![]() I wanted it to feel like a strong rap album.Photo by sara ligporria-tramp | from: emily bowser’s “refreshed for function” small living room makeover So I didn’t want my album to be a gimmicky album. Sometimes I want to be completely outlandish and funny but sometimes I feel the need to prove myself as a rapper. And then eventually time caught up with me. I was always two months ahead of time in terms of content. But I had eyes on it from the jump, which made none of my content go wasted. ![]() Whereas, like, I was kind of expecting a slow build, maybe by the end of it I’d have eyes on it. People knew when to tune in and fortunately, the very first one went viral, so I had eyes on me Week Two. “The Lion King” was just one of those new things. So sometimes it was a video for one of those 17 songs, sometimes it’s a new song. My strategy was I was gonna do this thing called Lil Dicky Hump Days where every Wednesday, I would put out something new. Train People To Fiend For Your New Material I couldn’t let a song like that go un-video’d. So “Ex-Boyfriend” is a really funny story that is that much funnier when you have visuals attached to it as opposed to just hearing it. And then it became very clear that there were certain songs that could have the biggest impact as music videos. So by the time I felt like I had 17 solid songs, I thought I didn’t need anymore than that for this project. A lot of those songs sucked and I got better and better and better. So there was certainly trial and error in the song-making process. And I made probably about 75 songs, 17 of which were chosen for it. I spent a year and a half making the music for my mixtape. Burn Through The Wrong Ideas To Get To The Right Ones Beyond that, obviously giving it a natural differentiation of it being music with jokes in it, it’s easier to stand out that way. It really felt like something I could take control of. And so rapping and music felt like something that I could really do 100% on my own and not have to rely on other actors. I really wanted to not rely on external factors. I thought actually filming comedy shorts would be a harder proof of concept in terms of showing off who I am. But if I wrote a script, I didn’t have many people to hand it to. I always knew that I was going to try something in the comedy realm. At a certain point, Burd realized it was now or never, so he quit his job to make silly-smart videos like “Ex Boyfriend” full-time, and he hasn’t looked back since. He spent a year writing TV commercials, while working a second shift writing rap songs and dreaming up video concepts. The video certainly made an impression on everybody who saw it, earning Burd a new job in the creative department. ![]() “But at the time, for what it was, it was mind-blowing.” “This video, if you could watch it now, I don’t think you’d be impressed,” he says. It was this moment, in making a Frito-Lay-related, jokey rap video, that Burd realized that the kind of work he wished he was doing was actually achievable-and without very much time or a budget. At the time, Burd worked in account management, but the task fell to his team to make the video, lest the company end up billing hours to creative. Then one day, a head of the Doritos account was changing positions in the company, so Frito-Lay asked the agency to make a funny, internal send-off video. He may have also cribbed some notes on marketing and self-presentation, though, from the time he spent working at San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners.įor the first year and a half of his job at Goodby, Burd wasn’t working on music. So, how has he maintained his connection with YouTube comedy kids while getting the nod from offline, barbershop-beloved rappers? Aside from a surplus of sheer talent that metastasized with practice, Lil Dicky, a/k/a David Burd, didn’t make one wrong move between posting his first video online and releasing his first album. Well, actually, they are, because even though Lil Dicky is indeed being taken seriously, he’s still seriously funny. But while Lil Dicky started out as a funny-rapping YouTuber with a goofy name, in two years he’s ascended to a level where his recent debut album landed on top of Billboard charts for both Comedy and Rap. Aside from the Halley’s Comet-rare emergence of a unit like The Lonely Island, professional comedians who are legit rap fans, this subgenre consists of pure corniness where hip-hop itself is the saggy-pantsed butt of the joke. Comedy hip-hop often is far more comedy than hip-hop–and bad comedy, at that. ![]() When it comes to comedy hip-hop, though, that struggle becomes unwinnable. In hip-hop, like so many hustles, it’s a struggle to be taken seriously.
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