The most prolific recording artist in music history
The days when bands used to wheel out an album in six months and then hit the road for the other half of the year in a repeating cycle until breaking point seem like a bygone era. For better or for worse, you don’t get many people racing through a rapid run of records like Bob Dylan of old. The vagabond almost folked himself to death as he rattled off the ground-breaking trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde in a quick-fire 15 months of near-perfection. But for every cultural rule, there is an exception. And the modern exception in this case is the utterly exceptional Lee Arthur Carter, as he is known to wide-birthing locals in Houston, Texas, or as his adoring/puzzled cult fandom know him: ‘Viper’.
Much like Dylan, he is a man who contains multitudes. On the one hand, he professes to be the second coming of Christ, Jesus thereof no less, but his uber-frequent rap releases also feature ungodly titles like ‘F—k Earth Im Gon Wage an Interstella War’, ‘I Grew Gills And Survived Tha Houston Flood’ and the homage to a little-known YouTube clip ‘I Be Possesin’ And Hauntin’ Tha Bones Of Sum Demonic Crazy Skeleton Toy Tonite’. How, exactly, do you go about explaining such a philosophical dichotomy? Well, Viper Christ II tells me that it is a simple case of separating the art from the artist.
And that is just about all he tells me. Over recent months, I have made various attempts to interview this elusive internet sensation. My first point of contact was a promising one. “Yes, I would love to do an article with you, but can you please make it an official article with an official interview,” he said. I did not know what would necessarily constitute an unofficial article, so I was more than happy to oblige his demand. A few confusing organisational prompts, such as his desire to “do the interview same day u reply to this email that same day 10pm central time,” put a spanner in the works. But eventually, these hitches were overcome, and I was sat waiting for him on a scheduled Zoom call.
Sadly, Viper encountered issues joining the meeting. After some time, it became clear to him that the issues pertained to the fact that he had not, in fact, downloaded Zoom. Following this, a series of further missed connections occurred over a matter of weeks before Viper began demanding payment for an interview, and the ship sailed beyond feasibility. This, however, was hardly surprising. He is a very busy man. He claims to be the first musician “in world history to make one million songs”. If the internet is correct and he is 51 years old, this means that even if he started ‘making’ songs when he was ten, he’d have had to make 67 of them every single day to hit the 1,000,000 milestone at this stage of his life.
That’s a staggering figure considering the depth of some of his tracks like ‘All Men Except Me Are Worthless’, ‘I Make This Money Look Simple, As Easy As My Chin Dimple’, and ‘The Holy Trinity Has Promised To Let All Living Things’ Souls That Have Ever Lived, Human & Non Human Including Satan & His Fallen Angels Into Heaven In Exchange For My Soul Going To Hell Forever For All’. Alas, while one million songs of this calibre might seem a little lofty, he did, indeed, release an album per day on average in 2014. He has also released well in advance of 2,000 LPs in his recorded career, which began in 1997, albeit only about 1-2% of these consist solely of original material.
His initial journey in music seemed rather typical. Under the alias of Lee Dogg, he began his career in earnest with a self-titled debut which he crafted with his labelmates at his local independent rap enterprise Dope House Records. Then, for reasons unknown, Lee Dogg’s touted future plans never came to fruition, and he went away. It wasn’t until three years later that he properly re-emerged as the rebranded Viper, even retroactively renaming his debut, Hustlin’ Thick.
However, in the interim years, he seemed to tap into the rise of the internet and the endless possibilities it presented. He poked and probed at its potential to serve his creative aims for a decade, regularly releasing material but continually finding himself frustrated by a lack of exposure, which, in turn, informed the themes of his angsty raps. In 2013, this all changed. He released You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack in 2008, but it was when it was uploaded to YouTube five years later that the irreverent title – which, according to Viper, is about his childhood vow not to be afraid of anything (including crack) – found a crowd who appreciated it.
Now, the record has received over four million streams. Its popularity helped to set the tone for Viper: lyrics madder than a hermit crab with a mortgage, outsider-styled home-productions with a personality more singular than Pee-Wee Herman in the ’90s, and tapping into trends – many of which, long outdated – was the way forward for Viper in the internet age. He realised that the cult of personality was upon us, and being prolifically unfathomable was set to be his.
While this may make it seem like he happened upon a niche and has been orchestrating a character to fill it ever since, his unwavering dedication and the indecipherable persona of the star I personally had several behind-the-scenes back-and-forths with proves that he remains one of the internet’s true enigmas, evidenced further by the fact that in all likelihood, he is actually the most prolific musician in history. So, it’s perhaps best to simply sit back and await his next track in his current vein of anthems like ‘Watchin Tha Whole Of Saul In A Vivid Trip When I Was High As F**k So I Didnt Understand It’, ‘I Can’t Stop Watching Italian Neorealist Films’ and ‘Tha Titanic Submersible Fell Victim 2 My Spirit Of Tha Sea’… which should arrive in roughly the next hour or so.
