Tampa teen beats the rap
Staff writer
Robert Spohn isn’t your typical rapper, as he will be the first to admit.
The Centre High School senior is soft-spoken and humble. He doesn’t smoke or drink. He is a far cry from the braggadocio, party-loving emcees who tend to top the hip-hop charts.
“I like to keep to myself more than anything,” he said.
But under the alias Lil Melon, Spohn has released 40 rap songs over the past three years, and is becoming a bona-fide hit with county youths.
Using free beats he finds on YouTube, Lil Melon’s songs are short, dealing with themes such as drugs, cars, basketball, and heartbreak.
Spohn got his start rapping in sixth grade for a school assignment.
“You had to do a 15-slide presentation, or you had to do some sort of skit or song,” he said. “Me and two of the people I worked with at the time got together and wrote something.”
The finished song, titled “Ron Rap” after his boss at his job on a fruit and vegetable farm, was such a success among classmates that Spohn began writing more raps in his free time.
To post his music online he needed an artist name.
He found one at the fruit farm.
“We all started walking around, just pointing to random objects and putting ‘Lil’ in front of it, like all the rappers do,” he said. “One of the people that I worked with pointed out a watermelon and said, ‘Lil Watermelon.’ I said, ‘How about we go with Lil Melon?’”
The name stuck — with teachers as well as students — and soon enough, Lil Melon was getting requests to perform live at Centre.
Friends set up concerts for the reluctant Spohn, often without his knowledge.
Spohn recalled a teacher asking him what time he was going on stage at a Leadership Day at Centre. He had no idea he was signed up.
Spohn grew to enjoy performing, however. He has performed at Centre “six or seven” different times, he said.
“Our school always supports him and goes all out,” Spohn’s mother, Barbara, said. “They had fog machines and lights.”
Far from being confined to Centre, the Melon name now spans county lines.
At an away basketball game in White City, Barbara recalled Rural Vista students “cheering for Lil Melon and running up to get autographs on their chests.”
At a Herington track meet this year, similar chants broke out.
“I looked at my husband; I was like, ‘he has a name, I swear!’” Barbara said.
A family friend recently made Lil Melon lanyards and keychains. Hoodies have also been produced. They read “Melon Gang.”
Lil Melon’s biggest song, 2024’s “Leave me Alone!” has 53,741 plays on SoundCloud. He even has some international listeners.
Spohn said his local fame was “more shocking than anything.”
While he loves that his songs are popular, he isn’t a big fan of the attention.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” he said.
Lil Melon’s music takes inspiration from the emo rap made popular by artists like Juice WRLD and XXXTentacion.
When he started out, it was “the genre that was blowing up more than anything,” he said.
Spohn has a simple but extensive process for making music.
He finds a beat, which takes a long time — 45 minutes or more.
Once he has an instrumental, he begins writing, usually mimicking an artist who “thrives” on that kind of music.
This is mostly what inspires his style of rap.
“Artists like Juice WRLD or X[XXTentacion] or [Lil] Peep or DC the Don, they make a kind of music that I can write more similarly to then Kendrick Lamar or J. Cole,” he said.
He tries out lyrics, edits and adds to the song, and repeats the process until he has a two- or three-minute track.
Lil Melon’s popularity is perhaps tied to the fact that Spohn hails from rural Tampa.
“I don’t really think anybody from a smaller town or a smaller county really ever does stuff like this,” he said.
While Marion County doesn’t influence the content of his songs — Lil Melon has no tracks about cattle ranching or tornados, for example — he does try to cater to a local audience.
“I kind of put things in ways that people around here would understand more easily than somebody from Wichita,” he said.
His songs often feature love and loss, but, Spohn said he doesn’t take inspiration from his actual life, instead writing about things other rappers write about.
Barbara, though, doesn’t buy it.
“This kid wears his heart on his sleeve,” he said.
Lil Melon will leave town this fall as Spohn heads to McPherson College on a basketball scholarship. He is unsure whether his rap career will survive his college schedule, which he expects will be jam-packed with classes and athletics.
As for trying to rap for a career?
“It’s definitely not my No. One option,” he laughed.