Queens’s Pop Wunderkind d4vd Returns to the City

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: