How did Benny the Butcher get his rap name?
Before Benny the Butcher made his name alongside his cousins Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine in their shared Griselda collective, he used to operate under the stage name Benny Bravo, or, simply, Benny. But he later added the “butcher” part—and he did so because of the influence of his fans.
Benny, whose real name is Jeremie Damon Pennick, started out performing as Benny Bravo, which was a play on the name of the character Benny Blanco from the 1993 Carlito’s Way. He later dropped the “Bravo,” and, for a number of years, he released mixtapes and performed simply as Benny.
It was only in 2015, around the time that his other musical collective away from Griselda, the Black Soprano Family, released a mixtape of their own, that Benny started to openly call himself “the Butcher.” But it hadn’t exactly been his own idea to do it.
In an interview with Hot New Hip Hop in 2022, Benny was asked where the “butcher” moniker came from. He explained that it came from the lyrics of one of his songs, in which he raps, “Benny the Butcher thaw / really I’m cooking raw.”
“I was just rhyming with that fifteen years ago,” Benny said of the line. “Like ten years after that, I brought it up again. I said, ‘Benny the Butcher,’ on some Westside Gunn shit.”
He hadn’t necessarily thought of using this name all the time, but his fans liked the sound of it. “And the fans just loved that name and kept calling me that,” he said. “So I changed my name to Benny the Butcher instead of just Benny.”
It wasn’t just that his fans liked the name, as there was a practical reason for Benny to adopt the “butcher” moniker, too. It basically came down to helping people to find him when they searched for him online.
“Plus,” he explained, “when I put some music out on iTunes, everybody was looking for Benny the Butcher and not just Benny, so I had to switch it up.”
If an artist is going to call themselves by a mononym, it’s going to have to be such a rare name that search results will always lead fans right to them. Or else they’ll have to be a superstar already. But for an underground rapper, “Benny” on its own isn’t going to be an especially helpful term to add into a search engine. So, because his fans called him it already, Benny the Butcher was born.