Richard “Ricky” Bascom II (b. November 18th, 2002) is a rapper from Poplar Bluffs, Missouri.

Bascom received fame originally in a band called PinkleTank, along his sister in 2007(Ricky known as Tank and his sister known as Pinkle) in 2007 with songs such as “Hoopty Doopty Mama” and in 2009, they released their debut album, “Get Tankled”.
During his time in the band, Ricky would self-teach himself to play multiple instruments such as the Piano, guitar, drums and flute.
In Spring 2011, his band would be signed to Tate Music Group, a small record label in Nashville, Tennessee, where Ricky and his family would later relocate.
In December 2011, PinkleTank’s album would be released in stores nationwide but would not gain many sales.
In 2012, the siblings would put their biggest song to date “Cool To Be Cool”, an anti-bullying anthem that skyrocketed them to popularity garnering fans that were popular artists like Deathgrips.
And on December 31th, 2012, comedian Eric Andre would invite them to his show to perform as a guest artist on his New Year Eve’s Spectactular show.
However, the group was dropped by Tate Music Group and forced the 2 siblings to go solo and the family to move back to Poplar Bluffs.

Bascom moved to Arkansas to attend high school where he began to start recording rap music and producing.
Rappers like Lil Tech and Lud Tdn would drop songs that had Ricky on producer credits.

In December 2017, Ricky would release a since-deleted EP named “Popular” with features such as Lud Tdn but in 2018 he made solo music resulting in 2 albums, CONNECTED and the weather which were also deleted from the internet.

In 2019, Bascom linked up with deceased Houston rapper

to make a song called “Rosanne” which garned over 70k streams on Soundcloud.
He would purposefully put himself into controversy by posting a YouTube video called “Ricky Bascom on Lil Nas X stealing his song” by insinuating that Nas X stole “Old Town Road” from him, though it was quickly debunked.
He would also post shitpost videos such as “How I became an underaged P*rnstar (with PROOOF)!” before returning to music in 2020 with his album, “Americka”.
He would release some of his biggest hits such as “If you don’t got this Tesla truck, you can’t beef with me” and “Autistic Dick” garnering public attention and multiple tens of thousands of views.
But he would take another break and make… piano covers of popular raps songs by artists such as YoungBoy Never Broke Again.

In 2020, during high school would start chilling with youtuber turned rapper, Daveo.
He returned to rap while inventing his own sub-genre, “Ricky Blues” and released one of his many hits “FatPhobia” and “Right Now” (both featuring NoWaay) and would release Art Trap!, an album featuring his friends such as Daveo, NoWaay and D.Tubbs which would place #17 on the Blues chart on Apple Music.

In 2022, he would invent another sub-genre called “Ricky Gospel” and release songs such as “Jesus Christ Has the Best P*ssy” and “Amazing Grace”.
And would release album “Right To Be Retarded” months later (His biggest hit, High Value Man which sampled Frank Zappa’s “Let’s Talk About It” would hit over 200k views on YouTube).

In 2023, he would release “Mom’s Basement”, another comedic rap album and make a TikTok account called tankgangaffiliate which posted Ricky lyrics twice a week to break the algorhitim and go global which worked.

As of 2024, Ricky is working on another album while being in his self-called “Sephora” faze, but one thing is certain, Ricky is here to serve the hits and make people laugh.

2025 was a change for Ricky, after releasing his on-the-fly single, “Charlie Kirk”, it was used for promotion for the newest Bascom album “TrapRockNBlues”- a style merging change for Ricky, not rapping on this album almost at all but all performed in this new singing voice.