Everybody should have more than one outfit, no matter how swank it might be. That’s why rapper Bently Boy is dropping three brand-new mixes of his sartorially oriented single “Alexander McQueen” featuring NLE Choppa and Elise Estrada — each version perfectly suited to its own particular occasion.
There’s an amped-up club mix for when you wanna get on the floor. A funk mix to make your ride bump and rattle. And a sinister, sinuous trap mix that whispers “Time to creep.” As produced by Adam H. (DJ Khaled, Ne-Yo, Ray J), the three reimaginings on Alexander McQueen: The Versions couldn’t be more different from one another. But each one is just the right ensemble to throw on once you’ve decided what you’re in the mood for. No matter where you’re headed, the cut, so to speak, is always gonna be perfect.
What all three mixes have in common is a lyrical thrust that exalts the sharp-dressed man as a paragon of triumph over adversity:
I got that drip
From head down to my toes
Hopped in the B and I flooded the scene
I’m soakin’, I’m drippin I’m like a marine
I’m mindin’ my business so don’t intervene
Designer on me: Alexander McQueen
The 24-year-old Bently Boy is a lot closer to that personal ideal than he was back in 2020, when he first started freestyling the number over a beat he had ripped from YouTube and pasted into Garageband. Back then, he was just an Iraqi-born Australian transplant trying to weather a severe culture clash while avoiding the dead ends of drugs and the other pitfalls of the street life. Oh, and all of it while enduring one of the most protracted and isolating COVID lockdowns the world had seen.
But he had faith in the trap-based track he had come up with, so he saved money from his day job in construction to record a studio version with producer Opentil8.
And he reached out to Memphis-based rap luminary NLE Choppa—who had already graciously retweeted some of BB’s prior efforts—to contribute a verse. Happily, the answer was “yes”—it just took two years to finally get it done.
In the interim, Bently Boy had been trying to get into the United States to take his nascent music career to the next level. But his cultural and personal background didn’t exactly make him the darling of the visa board, so he spent a good deal of time cooking his heels in Mexico instead. (When he finally made it to the States, a thank-you visit with NLE Choppa was naturally one of the first items on his itinerary.)
The true turning point was signing a distribution deal with Canadian music mogul Adam H.—who in addition to being a multi-platinum hitmaker is also a film producer, songwriter, record executive and artist manager. Thinking like a producer and not just a distributor, Adam H. took it upon himself to rip the track apart at the seams and sew it back together in three different ways. Most crucially, he added the voice of Filipino-Canadian pop icon Elise Estrada on the choruses, which gave the track a simply irresistible hook. A mixing job by five-time Grammy winner Orlando Calzada (Destiny’s Child, Lady Gaga, B2K) lent the entire project the commercial sheen that says “ready to wear.”
Now all that’s left is for the various markets and programming formats to follow, um, suit. Bently Boy hopes listeners will see themselves in at least one version of “Alexander McQueen”—and hopefully something of themselves in all three. Not everybody is an Iraqi citizen of the world who’s fluent in Chaldean, Arabic, Spanish and English, and neither can everyone claim to have found their life’s calling from an early appreciation of Kodak Black, 21 Savage and DaBaby. But everybody knows what it’s like to aspire to something better—and to want to wear the evidence on your back.
“I’ve decided to dedicate my life to music and have no Plan B,” Bently Boy says. “Even though it has been very hard and a tough journey, I cannot stop now. I didn’t get this far for nothing. I know that I was not born to be average. I was born to break the generational curse in my family and give my family and kids the life and opportunities I never had.”
Sounds like we’re all going to need a bigger closet.
