Skip to Content
Morning Spew

Queens’s Pop Wunderkind d4vd Returns to the City

The TikTok balladeer plays Baby's All Right tonight, and more links to start your weekend.

9:48 AM EST on March 3, 2023

(Hell Gate)

The kinds of "type beats" you can find on YouTube are extensive these days. The term started as a way for fledgling rap producers to show they could imitate the styles of beats made for superstars—your "Drake-type beats," "Gunna-type beats"— making it easier for new rappers to easily find beats they like.

As the sound of internet hip-hop has morphed and mutated, though, the term has expanded—now there are type beats for entire genres, from "'90s Old School Boom Bap type beat x Hip Hop instrumental with scratch hook" all the way to the delightfully baffling "indie rock + alternative rock + midwest emo type beats," which are essentially entire instrumental rock compositions. 

Under the auspices of this new world, semi-anonymous producer Dan Darmawan, who is based in Indonesia, began posting "bedroom pop" type beats to YouTube, like this one, "time." In the comments, you can see would-be songwriters spitballing lyrics they might sing over the instrumental.

Starting in 2021, in the closet of his sister's house in Houston, the Queens-born teenager David Anthony Burke began singing over Darmawan's instrumentals using the iPhone app Bandlab, and posted them on TikTok. Tens of millions of YouTube views on the resulting heart-swelling ballads "Here With Me" and "Romantic Homicide" and a multi-million dollar record deal with Interscope later, Burke, now going by the moniker d4vd, is returning to New York tonight to wrap up his debut "The Root of it All" tour.

If you can score a ticket, the best way to start your weekend is with d4vd's sold-out show at Baby's All Right in Williamsburg. Fair warning, though: It might be crawling with zoomers.

Here are some more links to start your weekend:

  • President George Santos?
  • Politico reports on the trend of forced psychiatric commitments among Democratic mayors, including Mayor Adams. And Adams has a new plan to help homeless New Yorkers with mental illness, which actually seems pretty useful, but there's of course a catch. Via the New York Times: "The mayor's new plan is short on details of implementation and cost. Mostly, it lays out a vision, a set of priorities; the city will need to cobble together funding for most of them."
  • Meanwhile, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Adams is engaging in some shenanigans, pulling together private meetings of south Brooklyn elected officials to oppose a two-lane limit on the BQE.
  • Councilmember Lincoln Restler's bill that would allow New Yorkers to snitch on drivers blocking bike and bus lanes no longer includes a bounty.
  • Train Daddy comes home?
  • Columbia is the first Ivy to ditch SAT and ACT scores as a requirement.
  • Meet the hero who rescued (us from?) the Prospect Park alligator.
  • The Marshall Project has a deep dive into death penalty "mitigation specialists" that is very much worth a read.
  • And finally, a pig walks in Brooklyn: 
Already a user?Log in

Thanks for reading!

Give us your email address to keep reading two more articles for free

Subscribe to Hell Gate for just 69 cents!

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Hell Gate

In Another Secret Court Hearing, Adams Administration Again Asks to Wriggle Out of Right-to-Shelter Duties

And after a closed-door court conference on Tuesday, the presiding judge mysteriously recused herself from the case.

September 26, 2023

NYC’s Biggest Nonprofit Newsrooms Face Massive Layoffs, Salary Cuts

Mismanagement and an overreliance on megadonors leaves journalists paying the price.

September 26, 2023

New York’s Finest: Automate This

The NYPD robots are stupid and creepy, but at least a robot can't steal its ex-wife's car keys.

September 26, 2023

Eric Adams, Freemason

Nothing like some fraternity on a Tuesday.

September 26, 2023

They Want to Clean Up Their Block. The NYPD Won’t Give Them a Permit.

“There’s been violence, and I’m not comfortable shutting down any street in that neighborhood for a block party,” a local cop told the neighborhood group.

September 25, 2023
See all posts