Hip Hop

sorcerer said:
That character is definitely just a parody of dudes like Unkle Adams whose schtick is being overly nice and rapping really badly. There isn't anything about mocking hip hop culture, just bad rappers.

I don't think Fantano has any beef with hip hop at all though. Even he reviewed some of Unkle Adam's singles positively before and helped get him a lot of exposure.
Fantano is also pretty influential as far as getting people new fans. While he isn't wholly responsible for Brockhampton's rise to fame, his incredibly positive review of the first Saturation album really drove a lot of his fans towards them. I believe some of the members of Brockhampton even address this in their interview with him. This is evident in what @BoilerRhapsody was talking about with his Brockhampton concert experience.
The same goes for artists like Jpegmafia and other groups like Injury Reserve. A big portion of their fans come from Fantano's reviews.

He clearly has an audience, but it's just not for me.



I don't think he should have to create an emocore mixtape with his Cal Chuchesta personality to be allowed to make a mixtape parodying bad rappers.
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If you can't see how problematic it is of a white dude playing up a character mocking a predominately black culture, to his predominantly white audience, I don't know what to say. The fact that he even took the time to record that shit is offensive to me as a hip-hop fan. It's not funny and all it screams of is a white dude with no connection to a culture that he feels free the need to mock and gatekeep on. And I hate using the word problematic.. but that's the least offensive word I can think of to describe this fuckboy and this whole situation.
 
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Clint Howard said:
If you can't see how problematic it is of a white dude playing up a character mocking a predominately black culture, to his predominantly white audience, I don't know what to say. The fact that he even took the time to record that shit is offensive to me as a hip-hop fan. It's not funny and all it screams of is a white dude with no connection to a culture that he feels free the need to mock and gatekeep on. And I hate using the word problematic.. but that's the least offensive word I can think of to describe this fuckboy and this whole situation.
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I think as others have said, it's more corny dude than corny dude that mocks hip-hop. but yo, this is not my hill to die on. if you want to hate this dude and call him problematic I am not going to stop you.
 
Tillman said:
I think the idea is just to not look into it so deeply. I definitely am not saying it's a good joke, but I do believe it's a harmless joke.
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I guess that's where we differ. I don't think it's harmless to normalize mocking a subculture you have no connection to. Why isn;this character singing shitty songs about veganism in a whiny jeff magnum voice? cause that would hit a little too close to home for his audience.
 
Clint Howard said:
I guess that's where we differ. I don't think it's harmless to normalize mocking a subculture you have no connection to. Why isn;this character singing shitty songs about veganism in a whiny jeff magnum voice? cause that would hit a little too close to home for his audience.
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You probably missed my response in the first post of this page, I've fixed it now.

So yeah, he has no issue mocking 'white people music', but there's no denying the only genre he's made a parody album of is Hip-Hop. The difference between mocking Hip-Hop and mocking white people co-opting Hip-Hop with an ironic white dweeb character is incredibly blurry watching the video I posted. I don't believe that he's generally racist, but @Clint Howard is making a perfectly valid point, and at the least it's worth considering that the Cal thing is sometimes brushing very close to racism.
 
BoilerRhapsody said:
You probably missed my response in the first post of this page, I've fixed it now.

So yeah, he has no issue mocking 'white people music', but there's no denying the only genre he's made a parody album of is Hip-Hop. The difference between mocking Hip-Hop and mocking white people co-opting Hip-Hop with an ironic white dweeb character is incredibly blurry watching the video I posted. I don't believe that he's generally racist, but @Clint Howard is making a perfectly valid point, and at the least it's worth considering that the Cal thing is sometimes brushing very close to racism.
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Isn't Fantano himself an ironic white dweeb? So where does the character end and he begin? And not to beat a dead horse but paying lip service to mocking white culture is like shooting fish in a barrel. Making a whole album mocking a particular subculture is something else entirely, especially when your 'character' just seems to be a version of you and you have no real apparent connection to the culture.

sorcerer said:
For the record, most of his fans are hiphopheads. His most viewed videos are reviews of hip hop albums. It doesn't seem that most people are even offended by it.
DeadEndHipHop, people that are actually pretty knowledgable about hip hop culture and are all black, even did a review of the tape and are just treating it as a tape parodying bad rappers instead of something actively attacking hip hop culture. That's definitely how it should be treated.

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I don't think either of those things negate what I said. I've seen fans of LUM say some of the most ignorant shit I could possibly read on the internet about hip-hop because they view it through an ironic lens. I used to party with 'indie rock' white people who thought it was hysterical to throw on Dre's 2001 because it was so foreign to them. This is the same shit ramped up.

I don't know DeadEndHipHop at all so I'm not going to speak on them ..
 
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Cloud said:
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Holy shit, only $12 .. part of me thinks this is going to be a stamper situation. Ah well, still crazy price.
 
Clint Howard said:
Isn't Fantano himself an ironic white dweeb? So where does the character end and he begin? And not to beat a dead horse but paying lip service to mocking white culture is like shooting fish in a barrel. Making a whole album mocking a particular subculture is something else entirely, especially when your 'character' just seems to be a version of you and you have no real apparent connection to the culture.
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Yeah I suppose he is a dweeb himself, if anything that reinforces that the Cal thing is self deprecating and not just a mockery of Hip-Hop, depends on the context of how you frame Cal. This is getting very muddy.

As for the question of his 'genuine' connection to Hip-Hop culture, I think it's there. There's the Brockhampton thing, and essentially the same for Death Grips. He does genuinely like Hip-Hop, look at his highest ever ratings to confirm that, he's friends with people in Hip-Hop. I know this is a very shallow 'he's not racist because..' argument, but his wife is black, and I think that likely feeds into his love for albums like TPAB too.

Not that any of that makes some of the things he does as Cal potentially any less racist. Whether or not it's problematic is a fine balance of subjective contexts and the line you need to be careful of with co-opting culture for humour is whether you are damaging or detracting something from that culture in the process. In this case he certainly could be. Remembering this is all on top of the fact that most people over 15 seem to find Cal rapping barely laughable, maybe you have to be there, but I'm not sure.
 
BoilerRhapsody said:
Yeah I suppose he is a dweeb himself, if anything that reinforces that the Cal thing is self deprecating and not just a mockery of Hip-Hop, depends on the context of how you frame Cal. This is getting very muddy.

As for the question of his 'genuine' connection to Hip-Hop culture, I think it's there. There's the Brockhampton thing, and essentially the same for Death Grips. He does genuinely like Hip-Hop, look at his highest ever ratings to confirm that, he's friends with people in Hip-Hop. I know this is a very shallow 'he's not racist because..' argument, but his wife is black, and I think that likely feeds into his love for albums like TPAB too.

Not that any of that makes some of the things he does as Cal potentially any less racist. Whether or not it's problematic is a fine balance of subjective contexts and the line you need to be careful of with co-opting culture for humour is whether you are damaging or detracting something from that culture in the process. In this case he certainly could be. Remembering this is all on top of the fact that most people over 15 seem to find Cal rapping barely laughable, maybe you have to be there, but I'm not sure.
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I don't know how else to say this but Brockhampton and Death Grips is hip-hop for suburban white kids. It's for people exactly like Fantano. The fact that he champions them is not lost on me at all.

The fact that rappers are friends with him doesn't really say anything either. If I put out a rap album tomorrow, I'd become bff's with him despite how I feel about him because I know all these suburban white kids are going to check out my music now.

The fact that he did a tour for himself .. a reviewer / vlogger .. i think speaks volumes. he is the star, the music is a byproduct. I think he needs to stop meming, stop reviewing stuff like he's reading off Wikipedia and maybe actually dive into a culture so he doesn't come across as a fake, fraud, culture vulture.. whatever the fuck you want to call him. and ffs, watch Almost Famous or gain just a fucking degree of humility.

But hes' successful so why would he do any of that?
 
Clint Howard said:
I don't know how else to say this but Brockhampton and Death Grips is hip-hop for suburban white kids. It's for people exactly like Fantano. The fact that he champions them is not lost on me at all.

The fact that rappers are friends with him doesn't really say anything either. If I put out a rap album tomorrow, I'd become bff's with him despite how I feel about him because I know all these suburban white kids are going to check out my music now.

The fact that he did a tour for himself .. a reviewer / vlogger .. i think speaks volumes. he is the star, the music is a byproduct. I think he needs to stop meming, stop reviewing stuff like he's reading off Wikipedia and maybe actually dive into a culture so he doesn't come across as a fake, fraud, culture vulture.. whatever the fuck you want to call him. and ffs, watch Almost Famous or gain just a fucking degree of humility.

But hes' successful so why would he do any of that?
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Haha as a now suburban, white kid who likes Brockhampton and Death Grips, I can't deny any of what you just wrote.

There's a part in that Lets Argue video where he says, "if you yourself were not a white nerdy music dork, you wouldn't be watching the white nerdy music dork show", in reference to his own channel. Before diving deep into the racial ethics of what he's doing, I guess that's all that needed to be said.
 
BoilerRhapsody said:
Haha as a now suburban, white kid who likes Brockhampton and Death Grips, I can't deny any of what you just wrote.

There's a part in that Lets Argue video where he says, "if you yourself were not a white nerdy music dork, you wouldn't be watching the white nerdy music dork show", in reference to his own channel. Before diving deep into the racial ethics of what he's doing, I guess that's all that needed to be said.
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Let's move on.. we've wasted way too much time on the dude already. I really do want to ask why the dude had to be Canadian but I know that'll just get me riled up anyway.

What I said wasn't meant to offend anyone or their tastes. Everyone like what you like, that was just my asshole opinion about some stuff so I really do apologize if I offended you.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..

Has Flygod leaked yet?
 
Clint Howard said:
Let's move on.. we've wasted way too much time on the dude already. I really do want to ask why the dude had to be Canadian but I know that'll just get me riled up anyway.

What I said wasn't meant to offend anyone or their tastes. Everyone like what you like, that was just my asshole opinion about some stuff so I really do apologize if I offended you.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..

Has Flygod leaked yet?
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Wait... whose Canadian now? That Fantano gearbox is definitely not Canadian... I'm lost...
 
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