The Actually Terrible Thing About "keep me going (BIRDBRAIN)" Isn't the Song
Slayr's Vocaloid-sampling single was a real win — until part of the reaction to it turned into exactly the kind of racism the vocaloid fandom keeps failing to deal with.
By Song Reviews · August 25, 2026
On August 1, 19-year-old Philadelphia rapper slayr (born Evan McDonald) released “keep me going (BIRDBRAIN),” a two-minute single sampling “BIRDBRAIN,” the underground Vocaloid-adjacent track by producer Jamie Paige (with OK Glass) featuring the voicebank Kasane Teto through Synthesizer V. On paper this was a good week for him: the song hit No. 8 on New Zealand’s Hot Singles chart, his highest entry there, and it landed in the middle of a run that’s already put him on XXL’s 2026 Freshman Class list and The Fader’s “32 coolest artists of 2026.” Then TikTok’s comment section got hold of it, and a real win turned into this week’s Terrible Tuesday — not because the song is bad, but because of what a portion of the reaction to it revealed.
The song itself is a panic-fueled two minutes: McDonald reframes a headless-chicken kind of anxiety — chasing success while quietly convinced it’s about to fall apart — into a hook bright enough to sound like a flex. Sampling “BIRDBRAIN” wasn’t a stunt; it’s the kind of genre-blending crossover the vocaloid and hyperpop-adjacent scenes have increasingly invited, and by the chart numbers, it worked.
What happened next didn’t have anything to do with craft. Comments piled up on TikTok comparing the track favorably to other rap specifically because it ran through Teto’s synthetic voice — “Why can’t all YN rap be like this,” “Playboi Carti but good” — the kind of praise that isn’t really praise, since it depends on treating a young Black artist’s music as more tolerable once it’s filtered through something else. Enough of it turned openly racist that McDonald pulled the song from his own setlist days into his first headlining tour, writing on social media: “done sampling that typa shit idk why ppl gotta be racist and then yall confuse that shit with my actual fans, enough.” Jamie Paige, the original track’s producer, was blunter, saying she was “genuinely asking [herself] how much [she] even wanna keep making music for a bunch of racist fucking white tiktok teenagers,” and that she hoped the people responsible would someday “treat black artists and black people like fucking human beings someday.”
That removal wasn’t a one-night reaction that quietly reversed once the discourse cycle moved on — it’s worth checking, because that’s usually what happens with pulled setlist songs. It didn’t. Setlist data from slayr’s Half Blood Tour across nine documented shows between August 3 and August 20 shows no reappearance of “keep me going” anywhere in that stretch. Three weeks in, the song is still off the list.
To its credit, the reaction wasn’t uniform — other artists in adjacent scenes, including SAWTOWNE and AMU Henry Smalls, publicly backed McDonald, and voices inside the Teto fan community itself pushed back on the racism rather than excuse it, with one widely shared post insisting “being racist is the opposite of what Teto is and goes against her creation.” That matters, and it’s worth saying plainly: this isn’t “vocaloid fans are racist” as a blanket claim. It’s that a large enough slice of a specific fandom, reacting to a specific crossover, made the same mistake that’s dogged this exact intersection before — Black artists engaging with vocaloid and hyperpop spaces running into fans who only extend welcome once a Black voice is routed through something else first.
That’s the actual Terrible Tuesday subject this week — not “keep me going” as a song, which by every available number did what it was supposed to do, but the trend underneath the reaction to it: a fandom’s warmest praise doubling as a tell about who it thinks does and doesn’t belong in the room. McDonald didn’t get to enjoy his highest New Zealand chart placement without also deciding, three days into his first headlining tour, that performing the song live wasn’t worth what came with it. That’s the disappointment — not a swing that missed, but a swing that connected and then got punished for connecting the wrong way, by the wrong crowd, for the wrong reasons. If there’s a positive note here, it’s that Jamie Paige, the Teto community members who called it out, and McDonald’s peers in the scene didn’t let the loudest, worst reaction stand as the last word. That doesn’t undo three weeks of a song missing from a tour it should’ve been part of. It just means the backlash to the backlash was real too.
Hero image: slayr performing at Rolling Loud Orlando, May 11, 2026, by Tristan Salvo, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.