“I'm the fucking king,” Xavier Wulf says, discussing his place as an influential figure for a wild new wave of rap that exploded from SoundCloud. “If you dig deep enough, you’ll find out who the real legends are.” The Memphis-born rapper has always been ahead of his time. A former member of the Raider Klan, Xavier hates the term SoundCloud rapper, but he does acknowledge that he was one of the first rappers to take full advantage of everything the platform has to offer—amassing a large following and millions of plays. “I remember the day I found SoundCloud,” he says, turning back the clocks half a decade. “I had no idea it would be what it is today." He adds, “I'm one of the first niggas who was on that shit. A lot of these niggas have no idea what SoundCloud was.” Before his punk rap style became the sound of the moment, Wulf was blending influences from bands like Skipknot and Limp Bizkit into his own twist on hip-hop. Now, he has mixed feelings about the rappers who came in his wake. “I ain’t gonna lie. Back in my day, shit was a little different,” he says. “The underground shit, it started out a certain way. Like, real niggas only, just killing shit underground. But now some fuck shit slid through and popped off. There are some dudes that got by off of the formula that me and a few of my peers laid down. They connected that formula and it's not real a lot of times.”