“I gotta do some laundry but it’s all a part of growing up and shit,” xaviersobased says in the first minute of Keep It Going, a new documentary produced and presented by The FADER.
That’s one way to describe the New York rapper’s last few years as he’s become one of the leading figures in the vast online web of rap artists and collectives known simply as “the underground.” The 22-year-old posted his first beat to SoundCloud in 2016, but it wasn’t until after the pandemic that his music — short and manic songs inspired by the absurd universe of Bay Area Lil B The BasedGod, Bladee, Black Kray, Goth Money Records, and more — began to take off. He’s widely considered to have pioneered a new era of jerk music that’s now heard in many corners of the internet and the U.K.’s underground. And now his ambitions lie even further.
Directed by Alex Hodor-Lee, this film follows Xavier as he prepares for and embarks on his first-ever headlining tour. Through tour stops in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and his hometown of N.Y.C., it captures a young rapper at an inflection point in his career: he’s the biggest he’s ever been and needs to make a decision of where to go next.
With a dedicated fanbase keeping up with his every move, Xavier is still working to make his most basic ends meet. “I’m homeless right now. We trying to get a crib right now,” he admits at one point during our doc. “We still got a long way to go.”