Credit: Spotify

Before they’d made it big as the rap duo Rae Sremmurd, Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi had it tough. Money wasn’t easy to come by, and, after their mother kicked them out of the house while they were still in school, they didn’t have very many options. They ended up squatting in an abandoned house, which, obviously, came with its challenges. But their insecure living situation during this period of their lives also had a specifically negative bearing on their love lives, at least in the case of Swae.

Before they’d made it big, the young brothers had begun to stay out at night partying, which, eventually, led their mother to periodically kick them out of her home. “It was so much stress,” Jxmmi explained of their mother’s decision, speaking to Fader in 2016. “She’s a single mother. We weren’t the most organized kids. Our room would be dirty and she didn’t like that.”

“Me and Jxmmi, we were always just me and Jxmmi. That’s all we had,” Swae picked up. “We had jobs, but we liked to spread out music. We were always out late. I guess it was just too rowdy.” When eventually their mother kicked them out one too many times, the brothers had had enough. They decided that, this time, they didn’t want to go back, which, with so few options available to them, led them to begin squatting in an abandoned property.

“It was a fucked-up, rinky-dink house,” Swae recalled of the place. “Cold as fuck. The water’s cold. You gotta jump straight out of the shower, jump straight into a blanket, and just chill.”

The living situation was rough, but the brothers used it to their advantage by throwing parties in which they introduced people to their music. “We made sure everybody knew that we didn’t give a fuck what color you are. Pull up, we finna get lit,” Swae explained. “The black people didn’t know how the white people partied, the white people didn’t know how the Latino people partied. So we brought them all together at our crib, where everybody could get along. The people that came were the people who understood that the world is bigger than black and white.”

The brothers eventually left that house, but their living situation didn’t exactly resolve right away. There was more instability to come, and that, apparently, was too much for Swae’s girlfriend at the time. This was one of his first ever serious relationships, but the money situation was so precarious that this girl started to look elsewhere. Swae spoke about that on the Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast, explaining that his ex, rather than sticking with him, instead turned to a truck driver she’d met, who was earning the admittedly handsome sum of more than $7000 per month.

“So boom,” Swae said, “she came up to the crib one day—I ain’t got no furniture, we sitting on the floor—[like] ‘Swae, I can’t be with you anymore… I’m getting ready to move to Atlanta and work with Ear Drummers and make this whole journey like you know what I’m saying? I’m like ‘huh you finna leave me?’ Boy, I’m shedding tears n—a.”

She left Swae for the truck driver, but it wouldn’t be much longer before Rae Sremmurd started to find success. That girl’s decision to go for the truck driver, even if we appraise it through the cold, romanticless logic of money, was a bad one. Swae had the last laugh.