Lil Baby puts MrBeast on a Dead Fresh remix, a song built on a Pharrell beat

Lil Baby released a remix of his single Dead Fresh over the weekend with a new verse from MrBeast, and the reaction has been more bewilderment than anything else. The two also shot a video for it in Greenville, North Carolina, the YouTuber's hometown.

The pairing has a longer runway than it looks. MrBeast's online alter ego, the photoshop and AI meme known as Hood MrBeast or Mr. Lean, has been circulating for a while and he has leaned into it rather than fighting it. Footage and rumours of him working with Lil Baby had been going around for months before the remix landed.

The video opens with MrBeast saying the meme is dead and that he cannot rap, before he starts a verse anyway. "Richest rapper on the scene, call me Mr. Lean," he raps, following it with lines about pulling 30 million pounds of trash from the ocean and planting 20 million trees, both references to his own philanthropic campaigns.

The rest of the verse runs through giving back to his neighbourhood and linking up with Lil Baby. What makes it strange is less the guest than the setting: MrBeast rapping over a Pharrell production is a sentence that would not have parsed a year ago.

Fans said as much. One comment quoted by HotNewHipHop said the video felt racist without being able to say why; another asked whether MrBeast had negotiated a Feastables placement into it. Neither camp treated the record as a normal hip-hop feature.

Whether there is more of this to come has not been said. Lil Baby has spent the year in collaboration mode, from Grind Time with Rylo Rodriguez to Yung Miami's Spend Dat remix with Kodak Black, and the rest of his schedule sits on the release calendar.