If Sir David Attenborough was to study the social behaviours of the great white human male, he’d find no richer environment than a Lil Dicky gig. Mod Club was plastered wall to wall with milky skin, backwards turned baseball caps and bottles of Molson Canadian. Leading the pack was the charismatically beta male Lil Dicky. An advertising account manager turned rapper/comedian, his discography is a treatise on the struggles of the ineffectual middle class white male. Have I said ‘white’ enough yet? ‘Cause this gig was practically luminescent.
Taking the stage in a no. 43, “Dickey” Blue Jays shirt, Dicky grabbed the crowd from the offset and didn’t let go. Flanked by the silhouette of a bearded Jew-fro’d face, he launched into Jewish Flow with aplomb. Bouncing around the stage like a rabid child, his hyperactive presence only aided his quicksilver flow and self-deprecating wit. Warmed up, he called on his business background to present the crowd with a quick PowerPoint on what to expect from a Lil Dicky concert. A bar graph illustrated that the “Fun Forecast” predicted a potential outcome of 90% in comparison to other rappers, singers and magicians (ranking in at 15%, 75% and 100% ‘fun’ respectively. Noting his lower rank than magicians he admitted “I’m no David Blaine. Nobody’s gonna be disappearing or anything here”). The gig was proclaimed a judgement free zone, empowering the crowd to be as weird and funky as they wished without the lash of criticism. He obviously knows his demographic, have you seen white people dance?
The fun forecast wasn’t wrong. While Dicky’s a legitimately skilled emcee/rapper, his style and subject matter parody the ego driven lifestyle of excess most of the genre seeks to promote. Just in case the energy got low, Dicky had an audio cue of Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It lined up, prompting him to shimmy across the stage like an epileptic toddler. By the second song he’d already unburdened himself from the sizable gold chains around his neck, noting “I’ll tell you one thing, chains are cumbersome. They keep getting caught in my jersey.” White Dude saw him eschew booty girls for an assortment of schlubby white males to awkwardly dance onstage, while he spent the entirety of All K wandering the crowd, rapping flawlessly into a handheld mic.
Closing out the gig with breakout YouTube hit Ex-Boyfriend, he stopped abruptly. “Cut the music. We don’t do mosh pits at Lil Dicky shows. We just have fun. I got y’all safety in mind.” Restarting the track, the audience rallied with renewed vigour, concluding the track with deafening cheers. Laughs and smiles were aplenty and why not? How many other gigs have featured a cardboard cutout of an armed penis with massive biceps and washboard abs?
