He’s got a gleefully outrageous top 10 hit with Kanye West, a new album and tour on the way and — with a jail stint behind him —

seemingly nothing to hold him back. But can Lil Pump overcome his…

Lil Pump is fried. It’s the day before his Saturday Night Live debut alongside Kanye West, for which he will dress as a bottle of still Fiji

water to West’s sparkling Perrier — a reference to a line from their hit song “I Love It” in which Ye mocks a “ho” for posturing. It’s

West’s biggest hit in years and rivals the success of Pump’s “Gucci Gang,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 last

December.

Today, Pump arrives with his entourage at Goldbar, a luxe cocktail lounge in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, engulfed in an aroma of

weed. He’s two hours late for this photo shoot but sauntering across the room without a care. In person, he’s unassuming. At 5-foot-7,

he comes up to the shoulders of his six-member crew, which includes two security guards.

Anyone who has followed the 18-year-old Florida native’s rapid ascent from SoundCloud rapper to mainstream chart threat knows

he’s a self-styled rebel. Over the course of three hours with Pump (one of them consumed by a hunt for the right lemon pepper wings,

his favorite, to keep him from getting “hangry”) he regularly requests cups of “that drank” — the contents of a 2-liter bottle of Sprite —

from his team. He’s encouraged to flash his youthful smile for the camera. Twenty frames into modeling his second outfit, a furry vest

and one of his many six-figure chains, he cuts the shoot short. He’s over it.His behavior isn’t all that shocking from a teenager who

broke into the music industry by forging his own way, on his own terms. In exactly one year, Pump — born Gazzy Garcia in Miami in

2000 — has translated lackadaisical drug raps and high fashion into a bankable brand. His 2017 eponymous debut album hit No. 3 on

the Billboard 200. He has since claimed two top 10 Hot 100 hits while amassing 2.4 billion on-demand streams in the United States

alone, according to Nielsen Music. He’s also a social media star, with over 16 million Instagram followers and another 11 million

subscribers to his YouTube channel. Last spring, he achieved viral notoriety for chanting during his shows “Fuck J. Cole” seemingly

unprovoked, leading Cole to chastise him on his KOD track “1985 (Intro to ‘The Fall Off’).”

But the daredevil Pump seen on YouTube — the one smashing the back window of a Rolls Royce Wraith with a golf club in the

“Esskeetit” video (319 million views and counting) and walking the halls of a school with a tiger in 2017’s “Gucci Gang” — disappears

when the work stops being fun. Sat down to answer questions about himself, he responds mostly in incomplete thoughts, if they’re

thought out at all, and hyperbole: “I’m the best SoundCloud rapper”; “Yeah, I got a song with Taylor Swift on the way”; “I’ma for sure

do more than 100K first week.” The lattermost refers to his forthcoming second album, Harverd Dropout. He can’t say for sure where

he calls home these days (the road, mostly, but Miami is still home base) or where he filmed the surreal “I Love It” video with West, in

which he wore an oversize square quasi-fat suit. (That was in Los Angeles, he thinks.)

His memory of how he ended up on a song with West is a blur. He explains that West cold-called him in August, on Pump’s 18th

birthday, with the song as a gift, and “that was it.” Pump recorded his part in 15 minutes. (The explicit hook — “You’re such a fucking

ho, I love it” — was West’s idea, says Pump.) He then went back to his party.Dooney Battle, Pump’s manager and A&R person, fills in

the story’s gaps. Pump and West actually talked for nearly three months about collaborating on Harverd Dropout, a title that proposes

a mythic origin story the same way West’s The College Dropout did (except West actually did attend college, Chicago State University,

before dropping out at age 20). Battle set up a studio in a private room at Pump’s party in a Miami mansion so Pump could meet

West’s same-day deadline. (The two rappers didn’t meet until they were on the video set.) Speaking of “I Love It” now, Pump simply

describes the song’s rise to No. 6 on the Hot 100, breaking a YouTube record, his follow-up conversations with West and even the

prospect of SNL as “regular shit.”