Yesterday, Frontier Touring announced that rapper Lil Dicky would play four shows in Australia and New Zealand this July.
Not only is this yet another tour announcement from an international artist who is not Carly Rae Jepsen and thus a personal attack on me and everything I hold dear, the fact that Frontier is banking on a YouTube comedy rapper to fill venues like the Enmore Theatre in Sydney and Melbourne’s Forum is worrying in itself.
For context, LD is actually a pretty decent rapper – he was on XXL mag’s 2016 Freshman list alongside Lil Uzi Vert, Desiigner, Anderson .Paak, Lil Yachty and 21 Savage, and he can hold his own in a freestyle.
A 2014 Noisey interview calls him “a one-man Lonely Island with better flow”, and that’s pretty bang on. His breakout song and video, ‘Ex-Boyfriend’, is an icky, puerile, but legitimately funny storytelling song, kind of like if Biz Markie’s ‘Just A Friend’ was mostly about a dude with a massive penis.
But even before now, it’s been clear that he’s just kind of a d**k. That same Noisey interview from four years ago is a brutal takedown of his racial politics, including his song ‘White Dude’, where he crows about the benefits of being a middle-class Jewish guy instead of a black man. (“I wouldn’t expect kids to understand brilliant satire,” he says sniffily when asked about the song.)
His latest single is about swapping bodies with Chris Brown, and it’s absolute trash on every level.
In ‘Freaky Friday’, as ‘played’ by Brown, he is excited about the benefits of being a black man, which are apparently that he can say the N-word – over and over – and has a much bigger penis. As Brown in Lil Dicky’s body, he enjoys not being looked at with suspicion on the street by white people because of his skin colour and “controversial past”.
I can’t believe I’m still having to say this, but beating the everliving s**t out of Rihanna is not “controversial”. It’s a crime.
He beat her til her mouth filled with blood and she passed out, and pleaded guilty to felony assault, and did not go to jail, and has spent most of the ensuing nine years alternating between being mad that so many people remember that it happened and having enough hits that it’s clear so many people don’t care.
I could fill an entire post just asking why so many people are still listening to music made by the guy who beat the s**t out of Rihanna.
As a society we obviously don’t care about women in general enough to treat partner violence as the crisis it is, and that’s not news. But apparently, even in the midst of #MeToo, we still don’t even care about Rihanna specifically enough to starve Chris Brown’s career of oxygen.
Done and done, apparently.
He’s somehow still one of the biggest recording artists in the world.
Lil Dicky – a smug white dude who’s good enough at rapping his jokes that it clouds the fact that they’re often at the expense of cheap stereotypes about hip hop culture and black people – is not a feminist hero or anything. Nor is he the only artist to release a track with Brown post-assault.
A non-exhaustive list of those who have: Tyga, Busta Rhymes, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Usher, Gucci Mane, David Guetta, Drake, T.I., Rita Ora, Ty Dolla Sign, Zendaya, Jhene Aiko, Future, Meek Mill, Migos, 50 Cent – and in 2012, bizarrely, Rihanna.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxE75Otag1M
But at least ‘Look At Me Now’ and ‘Birthday Cake’ are bangers. ‘Freaky Friday’ is a worse song than literally every single one of those collaborations.
Its politics are fundamentally cooked – but the production is excruciatingly dull, the verses sound like they were written by actual 13-year-olds and not revised once, and the magical body-swapping plot is resolved in barely half a line. It’s so bad I would still hate it even if the chorus went “I woke up in Chris Brown’s body / and immediately climbed into the nearest bin and closed the lid over my head and stayed there all day tweeting about what an unredeemable piece of s**t I am”.
It has 82 million views on YouTube and counting, and is currently at number five on the ARIA singles chart.
‘Freaky Friday’ could have been made, with barely a change, with literally any (black) rapper who would show up, and Brown is who they chose, and it’s worked.
Also, Ed Sheeran appears in the video. Ed Sheeran. The Kendall Jenner and DJ Khaled cameos are one thing, but someone let the biggest, mum-friendliest artist in the world hitch himself to this dumpster fire.
Not even your mega-wholesome mate Ed Sheeran thinks “Hmmm, Chris Brown. Isn’t that the guy who slammed Rihanna’s head in a car door in 2009? I might pass.”
But hey, the Sydney and Brisbane shows are all-ages. Take the kids! Take your grandma! Why not? It’s 2018: nothing matters anymore, nobody has standards, and everything is a joke.