Chris Lilley’s new television show
Angry Boys has been greeted with a degree of ambivalence by Australian viewers. Coming in for a particular amount of flak, is Lilley’s character S.mouse, a Los Angeles-based rapper based somewhere between Soulja Boy and Lil’ Bow Wow. Whether S.mouse is funny has been a topic of discussion on numerous internet forums, but some critics have gone further, voicing their concern that the character is little more than a simplified blackface parody of US hip-hop culture.
Is S.mouse racist? And does the character have anything worthwhile to say about American hip-hop culture? Seeing as the show received partial funding from US cable network HBO, we here at TheVine thought it’d be a good idea to show S.mouse from
Angry Boys to Stateside hip-hop aficionados, on both sides of the industry, to find out what they think of one of Lilley's most divisive characters yet.
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Zilla Rocca, MC – 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers (Philadelphia)
The S.mouse stuff is crossing lines of comfort, decency, and racial boundaries rather flippantly. Strike one is having a white person say the ‘n’ word multiple times. It's not like blackface hasn't been done in the recent past—Ice Cube did a whole show called
Black. White. where a black family was made white and a white family was made black to see how the world treats them. Fred Armisen, a white guy, portrays Barack Obama on SNL, the same way Darrell Hammond, another white guy, portrayed Jesse Jackson. Either way, blackface has been used to stir up either hard-fought political and racial truths we tend to believe don’t exist anymore in America, or it’s done in a lavishly ridiculous and playful manner while tiptoeing carefully around outright exploitation.
S.mouse, while funny at times, wasn't going for the revelation of ugly racial truths through the most controversial medium available (a white guy in blackface); he was making fun of American rap stars who aren't his colour. The rap stars he chose to lampoon (
Soulja Boy,
Lil' Wayne and the year 2000 rap star who frankly doesn't exist anymore) are truly the lowest hanging fruit. He didn't mimic Kanye West, the son of academics, Jay-Z, the most savvy and sharp businessman rap has ever seen. He didn't punk Drake, the polished preppy child star, Diddy, a millionaire impresario of nearly twenty years, or 50 Cent, the ruthless student of Robert Greene and Forbes Magazine. He picked rappers who record dumb songs, talk like illiterates, and live up to the stereotypes of rappers my mum frowns upon: obsessed with money/hoes/clothes with no real street cred and proud to be ‘hood’ all in the same. Sadly, this is not the current state of the American Pop Rapper. He is ten years late on his ‘clever’ takedown. With the internet and invention of smart phones, it's no excuse.
It's a very basic principle he violated: white people can only mock black people and black culture if there's a black person around saying it's OK. When Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle mocked white people, they were working with white writers, white network execs, white cast mates who all thought it was genius. Danny Hoch and Jamie Kennedy (
3 A.M,
Blackbird) purposely put black characters in their movies who spoke on behalf of the audience: “You're going too far, and there are consequences.” S.mouse goes way too far and only interacts with black people who are hired to read their lines, not act as the audience's conscience.
Kool A.D., MC – Das Racist (New York City)
This is dumb. I had to turn it off a couple minutes in. His accent is bad, which makes the blackface worse. The only time I've seen blackface used in a way that actually made me "think more critically about race" is [the Spike Lee film]
Bamboozled.
Ice Cube Presents: Black. White. was pretty dumb but I watched every episode.
Hoodoo Possession by Guillermo Gomez-Pena had its heart in the right place but was too ‘avant-garde’ which is French for “white people seem to eat it up." I only saw a few minutes of
Tropic Thunder [in which the white Robert Downey Jr. plays a black man] but it was annoying in that "let's see if we can innocuously pull off something traditionally understood to be racist as an ‘edgy statement' of how we're over it" way. This show seems like it's similarly whack but I have even less patience for that type of thing now. I would go into great detail and use a bunch of college words but I don't have the time to do that anymore unless someone wants to pay me. Maybe Australians would call this ‘cheeky’, or something. As for how it would go in America: who knows what the kids want, am I right?
Open Mike Eagle, MC (Los Angeles)
Hell yeah it’s offensive. Blackface is not the kind of thing that just becomes acceptable one day. I don’t give a damn how ‘meta’ this cat thinks he is, it doesn’t give him a pass to exploit the history of race relations for a cheap laugh. The worst part was that the blackface was unnecessary. It didn’t add a damned thing to the presentation of the comedy. He could have done the same thing as a white rapper and stepped around the minefield. Instead, I couldn’t relax enough to find any of it funny. All I could think about is how big of an idiot this guy had to be to think that this was something to be done. Rap-wise it wasn’t offensive. It was uninspired and not at all creative, but it wasn’t offensive in its portrayal of the art or the industry.
It’s full of truths about record label restrictions, artist posturing, rap fandom and the like, but it’s not the definitive story of the rap music industry nor was it attempting to be. The real situation is far too nuanced to have been accurately reflected here and if anything he does a good job compartmentalising this as one individual's journey. Once again, however, there was absolutely no reason that this individual had to be black. There's nothing inherently wrong with portraying these ideas with a black character. The issue is that character needs to be naturally black, instead of a white portrayed as a black in a manner that is closely associated with a racist form of entertainment.
Martin Douglas, Producer – 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers, contributor for Pitchfork (Seattle)
You can tell you from the very first seconds that the music itself feels like more of a parody of rap music than a genuine fictional take on the art form. I mean ‘Animal Zoo’? Really? It seriously sounds like Lilley sampled two minutes of only the worst Soulja Boy songs and based an entire character around it. Looking at the character, it's appalling that he couldn't even get a black character to play this abhorrent role. It feels far more than simply "not funny"; as a black man in America, I feel as though this is a blatant mockery of black men in America. Any human being with even a moderate respect for hip-hop culture would have created this character a lot differently.
I think on a purely musical level, the beats are competent enough to fall in line with today's popular, radio-friendly rap; I also think the cadence of the raps should be placed in that category, as well. I just think that, because it was supposed to be a parody, Lilley went way over the top as far as the persona he was trying to recreate. The satire would have been massively more effective if a) Lilley had done a little more research on hip-hop culture instead of making a halfhearted parody on something he obviously doesn't understand, and b) if he would have brushed up on America's shaky history with race before deciding to play a black character.
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