Everyone in Europe seems to know Tommy Cash, within a few degrees of separation. When I started talking about interviewing him a couple of years ago, every Estonian I met would tell me a story about running into the rapper at a party. I thought that was weird but not impossible—Estonia, after all, is a country of only 1.37 million. Then I got to talking with a barman in a central London chain pub. “Oh, Tommy,” he said, “I got high with him once.” The barman has never been to Estonia in his life. Of course, any (or all) of these people could be lying, but it's easier to entertain the idea of Cash casting a web in the night, the only common denominator among perfect strangers.
When I call Cash in late November, he’s at the airport in Paris, having just finished work on his new studio album, ¥€$. Before I know it, he’s asking me questions about my reaction to his latest music video for the Danny L Harle–produced track "X-Ray," one that depicts Cash as a techno cult leader of sorts. I tell him I thought it was spooky, which he finds kind of amusing. “But I went easy on this one!” he says (previous videos, in comparison, have featured disabled dancers sporting blades instead of prosthetics; others sport Cash’s face superimposed onto every character). “I thought it was more emotional and less dark than the previous ones. But then,” he adds, more seriously, “for me, very light things can be spooky.”
Tommy Cash was born Tomas Tammemets in 1991 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. He grew up in a predominantly Russian neighborhood in Tallinn, Estonia, and was into dance before he was into music. A childhood hip-hop class sparked an interest in making his own beats. He left school at 17, briefly attended art college, then left that too to focus on his interest in performance. He released his first album, Euroz Dollaz Yeniz, in 2014 and rapidly gained fame in underground Baltic and Eastern European circles—and then internationally, too, thanks to the viral success of his self-produced 2016 music video for the single “Winaloto.”
He came up during (or perhaps because of) a wave of interest in the “post-Soviet aesthetic” but says he has a complicated relationship with that label. A better way to put it is that the label itself is complicated. "Post-Soviet" was based on the romanticized "otherness" of the former satellite states. It was often conflated, too, with a blue-collar sensibility, partly because of socioeconomic assumptions and partly because its rise coincided with an industry’s renewed interest in “street” culture and the working classes. Terms like “raw” and “real” were thrown around loosely. It's not an association Cash says he consciously cultivated; in fact, he finds the continued probing into his childhood, as well as the (incorrect) allusions that he grew up "on the wrong side of the tracks," tiresome. “Every time people ask me about growing up in Tallinn and my name and my parents, a little part of my soul dies,” he says.
Estonia broke away from the USSR during the Soviet coup of 1991, the year Cash was born. The economic and cultural realities of the ’90s that are central to the post-Soviet aesthetic had little bearing on him, but that's not to say that he hasn’t adopted them when it's convenient. When he speaks, his accent is firmly Estonian, but in his songs he often has a Slavic twang, softening his T's and N's. “I got huge ears, big eyes, call me Cheburashka,” he sings on his 2018 single, “Pussy Money Weed,” referring to the Soviet children’s cartoon. On ¥€$, he hums the "ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop" bit (you know the one) from the Scatman classic that was widely mixed by Euro-dance DJs in the '90s.
But the misunderstanding behind the idea of the post-Soviet aesthetic so often ascribed to Cash was that there was an assumed insider knowledge that existed among artists, while for the most part, '90s kids in Eastern Europe grew up not that differently from '90s kids elsewhere, influenced by pop charts and American hip-hop and the Internet. Cash’s subtle genius is that he managed to nail down his own sound within a more global sphere, while also still repping an entire culture for a generation that was taught to look for escapism elsewhere.
Globally, the rapper found early fans and collaborators in PC Music leader A. G. Cook, as well as Harle and pop polymorph Charli XCX. Cash says that a lot of the new album is “the music [he’s] always wanted to make,” inspired by what he listened to growing up. Like what, exactly? “I mean, you know...Madonna,” he says, pausing for effect. “And psychedelic rock. And then I discovered house and trance.” Though those influences are scattershot, something's clearly connecting with fans. Within a few days of its release last month, ¥€$ shot to the top of the Apple Music charts, and there were enthusiastic responses from everyone from Eastern European teens to music-industry bigwigs (Charli herself called it the most iconic album of the year) and international art-world fixtures.
In other words, with ¥€$, Cash achieved a niche artist’s dream scenario: He's made an album rooted in his own culture that's also cool enough to cross boundaries into the mainstream. It's both underground and totally accessible. He spent a lot of time in the studio co-producing the record with Cook and Harle, alongside the Finnish electronic duo Amnesia Scanner. Cash had more creative control over the sound design this time around, and it’s clear there’s been an evolution both lyrically and musically. His rhymes are wittier, his sounds and concepts fitting into each other like a kaleidoscope suddenly snapping into focus. It’s eclectic music, but deliberately so: His signature ironic rap is still there, but there are also elements of “Euro-dance and happy hardcore.” Listening to ¥€$, you get the sense that he's one step ahead of the rest of us, offering a glimpse into the future, one beyond our comprehension.
When he speaks about his work, Cash often refers to it as his product, which is an accurate if overly prosaic way to look at it. His videos and performance are inseparable from his music. Cash co-directs them with Anna-Lisa Himma, who’s his girlfriend and manager, though they’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to delegate the latter task. Himma often also does the styling and production, and scouts the locations, too. “Tommy comes to me with the core idea of what he wants,” Himma says. “He deals a lot with the specifics of a scene, and then I filter his ideas, dress them up, and create the production design. He has a lot of crazy ideas. I’m good at creating a whole.”
In an interview from summer 2018, Cash named the new-wave Brazilian funk DJ MC Bin Laden as a dream future collaborator. “I did?" he cries, excited. “Crazy. Crazy! And it came true! Who else was there?” Daft Punk, for one, which might be a higher reach, but MC Bin Laden did make the cut (on “Brazil,” a club track in his signature bassy funk). In the future, Tommy says, he’d like to collaborate with Björk. “Or dig up some old Jim Morrison a cappella and say it’s Tommy Cash featuring The Doors. I’d definitely like to work with Aphex Twin, although I know it’s very hard. Or Rockstar Games, you know, who make Grand Theft Auto.”
For someone who claims to have no interest in trends, Cash seems to have a sixth sense for what comes next. Think of him as a sort of cultural oracle. He explains his gift with a sprawling analogy about Tesla and Edison. “Tesla was the genius, the guy who was willing to test the limits. But Edison was the businessman who said, ‘Okay, let's do this.’ You know what I mean?”
Earlier this year, for instance, Cash said that the brand he’d most like to collaborate with is Wunder Baum, the company that produces those ubiquitous tree-shaped car air fresheners. “It’s one of the most legendary things, and it’s in every car,” he said. “I swear when you put it in the magazine, Vetements or Balenciaga will do this in a couple of months.” In October, Balenciaga released (and was promptly sued for) a line of keychains that retailed for $275, copying Little Trees down to the colorways. “Well, there’s two options,” Cash says matter-of-factly. “Either I’m an oracle, like you say, or someone read the magazine and thought, ‘This is actually a really good idea.’ You know, like Tesla and Edison.”
