being fed up over his laziness of not dropping music. There was a time before 4Batz blew up when he was in his head about everything related to his music. There’s certainly a kid in there who was frustrated when nobody would listen.
Bennett was born and raised in South Dallas, moving to the Highland Hills neighborhood in Oak Cliff when he was 12 years old. He began taking music seriously in third grade. In high school, he carried a spiral notebook around to write songs, sometimes penning multiple a day. “I still got it, it’s at my grandma’s house,” he says. That notebook changed his life—just not in the way he’d expected.
4Batz remembers how it began in the cafeteria. It was too loud for him to concentrate on writing a song, so he says he found an area where it was quiet enough for him to think, even though he wasn’t allowed there. A teacher at the school approached him. An altercation took place.
“Tell me why the lady, she gon’ pull up, she looking at me, she be like, ‘Why are you over there?’” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m just trying to make a song.’ She’s like, ‘You’re not supposed to be over there.’ This lady, I was giving it to her. I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t want to do [school]. I want to be an artist.’”
4Batz says the woman spoke to the principal. He got detention and written up. Eventually, he was expelled from school for the incident. He never looked back.
“I was just like, ‘I’m gonna keep doing music.’ Because I didn’t feel like nobody believed in me,” he says. “My family didn’t believe [me], and that made me feel like I could do it. The fact that people didn’t believe in me, made me have a chip on my shoulder and made me feel like, you know what? [I can do it.] And then the shit that happened with Jada was the icing on the cake. ‘Aight, bet. You don’t believe either? Say that.’”
His music bridges the gap between younger and older generations, mining ‘90s R&B records and putting a refreshing spin on them. He thanks his grandma and mother for raising him on the classics, blending what felt like a simpler world with the harsh realities of growing up in South Dallas—all the moving around, the eviction after eviction. Pain is 4Batz’s biggest motivator, whether it is dealing with relationship problems, contemplating suicide, or coping with the death of his father.
Even some of the support he did have felt conditional. His mother and grandma didn’t mind him pursuing music, but only as long as he went to college and stayed out of trouble. In a sense, he understands it. “Music is so foreign,” 4Batz says. “Being able to make money off your music being from where I’m from. Being from the hood, telling somebody, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna make it.’ It’s like you telling them you gonna go the NBA. ‘We hear you. We got you. We hope you do. But for now, let’s go get a job at Family Dollar real quick. Go over here. Make sure you go to school and all that.’”
Still, a part of him took it as another example of how the only person he could trust to believe in his art was himself.
“So for a moment, I felt kind of bothered by that,” he says. “I’m talking about everyone. For a couple of months, I just broke off whenever I needed [to do something], and I just started doing me. Doing what I wanted to do. A lot of people didn’t like that.
“But they love it now,” he adds, with a laugh.
4Batz is approaching his final act at the Echo Lounge. He has one more surprise in store: BigXThaPlug. “See, I really been poppin’ my shit on a whole ‘nother level!” the two rap on “Levels,” and it couldn’t be more fitting. It was watching the new guard of Dallas hip-hop take center stage.
Then 4Batz called up his family and friends to join him on stage for his biggest hit, “date @ 8.”
“So listen, we finna have a motherfuckin’ moment right now,” he says. “Because being from where we are from, they said we weren’t supposed to be up here. They said we would be dead or in jail. Well, guess what? We here.”
4Batz rips through it, followed by the song’s remix with Drake, whose verse was sung extra loudly by the crowd. For someone who is trying to manifest that he’ll be one of the biggest artists in the world, his homecoming only proved he’s on his way.
“If you put my first year to a lot of people’s first years, it’s not luck,” he says. “You can just tell by the stats that it is where it is going to be … I’m not even looking at the ‘date @ 8’ and all these other things. It was cool. But I still need to drop this, do this, and move like this.
“So I’m excited to get my feet dirty and actually get in the game. Because I feel like I’m still on the bench. I’m still doing the lay-up rehearsals.”
4Batz’s next act is already in motion, sharing snippets of his upcoming singles with Lil Baby and BigXThaPlug, and doing his first Rolling Loud festival in December. He’s already shown what he’s capable of in a short amount of time. Just imagine what he does as Dallas’ go-to man.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Drake signed 4Batz to EP deal through his OVO Sound label.
