I have zero connection with commercial rap/hip hop produced these days,… although I have never been a fan of the genre, I admire and respect rappers like Public Enemy’s Chuck D, the old-school ones with who brought social consciousness in the game, but what happened to that? The last 20 years have been disastrous at this level, and successful rappers are now just rapping about sexual acts, materialism, violence, wrapped around homophobic, racist, sexist rants and stereotypes. Rap has simply lost any goal and has become just a way for some rappers to become very rich and famous.
Tyler the Rapper knows this more than everyone else, and this is why his new video/parody is hilarious. ‘I Just Bought a Bugatti (I’m Happy)’, a parody written and recorded for Odd Future’s Adult Swim sketch comedy, Loiter Squad, features IceJJfish and of course Tyler, doing what he usually does, playing an alter ego, ‘Young Nigga’, a character resurrected from a few years ago… with bling and wig, obviously. The whole thing is a sort of self-parody, and it is beyond ridiculous. Just like your average rap video, it includes random items such as lots of fake guns, llamas, and some cameos from the Odd Future’s gang.
I haven’t been following Tyler the Creator’s career very closely but it seems that he has always been apart in this world of commercial rap, he is playing the game, making money and rapping with Lil Wayne and Kanye West, but at the same time he is either pushing the genre to some extremes or making fun of rap, biting the hand that feeds him. In a recent interview with Larry King – yeah quite surrealistic – he told the king of the media something I was hardly expecting:
‘I hate rapping. It puts you in this box. … I’m talented enough to do other things. I don’t know, I’m pretty bored with it. It’s not interesting. In the future, I want to do films. I want people to mention my name next to Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino. I don’t want my name to be mentioned next to other rappers at all.’
Interesting and ambitious! Still the video is funny, the music horrible and it looks like something Dave Chappelle could have made. But is that IceJJfish for real?
