At the Vogue Theatre on Friday, December 19

A few days before Yung Lean and his Sad Boys crew played the Vogue Theatre, the Seattle publication the Stranger posted an article on its website with the title “Is Swedish Rapper Yung Lean a Genius or a Gentrifier?” I’m just going to go ahead and declare that the stupidest music headline of 2014.

The answer to the question is “Neither”, but the headline is especially problematic in that it suggests that Lean—the 18-year-old Internet sensation born Jonatan Leandoer Håstad—has no business being a rapper in the first place. What does being a “gentrifier” mean in the context of a cultural phenomenon that went global decades ago?

Lean is just a kid who grew up in Stockholm, absorbing hip-hop culture the way kids everywhere do: second-hand, from music videos and Internet mix tapes. He found something he loved and he wanted to do it himself, questions of authenticity be damned. As far as gentrification goes, Lean isn’t looking to move into anyone else’s neighbourhood and jack up the rent. As he told the New Yorker earlier in the year, “I’ve always been an outsider everywhere I go—I don’t fit in with the Swedish rap community or the American rap community. But who cares?”

He can afford to be nonchalant. Lean has his detractors, but he also has fans—a lot of them. If the overwhelmingly teenage crowd that turned up at the Vogue is any indication, those who like this music like it a lot.

I will gladly defend the right of Håstad and his pals to do what they’re doing, but the whole thing is slightly ridiculous, in ways that are almost certainly deliberate. There’s the veneration of brands that have no cachet beyond the Sad Boys’ Stocktown bubble, for one thing; Lean drops names like Arizona Iced Tea and Gatorade the way American rappers reference Patrón and Dom P. There’s also that weird commingling of stereotypical rap braggadocio with ostentatious displays of vulnerability.

This came to light at the Vogue when, in the space of one song (“Lightsaber//Saviour”), Lean boasted “Bitches on my dick cause I’m so luxurious” but later announced, “I’m on the floor crying, crying.” If you took the entire Drake catalogue and stripped out everything but the moping, it still wouldn't be as look-at-me melancholic as that.

In any case, Yung Lean didn't seem particularly sad during his third Vancouver show. (The first two—an all-ages set at Chapel Arts and a bar gig at Fortune Sound Club—took place on the rapper’s 18th birthday, back in July.) Indeed, as he bounced and bounded around the stage, the baby-faced MC seemed energized, and eager to connect with an audience composed largely of kids even younger than him. He also displayed the quirky habit of applauding after his own songs, which was sort of endearing.

In the aforementioned Stranger blog post, Trent Moorman levelled the following charges at Yung Lean: that his “replica-rap” is “blocky” (whatever that means) and “obvious”, and that he imitates a Southern “baller” accent. Whatever you think of Lean’s lyrics or skills on the microphone, however, he has what are inarguably among the most enthralling beats in contemporary hip-hop over which to showcase them.

Those beats, provided by resident Sad Boys producers Yung Gud and Yung Sherman, were in full effect on Friday night, with pile-driver bass quakes rippling through the room and anchoring cloudy textures, abstract synth squiggles, and a shitload of very idiosyncratically employed Auto-Tune.

Tracks such as “Ice Cold Smoke”, “Ghosttown”, and “Yoshi City”, all from Yung Lean’s first proper album, Unknown Memory, are absolute monsters, and they sounded like world-beaters in concert. Are they the work of geniuses? As Lean himself might say, “Who cares?”