Can You Believe Me, Brother?
Then there’s the shots of him, legs pushed up behind his head, between Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders, and getting head from a cop in front of the Hollywood sign. If you dig deeper still, you’ll see him surfing on a bloody maxi pad, or posing in a typical ‘80s glamour shot, featuring a guy with a mullet in an oversized suit riding on the back of a woman with a perm in a tacky wedding dress. When you look closer, you realize it’s all Tommy Cash.
Tommy first came across my radar three years ago, when a coworker showed me his video for a track called “WINALOTO.” I was working at a magazine, and one day, before our weekly pitch meeting, an editor pulled out her computer and called everyone over. “You’ve gotta see this guy,” she said, smiling. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.” The video opens with the sound of a xylophone, and Tommy, staring blankly in front of a beige background, hitting four thong-clad asses to the simple beat. About 20 seconds in, he starts: “Oh, I think I win a lotto, can you believe me brother?” then half-whispers, “Like, for real.” The next three minutes is a mix of trap, rap and montages of Tommy with a cast of beige-wearing bodies twisting like pretzels. The sheer weirdness—or genius—of the video defies description. As with much of Tommy’s work, you have to see it yourself. Like, for real.
Cash is from Estonia, a small country that juts into the Baltic Sea, across the water from Stockholm and Helsinki, and about 600 miles WNW of Moscow. Unlike other Eastern European countries like Russia and Georgia, that have gotten a recent boost in our collective consciousness thanks to designers like Demna Gvasalia and Gosha Rubchinskiy, Estonia remains largely unknown—Google it and you’ll find that it’s “famous” for beautiful women, online banking and a hell of a lot of free WiFi. Google Tommy Cash, and you’ll find that he’s been dubbed the face of Estonian rap, though beyond him, it’s unclear whether the genre actually exists, or what it really stands for. Part of that might come from the fact that the Estonian identity, as Tommy asserts, “is all mixed up,” or because there’s not a huge art scene there, or because, like I said, it’s not so well-known. But Cash is a pioneer, both in his music and his imagery, and it’s hard to separate the rapper—and what he does—from his country.
The diversity of the Estonian cultural legacy (“We’re kind of near Finland... or what you would call Baltics... but at the same time, we have a lot of Vikings here,” he explains) parallels the mix of influences in Tommy’s music, and the lack of a domestic creative network has led Tommy to produce everything in- house. Working with the same small team he’s had since he started, the 28-year-old has a hand in every single part of the process, whether he’s recording a track, shooting for his Instagram, or teaming up with Rick Owens on an exhibition that featured, among other works, a tank filled with 200,000 of his own sperm. Whatever the medium, Tommy creates his own brand of “controlled chaos,” making it hard for anyone to pin him down. Though that didn’t stop us from trying— twice. First, he spoke with our Editor-in-Chief, Simon Rasmussen; and then, for good measure, with his friend, the equally eccentric Michèle Lamy, who also happens to be the owner of Tommy’s sperm tank.
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