Song #17: "Tunnel Vision" by Kodak Black

 

🎵 Today’s Song

Kodak Black — “Tunnel Vision”
2017

Random draw
Selected era bucket: 2010–2019
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,058 recordings
Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, then one uniform random draw from previously unselected eligible recordings in that era

Chart performance

Overall pop peak: #6
Billboard Hot 100: #6
Billboard Hot Rap Songs: #2
Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs: #4
Billboard Country: N/A
UK: Did not reach the main singles chart; #80 on the Official Streaming Chart and #31 on the Hip Hop and R&B Singles Chart
Yearly rank: #34
Weeks charted: 20
Weeks Top 20: 8
Weeks Top 10: 6
Weeks at peak: 3

Kodak Black at this point

Charting record: 4th of 44
Top-20 hit: 1st of 5
Top-10 hit: 1st of 4
#1 pop hit: None
Previous Top-20 hit: None
Next Top-20 hit: “Wake Up in the Sky” — Gucci Mane x Bruno Mars x Kodak Black

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #4,480
Among Kodak Black songs: 3rd of 44
Among Kodak Black Top-20 hits: 3rd of 5
GOAT points: 211,040
Hot 100 portion of chart run: #6 peak, 20 weeks

Record details

Entered chart: March 11, 2017
Released: February 17, 2017
Recorded: 2016; exact session date not reliably established
Single: Digital single; no traditional B-side
Album: Painting Pictures
Songwriters: Dieuson Octave, Leland Wayne, Joshua Luellen, Kevin Gomringer, Tim Gomringer
Running time: 4:28
Label: Dollaz N Dealz / Atlantic
Catalog number: USAT21700379
Recording to use: The original 2017 single/album recording

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Kodak Black — “Tunnel Vision,” original 2017 recording
📺 Official music video: “Tunnel Vision,” directed by Michael Garcia
📝 Lyrics: Shazam/Musixmatch transcription

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original recording
Important alternate versions: No separately charting alternate recording identified
Same-title unrelated chart hits: None relevant to this recording

Streaming note

There is no meaningful version trap here. The standard 2017 single and Painting Pictures album track are the recording that charted.

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Kodak Black — “Tunnel Vision”

There are songs in this project that I know immediately, songs I have never heard at all, and a third category that may be the strangest: songs that I apparently encountered when they were hits but left almost no lasting impression on me.

Kodak Black’s “Tunnel Vision” was one of those.

Before listening again, the only thing I could summon from memory was Kodak singing the words “tunnel vision” in a wheezy, vaguely mumbled voice. Looking through my saved music didn’t help much. Kodak Black appears exactly once in my favorites, as the featured rapper on A Boogie wit da Hoodie’s “Drowning.” I knew “Super Gremlin,” at least enough that its creepy video had apparently caused me to mentally file Kodak somewhere in the vicinity of horrorcore. I knew his name. I knew he had been a substantial rap star.

But if you had asked me to explain how Kodak Black became famous, I would have had essentially nothing.

From my perspective, he had just appeared.

That turns out to say more about the way I encounter music than it does about Kodak Black.

There is also a small project milestone here. After sixteen songs, the randomizer has finally landed on the 2010s. “Tunnel Vision” is our first song from the 2010–2019 bucket.

The chart shows the crossover, not the runway

Kodak Black, born Dieuson Octave and later legally known as Bill Kapri, grew up in the Golden Acres housing projects in Pompano Beach, Florida. He was rapping by adolescence, joining a group called Brutal Youngnz around age 12 and initially performing as J-Black. “Black” was already a childhood nickname; “Kodak Black” grew out of an online username and eventually became the name that stuck.

His route toward fame was, in retrospect, fairly conventional for a young rapper of his era. He released the mixtapes Project Baby in 2013, Heart of the Projects in 2014 and Institution in 2015. “No Flockin,” released in 2014, became an important regional and online record. “Skrt” expanded his audience further, and Drake gave Kodak an enormous visibility boost in 2015 by posting himself listening to the song.

By 2016, Kodak was part of XXL’s Freshman class alongside 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Denzel Curry, G Herbo, Dave East, Desiigner, Anderson .Paak and Lil Dicky.

In other words, people who were following contemporary hip-hop did not wake up one morning in March 2017 and discover some unknown kid named Kodak Black sitting at #8 on the Hot 100.

I did.

That distinction is important. Mixtape culture has never really been part of my normal listening world. If a rapper is building an audience through mixtapes, SoundCloud, YouTube and regional buzz without appearing prominently on the pop charts, there is a very good chance I won’t encounter him until the crossover has already happened.

And “Tunnel Vision” makes that disconnect particularly dramatic. Kodak’s previous Hot 100 appearances had barely registered: “No Flockin” peaked at #95 and “Everything 1K” at #84. Then “Tunnel Vision” debuted at #27, jumped to #8 the following week and reached #6 a week later.

To someone watching primarily through the Hot 100, that looks like an explosion from nowhere.

It wasn’t. The chart showed the crossover, not the runway.

Even “Tunnel Vision” had a runway

The song itself had already developed a life before its official release.

Kodak previewed an unfinished “Tunnel Vision” while working with Metro Boomin in late 2016. Fans began circulating audio pulled from the preview, and a SoundCloud rip reportedly accumulated more than a million plays before the finished single arrived. By the time “Tunnel Vision” was officially released in February 2017, it was already an anticipated Kodak Black record rather than a song being introduced cold to the public.

Less than two weeks after release, the video had accumulated roughly 25 million YouTube views.

That makes the Hot 100 trajectory much easier to understand. The #27 debut was not necessarily the beginning of people discovering the song. It was the chart finally registering an audience that had already been waiting for it.

Then streaming took over. The week “Tunnel Vision” jumped from #27 to #8, its U.S. streams increased 65 percent to 30.7 million. It rose to #3 on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart, #2 on Hot Rap Songs and #4 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

This was Kodak Black’s first Top-20 hit and first Top-10 hit.

And he watched it happen from jail.

A career taking off from behind bars

There is no particularly clean way to tell Kodak Black’s early career story without discussing his legal history, because by the time his music crossed into the pop mainstream, the two were already running alongside each other.

By 19, Kodak had accumulated serious legal problems. Cases in Florida had involved charges including robbery, battery and false imprisonment, and in 2016 he received house arrest and probation after pleading no contest in two cases.

More seriously, a teenage girl in South Carolina accused Kodak of sexually assaulting her after a 2016 performance. He was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct. The case remained unresolved for years; in 2021 he ultimately pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of first-degree assault and battery and received probation.

He was released on bond in the South Carolina case on December 1, 2016.

Within weeks, he was in the studio previewing what would become “Tunnel Vision.”

The finished single arrived February 17, 2017.

On February 28, Kodak was taken into custody again for violating the terms of his house arrest. The alleged violations included unauthorized trips to a strip club and a boxing match and failure to complete required anger-management programming. He was subsequently found guilty of five house-arrest violations and sentenced to 364 days, although he was released in June after completing a life-skills course.

So while Kodak Black was sitting in jail, “Tunnel Vision” went from #27 to #8 to #6.

That chronology is remarkable, but it is important not to reverse the causation. I found no compelling reason to believe “Tunnel Vision” became a hit because Kodak was incarcerated. The much simpler explanation is that he already had a substantial audience, the unreleased song had developed significant advance buzz, and the finished record gave that audience something distinctive enough to push into the mainstream.

His career was taking off despite his legal problems, not necessarily because of them.

Kodak’s history also raises the larger and uncomfortable question of how we listen to music made by people whose behavior we may find reprehensible. That is far too large a question to resolve through “Tunnel Vision,” and it isn’t really the question I am trying to answer here anyway. My task is narrower: why was this particular recording popular enough, at this particular moment, to become a Top-10 hit?

Enough people clearly heard something they wanted.

After several listens, I think I understand what it was.

The part I actually like

My first reaction to “Tunnel Vision” this time was immediate:

Ooo. Haunting.

Before I was paying much attention to Kodak, I was paying attention to the track behind him.

There is an airy, flute-like melodic figure floating over the beat, joined by a similarly repetitive guitar-like pattern. The whole thing feels dark and slightly eerie in a way that seems unusual for a major pop hit. The melody doesn’t announce itself with a giant chorus or obvious pop flourish. It just hangs there, cycling underneath Kodak.

That loop is the best thing about the record.

And interestingly, it did not originate with the most famous producer in the credits.

“Tunnel Vision” is credited to Metro Boomin, Southside and Cubeatz. Metro Boomin is easily the name I recognized, and Southside was already a major Atlanta producer and co-founder of 808 Mafia. But the melodic loop that gives “Tunnel Vision” so much of its identity came from Cubeatz, German twin brothers Kevin and Tim Gomringer.

Cubeatz became important figures in a changing hip-hop production system. Rather than necessarily producing an entire record themselves, they specialized in creating melodic loops and sending them digitally to producers in the United States, including Metro Boomin. Those producers could then build beats around the material. Pitchfork later identified “Tunnel Vision” specifically as one of Cubeatz’s essential loops.

That makes them worth elevating beyond a parenthetical production credit here, because the part they supplied is the part I noticed almost immediately.

It also leaves a much larger story for another day: how two white twin brothers working in Germany became important suppliers of the melodic language of Southern American hip-hop. That is a fascinating consequence of an era in which pieces of a record could travel around the world digitally before the artists involved ever needed to occupy the same studio.

For “Tunnel Vision,” though, the result is straightforward. Cubeatz gave the record a strange and recognizable atmosphere. Metro Boomin and Southside helped turn that material into the finished beat. Kodak put his voice over it.

And the combination is distinctive.

Still wheezy, less mumbly

I had also remembered Kodak Black as considerably more difficult to understand than he actually is here.

The voice is exactly as I remembered it: nasal, wheezy, slurred and instantly recognizable. But following along with the lyrics, I had surprisingly little trouble understanding most of what he was saying.

So “mumble rap,” while understandable as shorthand for the style and era, doesn’t describe my experience with the record particularly well.

The bigger problem for me is that once I could understand Kodak, I wasn’t terribly interested in what he was saying.

The lyrical territory is mostly familiar: people don’t want Kodak to succeed, people want to see him imprisoned, women want him now that he has money, he needs to stay focused, his friends are getting caught up in trouble, and he intends to make millions.

My reductive summary would be something like: I’m great and everyone hates me.

There are personal details embedded in that, especially given how literally relevant the penitentiary references were becoming to Kodak’s life. But as writing, very little of it jumped out at me as especially clever or revealing. I feel like I have heard variations on these ideas many times elsewhere, often done more interestingly.

I did at least learn that the “‘Yota” Kodak mentions near the end is a Toyota.

The project provides educational opportunities in unexpected places.

And then it just keeps going

The more significant problem for me is structural.

Once “Tunnel Vision” establishes its sound, it has almost nowhere else to go.

The chorus is extremely repetitive. The underlying musical figures continue cycling. There is no bridge or major instrumental change that resets the record. After four and a half minutes, the song doesn’t really resolve so much as stop.

It reminded me a little of Kris Kross’s “Alright,” another project song where I eventually felt that the record had exhausted its available ideas and simply ended because there wasn’t another musical destination waiting for it.

“Tunnel Vision” is considerably more atmospheric than “Alright,” and its loop is much stronger. But the same basic problem affects my reaction: the thing that initially makes the song interesting eventually becomes the thing that makes me tired of it.

Interestingly, its chart run was also relatively compact for a Top-10 hit of this period. “Tunnel Vision” spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100. Looking at Top-10 hits from 2016 through 2018, 20 weeks lands roughly around the bottom quarter of the distribution, while the median was about 28 weeks.

I don’t want to pretend the repetitive arrangement caused the song to disappear faster. There are far too many variables involved to establish that. But its chart trajectory does feel surprisingly conventional for the streaming era: #27, then #8, three weeks at #6, several more weeks in the Top 10, and then a fairly orderly descent until it left after week 20.

It came. It became a legitimate hit. It declined. It went away.

Not an album-bomb track that collapsed immediately, and not the kind of streaming-era “playlist furniture” that establishes a consumption floor and occupies the chart indefinitely.

It behaved remarkably like an old-fashioned hit single.

And then there is this video

If the record itself is relatively simple, Michael Garcia’s video is anything but.

Before the song even begins, a Black man is shown confronting a white man wearing a red hat. Elsewhere there are burning crosses and a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure hanging from a cross. The white man wears a Confederate-flag jacket and a red cap reading “Make America Hate Again,” an unmistakable variation on Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hat.

The central narrative involves the white man arriving at a place labeled “The Hunting Ground,” apparently intending to shoot the Black man working there. His gun jams. The two fight. Eventually the Black man begins choking him with a flag until a young white girl suddenly appears and yells for them to stop.

They stop.

The video ends.

My main reaction was: What did any of that have to do with the song?

“Tunnel Vision” is not, at least in any cohesive way I can hear, a song about racism. Kodak talks about people wanting him to fail and wanting to see him imprisoned, but he doesn’t develop that into an argument about race. Most of the song is about money, women, enemies, success and staying focused.

The video supplies the racial narrative.

Remarkably, Garcia later more or less explained why.

Asked how he got started directing music videos, Garcia recalled being offered “Tunnel Vision” in 2017 and said that because Kodak was “sort of mumbling,” he interpreted the song as being about racism. From that interpretation he developed what he described as a “Jim Crow in 2017” concept involving a man in a MAGA hat hunting a Black man.

That may be the single most useful fact I learned about the video, because it confirms that I wasn’t simply failing to decode some elaborate relationship between the lyrics and the visuals.

Garcia heard the song, arrived at his own interpretation and made a largely independent short film around it.

Music videos certainly don’t have to illustrate lyrics literally. But in this case, the disconnect is enormous. The burning crosses, hanging Klansman and Trump imagery are extraordinarily provocative visual material attached to a record that does very little to develop those themes itself.

And the story acquires a bizarre postscript four years later.

In January 2021, President Trump commuted Kodak Black’s federal prison sentence from an unrelated firearms case.

That does not make “Tunnel Vision” an anti-Trump song, nor does it establish that Kodak himself conceived the political message of Garcia’s video. But it is still an extraordinary juxtaposition: in 2017, a video built around Kodak’s song used a Trump-style “Make America Hate Again” hat as part of its imagery of racism; four years later, Trump commuted Kodak’s federal sentence.

Pop history produces some very strange footnotes.

Why was this a hit?

By the end of this, the success of “Tunnel Vision” makes considerably more sense to me than it did at the beginning. Kodak already had an audience built through mixtapes, regional popularity and internet exposure, and the song itself had generated substantial interest before its official release. Then it arrived with that dark, distinctive Cubeatz loop and Kodak’s equally distinctive voice.

I heard the appeal almost immediately. I just don’t respond to most of the things surrounding it.

The loop is genuinely interesting, and the darkness gives “Tunnel Vision” an unusual atmosphere for a major pop hit. But once that initial impression wears off, there isn’t much else here for me. The lyrics mostly sound like familiar boasting and grievance, and the arrangement repeats its central idea without developing very far.

That may be the most useful thing I got from today’s draw. Spotify has spent years learning what I like, and based on that history, it would probably never put “Tunnel Vision” in front of me. It would be right: this isn’t really my kind of music.

But that is also exactly why I want a randomizer involved in this project. “Tunnel Vision” reached #6. Millions of people heard something in it that my normal listening habits would probably have prevented me from investigating. Spending time with it didn’t turn me into a fan, but it did let me understand the appeal.

I can hear the quality in it. Most of that quality simply doesn’t connect very strongly with me.

My rating: 24/100.