Throughout the show, Dave treats his friends and collaborators like shit, has universally awful fans, and can’t make any music that doesn’t suck. Multiple episodes shine an unkind light on Dave’s self-absorption and skill for cultural appropriation-at one point in Season 2, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (playing himself) is brought on to call out Dave’s blaccent and unrestrained self-regard. The show is not at all shy about advancing the theory that Lil Dicky was never much more than an offensive persona invented by an artistically bankrupt narcissist who had to fall back on cheap and grotesque humor in order to avoid grappling with what it actually means to be a white artist in a predominantly black art form. The show, which tells a lightly fictionalized story of Burd’s attempts to become a rap superstar, often holds its title character and his talents as a rapper in utter contempt. So you can imagine my surprise at discovering that much of Dave‘s 20 episodes are concerned with advancing exactly the sort of critiques that I have long held against Burd’s music. If Lil Dicky has any lasting cultural impact, it’s probably thanks to a song he made with Chris Brown called “Freaky Friday,” which used the idea of a white guy saying the n-word as a punchline and certainly helped convince a great many white American youths that they would be totally justified in saying it themselves. One of his first big songs, called “White Dude,” was a rudimentary stab at satire that includes lines like, “Happy that my name ain’t stupid/Dave coulda been Da’quan with a few kids.” His biggest hit is probably a song called “Save Dat Money,” which is all about how Lil Dicky, unlike all those other extravagant rappers, saves money.
The problem with Burd becoming massively popular with upper- and middle-class white kids across the country wasn’t the mere fact that he is white, but that he was one of those white rappers whose artistic vision didn’t extend beyond repeatedly pointing out that he was a white guy who was rapping, and wasn’t it so crazy and funny that a white guy was doing raps? He was a comedy rapper who could only make jokes at either his own expense or at the expense of the culture onto which he’d successfully latched himself. Scientists are still examining the data, but it is believed that the words “Yo, have you seen that new Lil Dicky video?” were at some point spoken in 99 percent of all frat houses in America during that time period.
If you’ve never heard a Lil Dicky song, that’s probably because you somehow managed to make it from 2013 to 2018 without ever being in a room with three or more white guys for more than 15 minutes. I happen to think that Burd’s rap career was one of the most damaging cultural forces of the 2010s. The cause for my annoyance is pretty straightforward. I have found myself in a bit of a pickle: I watched both seasons of the FX television show Dave, written by, created by, and starring Dave Burd, more commonly known as the rapper Lil Dicky, and have been forced to admit to myself that I enjoyed it quite a bit.