Story originally posted at TheVine.com.au

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.

WARNING: Clip contains language which may be offensive to some viewers:



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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. in which 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 any more 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 any more) 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 20 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/hos/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 10 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 jnr. 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.





Curly Castro, MC (Philadelphia)

It's blackface. It's pretty much blackface—the old cultural standard that we have over here, when they were performing that way. It's done for entertainment—and it was unnecessary. He could have been some weird rapper, he could have been white, he could have done whatever he wanted to do – he could have made that ambiguous. But to make that part of the character, and have a black family: it was like, 'Alright, so what's the point? What are you doing? Are you makin' fun of rapping?' And also, it's out of time. There ain't a lot of rappers even living like that anymore. They're like us—they've got mortgages, they foreclose. That lavish lifestyle was definitely in the 90s, for sure, but now you have to work for a living. A parody works when it's current—something that just happened on the news a week ago and is now appearing on a sketch comedy show. You can't do a skit about something that's from 1995.



I don't think it will do well in the US. But with things of a foreign nature, we muddle them up and mess up things—a lot. So, who knows? But in its current form, I doubt it. It'll be thrown down by the hip-hop community, because the people it's making a parody of, they'll take offence to it and say, 'What is that? Is that me?! That's not me!' With hip-hop, it's always two steps forward and four steps back. You're always fighting for your image and no other music struggles that way. You just want to be taken seriously, and things like this might be done in jest, but they're not helping the cause. He's not going to be welcome in the hip-hop community round here.





Has-Lo, MC (Philadelphia)

I found it offensive both in terms of its portrayal of black males and rap music. I don't think an Australian comedian should be parodying a black hip-hop artist like this. One could argue that this is comedy and no one's above being joked about. However, what's the comedic value here? This sketch is a white man pretending to be a talentless, unintelligent black boy who has a conflict of identity. His identity is manipulated by corporate white men. He is completely out of touch with reality, with where he comes from. This black character is an idiot. I don't think it has anything worthwhile to say about rap music and the record business. A lot of the things said HAVE been said before. I don't know if there's a bigger statement being made here. If there is, I don't personally see it. It seems to be more of a "look guys look, look at how absurd this is" kind of thing. There are a few accuracies, though.



This is a good example of the fundamental idea about what a young black man is. What do you see when another comedian, black or otherwise, plays a white male? Oft times you see them playing on things like awkward body language, lack of street smarts, a danger-seeking mentality, et cetera, while parodies of black men lean heavily on the idea that we're ill-mannered, unintelligent, quick to anger, violent, money-hungry, sex-crazed: these are character flaws not behavioural oddities. His idea of comedy is no different then the old blackface minstrel shows. On top of that he throws in ‘nigga' a couple times just to cover all the bases of offensiveness.



Even if you were to try and assign some grand commentary to this, why does he even have to be black? White emcees are not rare anymore. There are plenty of them at all levels of hip-hop, mainstream and underground. This comedian is white, why couldn't the character just be white? Then we don't even need to ask these questions.



Ben Westhoff – Music editor for LA Weekly, hip-hop journalist, author of Dirty South: Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop (Los Angeles)

I don't think it's very funny. The fake-gangsta stuff has been done better in CB4 and elsewhere, but the ‘Slap Your Elbow' stuff is a pretty good parody of southern rap. I don't find any of it particularly appalling, however. Putting on blackface is taboo, but beyond that it doesn't make me cringe. He seems a bit out of his element at times, but mostly he's got the aesthetic down pretty good.



It does seem outdated, and the parody suffers for that. I honestly don't think this character would generate a lot of outrage in America, or the hip-hop community, just because it's so tired and unfunny. If it were more relevant and current, I could see it causing ire.



Noncando, MC (Los Angeles)

I don't think that idea could even be pitched and taken seriously in the United States. It wouldn't make it past the pilot stage. I don't know if any actors—white, black, or other—would even agree to take part in that. Blackface is subject that white actors in America would not touch with a ten-foot stick. Black people would make sure that this sort of show was not released. Tropic Thunder had to be thoroughly—no, tediously—explained and most of the mainstream black community was against it. But, hey, with the right PR anything is possible.



Jeff Weiss – hip-hop journalist for The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Spin, Variety and Billboard. Essayist for ‘Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey' (Los Angeles)

It seems like he just saw Lil' Bow Wow or Lil' Romeo and he made a character. At the same time, in terms of comedy, it's not hard-hitting: neither of those people have had any sort of commercial impact in seven or eight years. That's just not what rap is now; it's a dull blade. On top of it, yeah, it's offensive. Some things are just immutable: I remember Ted Danson—he appeared in blackface at a roast [where someone is subjected to a public presentation of comedic insults, praise, outlandish stories, and tributes] for Whoopi Goldberg and there was this huge uproar. Understandably so, because there's a certain legacy.



It's a whole different ball game when there is no Australian minstrel show, you know what I mean? There is no legacy. I drove around the American south in 2003 and there are Little Black Sambo books and stories about plantations. There's still that legacy there. For a country like Australia: I guarantee you that if he did something about Aborigines that was that insensitive there would probably be more of an uproar. Or maybe not, I don't know.



Ultimately, it comes down to what is he parodying? It's different when you're invested in the culture and you're lovingly parodying it, like The Lonely Island—I think that's a perfect example, actually. You have a guy like Jorma Taccone and he's the biggest E-40 fan, or East Flatbush Project—these random, obscure artists that this person really loves. He has a nuanced perspective of it. To Lilley's credit, he's not necessarily parodying the street rap guy; he's parodying the fake rap guy, which I think in his mind allows him a certain immunity. But at the same time, it just feels like he picked up his version of hip-hop at a point that was convenient to him, and didn't do any of the legwork. The best parodies are incisive, and they're researched, and they're sharp. Like The Lonely Island: they get it, they make it authentic and then turn it on its head. Whereas Lilley's stuff is just a really flaccid and flabby attempt at satire – it's just toothless: what are you parodying?

