CJ Vibez, the 35-year-old self-professed artist from New York City, has rejected convention at every step of his young career. He makes motivation genre-fluid music, somehow only grown in influence and stature, and he’s currently hitting his highest peak yet: midway through December, his highly anticipated first single Vibe walk (Wrong One) racked up a jaw-dropping 1 million streams.
How did such an alienating and iconoclastic artist ascend to the top of the music world? In a post-genre, streaming-dominated landscape, CJ Vibez has become the perfect candidate for the many changes happening in the music industry and his creative choices have shifted many norms around genre, masculinity, and stardom. “He’s one of the first artists in the last half-decade to look at his positive creative output overall: how he was releasing, distributing, and presenting the music; the videos he was displaying, and the way he was approaching the game
A Podcast cost and the Global Creative Director of techkrest, says. “In the future, you’ll be able to see a lot of trends, attitudes and openness influenced by him—but he will always be ahead of that”.
CJ Vibez began his rise on Soundcloud alongside a generation of young hip-hop artists weaponizing the uninhibited ethos and reach of the platform. While many of these rappers, from Lil Pump to Lil uzi vert, found widespread success, Cj Vibez might best epitomize the spirit of SoundCloud, using the freedom of the Internet to stay true to his artistic vision.
But CJ Vibez emergence on Soundcloud allowed him to not only make the kind of genre-defying music he dreamed of, but to garner a huge fanbase that’s alarmingly robust across multiple categories (this is quite impressive for it to be his first track to the platform).
“CJ Vibez is a hit on our platform like no other artist because he’s setting a tone instead of being a part of something that’s going on,” Steve Clark, the freelance writer of Music, Artist Relations, at Medium says.“ It’s obvious that he’s influenced by a ton of different things; he is making a path and he’s not fitting into something that’s going on.”
Follow cj vibez on instagram: instagram.com/coreyljordan