Tuesdays with Tom: The Silly Antics of the Frat Rapper Era
A guilty pleasure music genre and its key figures; plus thoughts on the boringly bad White Sox, the MLB's dilemma with Shohei Ohtani, and an American ban of TikTok
I graduated from college in 2014 and they were some of the best years of my life. College students think the world revolves around them and that is often reinforced by the culture catering everything to their specific tastes. It’s only later that you realize how little you know about a lot and some of the things you believe are a huge deal mean nothing to most. One of the glaring things that stands out to me from this time in my life is the era of the frat rapper.
If you’re not my age and curious to learn what “frat rap” was like in the 2010s, stick around. Frat rap was created by mostly white, college-aged guys making music about loving college life, drinking, smoking weed, succeeding with girls and generally being the shit at everything. It was proudly juvenile and rarely thought provoking. The genre lacked the satire and irony of predecessors like the Beastie Boys License to Ill record. These frat rappers believed everything they said and they had an eager audience of fans who ate it up. Many students treated these songs as personal anthems for the college lifestyle of the time.
I won’t run from it. I was a fan of frat rap. But it's a niche genre that I can’t fully recommend to most and it’s one of the most reviled hip-hop subgenres ever. Still, it’s very amusing now to remember that we thought a lot of these people were massive stars. The reality is they were only famous in the bubble we existed in. So, who were the stars of the frat rap era? Do their songs pass the retroactive eye test or are they relics of the past? And where are they now?
Too Famous for Inclusion: G-Eazy, B.o.B., Macklemore, Post Malone
Asher Roth
The frat rap era began with Asher Roth. The Pennsylvania native was a student at West Chester University when he began posting his rap verses on his MySpace page. He sent a friend request to a young music producer named Scooter Braun and sent him his songs. Within a week, Braun was his manager and they began working on his debut album under Braun’s Schoolboy Records label. Roth was featured in XXL’s 2009 freshman class featuring rappers like Kid Cudi, Wale and B.o.B. But things really took off with his 2009 debut single “I Love College” that opened the floodgates for frat rappers everywhere. The song is a prospective college guy’s ultimate fantasy and a starter’s kit for the most common references within college party life that still exist today. Roth rode the song’s success through his album Asleep in the Bread Aisle and became the godfather of frat rap.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “I Love College”
Where Are They Now?: It took Roth five years to make a follow-up album. It was about four years too late to capitalize on his moment in the sun. He looks noticeably different now and, despite several more albums, he’s still best known for his debut song. But “I Love College” remains the most frat rap song ever and it's a nostalgic reminder about the carefree pleasures of college life. It might not have been the greatest thing to aspire to, but “I Love College” perfectly memorialized a time that many people are still fond of.
Timeflies
Timeflies was a pop-rap duo featuring two Tufts University students, Cal Shaprio and Rob Resnick. The pair met in 2007 and briefly played together in a funk band called The Ride after Shaprio freestyle rapped for Resnick at a party. In 2011, they formed a new group called Timeflies and released an EP called Scotch Tape that made waves on the Internet. The duo became very popular from their ongoing YouTube series called Timeflies Tuesdays. With Resnick’s beats, Shapiro would freestyle rap every Tuesday using newspaper clips or random words from sheets of paper as lyrical inspiration. The series was a must watch in dorm rooms and fraternity houses everywhere.
Timeflies eventually realized that freestyling on YouTube wasn't a sustainable career move. They went on tour with their act and in 2014 their first major label album After Hours did a nice job introducing them to a wider audience. After Hours featured artists like T-Pain and Fabolous, giving them a formal endorsement from the auto-tune rap community. Their 2015 album Just For Fun was a rinse-and-repeat approach from After Hours and their 2016 single “Once In A While” has 339 million streams on Spotify today.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “Die Young”
Where Are They Now?: There was a built-in shelf life with the Timeflies Tuesday concept. Despite the impressive freestyling, the songs were not very memorable. Timeflies is done, but Cal Shapiro is still involved with music and recently worked on the new MisterWives album last summer. Rob Resnick is involved in the music business. At its best, Timeflies was a charming gimmick in the early days of YouTube that dovetailed perfectly with college party culture and the popularity of pop mash-ups.
Hoodie Allen
Steven Markowitz is a New York-based rapper who goes by the stage name Hoodie Allen. In 2009, he broke into the frat rap genre with his self-produced mixtape The Bagels & Beats EP. After graduating from Penn University in 2010, he dedicated himself to pursuing rap on the side from his full-time job working at Google. His music video for a 2010 single “You Are Not a Robot” went viral on YouTube. His success continued with another mixtape in 2011 called Leap Year. It all coalesced in 2012 with his first full album All-American that solidified his status as a peak frat rapper.
All-American contained hits like “No Faith In Brooklyn (ft. Jhameel)” and “No Interruption” and Hoodie Allen parlayed the release into a 2012 tour with G-Eazy. The album peaked at No. 10 on the US Billboard 200 list. The next year, Hoodie Allen released the album Crew Cuts with another noteworthy single called “Fame Is For Assholes” that featured Chiddy Bang (we’ll get to them later). Another album, People Keep Talking, came right after that and included Ed Sheeran on the track “All About It”. But while Hoodie Allen has consistently produced new music, the genre’s fading popularity coincided with a drop in his visibility.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “No Interruption”
Where Are They Now?: Compared to his peers, Hoodie Allen is far more mature and prolific. He just wrapped a U.S. tour promoting his 2023 album bub and has maintained a devoted following on social media. He’s acknowledged that most people remember him for his early days on TikTok in a self-deprecating tone. He seems at peace with his music career and more importantly continues to have one. He may not make the Mount Rushmore of frat rap, but maybe that’s a good thing for Hoodie Allen.
3OH!3
Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte created the electronic-rap duo known as 3OH!3 after meeting in 2004 in their hometown of Boulder, Colorado. The name is based on their home area code and their self-titled album debut in 2007 produced one modest hit with the track “Electroshock”. 3OH!3 made significantly more noise with their 2008 album Want that simultaneously invented sophomoric dance rap. Some critics described the 3OH!3 style as “ridiculous, obscene, infectious, and obnoxious” and that sums them up well. Nothing exemplifies this better than their lead single “DONTTRUSTME”, which contains the most gleefully offensive lyric ever written (“do the Hellen Keller and talk with your hips”). Other songs like “STARSTRUKK” featuring Katy Perry and “IMNOTYOURBOYFRIENDBABY” had identically juvenile tones. In 2010, their second album debuted with the single “My First Kiss” featuring Ke$ha, who returned the favor by featuring them on her song “Blah Blah Blah” later on.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “DONTTRUSTME”
Where Are They Now?: 3OH!3 albums like Omens, Night Sports and a brief revival in 2021 with Need never came close to matching the popularity of their initial ones. The duo has largely taken a backseat as producers for acts like Maroon 5, MAX and Ariana Grande. But for a few years, they were a Warped Tour darling and frequently featured on Top 40 radio stations. They were tailor made for the bump-and-grind, club music era and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude of late-aughts MTV. 3OH!3 never took themselves seriously, but neither did anyone else after 2011.
Chiddy Bang
Rapper Chidera Anamege and producer Noah Beresin formed the duo known as Chiddy Bang after meeting at Drexel University. Their 2009 mixtape The Swelly Express gained traction for its catchy samples of artists like Passion Pit and MGMT. Most notably for the track “Opposite of Adults”, which they used again in their 2010 extended album called The Preview. In 2011, the rapper Chiddy set a Guinness Book World Record for the Longest Freestyle and Longest Continuous Rap at 9 hours, 18 minutes, and 22 seconds and it inspired most of their mixtape Peanut Butter and Swelly. Chiddy Bang plateaued with their only major label album Breakfast in 2012. Breakfast featured singles like ”Handclaps & Guitars”, “Mind Your Manners”, “Ray Charles” and “Baby Roulette” with Train singer Pat Monahan. Chiddy Bang was the epitome of frat rap’s delights and they were a consistent part of the college party playlist rotation.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “Opposite of Adults”
Where Are They Now?: Beresin backed out of Chiddy Bang to focus on producing and the group completely fell off the map for 10 years. Out of nowhere, Chiddy Bang returned, with just Anamege this time, and released 47 tracks in 2023. Those albums have mostly fallen on deaf ears. In its heyday, Chiddy Bang took unexpected contemporary pop songs and turned them into enthusiastic, genre-blending bangers. They were playful and their lyrics were extremely geared towards college living, which made them one of the frat rap genre’s greatest contributors. But unlike a lot of frat rap, Chiddy Bang’s songs have aged gracefully and wouldn’t feel terribly out of place today.
Sammy Adams
The poster child for the most douchey side of frat rap was none other than Sammy Adams. The kid from Wayland, Massachusetts, wasted no time going for the frat rap jugular by sampling Asher Roth’s song with his own version called “I Hate College”. His first full length album was appropriately titled Boston’s Boy and it was a loud announcement to self-absorbed frat stars that their hero had arrived. Boston’s Boy featured some of Adams’s biggest hits like “Coming Up” and “Driving Me Crazy”. But nothing topped the song “All Night Longer”, which might as well be etched into frat rap’s ten commandment stones. Adams continued on for several years working with some of music’s biggest names before quietly fading into the background.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “All Night Longer”
Where Are They Now?: Adams only released two other full lengths after Boston’s Boy and one of them was an extended edition of that album. Outside of a few sporadic singles, he never broke out of the trappings of the genre. Perhaps he never aspired to do more, but his induction as a frat rap Hall of Famer is unassailable. Sammy Adams was worshiped by frat bros and remains a walking billboard for everything to love and hate about the genre and lifestyle.
Lil Dicky
Dave Burd shocked his employers at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners by turning a routine monthly report into a rap song and moved into the ad agency’s creative department. When he wasn’t slinging ads, Burd crafted material for his rapper persona, Lil Dicky, and his first YouTube video “Ex-Boyfriend” got over 1 million views in 24 hours in 2013. Other songs like “Lemme Freak” and “White Dude” went viral and Lil Dicky became the next household name in the frat rap genre. In 2015, he released a full length album called Professional Rapper that featured “$ave Dat Money”, another massive hit on YouTube that charted in the Billboard Hot 100. Professional Rapper had a stunning list of featured artists like Snoop Dogg, T-Pain, Rich Homie Quan, Fetty Wap and Brendon Urie. In a few short years, Lil Dicky went from writing ads to working with the biggest names in rap.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “$ave Dat Money”
Where Are They Now?: Dave Burd has finally decided that he’s a comedian disguised as a rapper and not vice versa. Today, he is best known for playing himself in Dave -- a FXX comedy series about his own life. Outside of singles like “Freaky Friday” and “Earth”, he has barely made any music in the last decade. Even his long-awaited 2024 record Penith was nothing more than songs from the show. Nevertheless, his hilarious music-led satires and unflinchingly honest self deprecation have helped Dave Burd make the rare leap from frat rapper into a legitimate entertainment star.
Mac Miller
Mac Miller’s rise to the frat rap pantheon began in Pittsburgh with his 2009 mixtapes The Jukebox: Prelude to Class Clown and The High Life. As an 18-year-old, he signed with the Pittsburgh independent label Rostrum Records and created the mixtape that would change the genre forever. K.I.D.S, which stands for “Kickin' Incredibly Dope Shit”, introduced Mac Miller to the masses and featured a handful of absolute bangers that would come to define the genre. “Nikes on My Feet”, “Senior Skip Day”, “The Spins”, “Knock Knock”, “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza”, and “La La La La” were all instant frat rap classics. Miller’s second album Blue Slide Park mirrored the tone of K.I.D.S and did better commercially as he became more famous. Even in his early days, Miller never shied away from serious topics like his substance abuse or depression while maintaining strong artistic chops.
Frat Rap All-Timer: “The Spins”
Where Are They Now?: Mac Miller stans are very passionate and will quickly point out that he had long since matured out of frat rap with albums like The Divine Feminine and Swimming. At 26 years old, it felt like Mac Miller already experienced the highs and lows of a much older artist. But because of his untimely passing in 2018, we’ll never know what else he would have achieved. Still, K.I.D.S is a frat rap masterpiece, if such a thing exists, and Miller was the most fully-realized frat rapper from the jump. He was the perfect blend of aspirational cockiness while remaining grounded and relatable. One of his final public moments was on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series and it serves as a bittersweet view into what could have been for Mac Miller. It’s a far cry from his frat rapper days, but he remains the most artistically diverse and successful guy to ever do it in this silly genre’s history.
Tom’s Thoughts of the Week
In the last two episodes of Friday Night Beers, Vince and I drank Trip Hammer and 60 Minute IPA. We celebrated our 3rd anniversary as a podcast with Trip Hammer and it was a fun walk down memory lane of the early days of the show. We had a special guest on the 60 Minute IPA episode. Neil Rogers recently wrote a book called Bar Tips: Everything I Needed to Know in Sales I Learned Behind the Bar and it was a pleasure chatting with him and discussing his book. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast here and follow our Instagram page for relevant updates!
The White Sox rang in their 2024 season in appropriate fashion last Thursday. The team was bizarrely introduced to 33,000 fans in a parade of Ford vehicles on Guaranteed Rate Field. They promptly followed that up with a 1-0 loss to the Detroit Tigers, a game in which they had no extra base hits and struck out 11 times at the plate. Outside of starting pitcher Garrett Crochet’s stellar outing, it was a dreadful day for the Sox and one that will likely repeat many more times over the course of this 162 game season. I won’t be talking about this team very much. This might be the most apathy I’ve ever had going into a White Sox season. The past few seasons were filled with disappointment and drama. They eliminated both of those factors and replaced them with a team that will be boringly terrible for years to come. But hey, at least you can eat some wildly delicious food at the stadium.
I’ve never thought more about Japanese translators in my life between the increasingly great Shōgun series on FX and this new scandal surrounding Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers signed Ohtani to a record setting 10-year, $700 million contract this offseason, which includes a highly controversial yet technically legal clause to divert $680 million of those dollars until 10 years after he is done playing baseball. That’s a separate topic, but worth noting because it cemented Ohtani as the MLB’s most important and expensive asset. Not long after the season began, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ohtani was an alleged victim of theft by his English language interpreter and close friend, Ippei Mizuhara. Mizuhara was fired and he’s alleged to have used Ohtani’s money to make off-the-record sports bets. According to the reporting, at least $4.5 million was wired from Ohtani’s personal accounts to “an associate of Mathew Bowyer, a bookmaker in California who’s under federal investigation because sports betting is illegal in the state.” At first, the team representing Ohtani said the money was used to pay Mizuhara’s gambling debts. Later, they denied knowing about the gambling and insisted it was all Mizuhara’s doing. The real controversy here is whether Mizuhara was betting on behalf of Ohtani and, most crucially, if any of the bets were on baseball games. We don’t know the answers to those questions today.
If you know about the history of baseball, you may know that Pete Rose remains banned for life by the MLB for gambling on baseball as a manager for the Cincinnati Reds. Rose has lobbied for decades to be taken back and he’s been denied every time. It’s one thing to uphold a decades-long punishment of a grumpy, former player. But Shohei Ohtani is the biggest star in the MLB, a superstar in the middle of his prime who just signed the biggest contract in American sports history to pitch and hit for the Dodgers. If it is proven that Ohtani’s money was used to bet on baseball, the MLB would be in a dangerous position given their established precedent of banning players for life that do this. Personally, I find it extremely suspicious that an employee would have access to someone’s personal bank account, even if they were close friends as suggested, and it seems even harder to believe that Ohtani was totally unaware that Mizuhara had a gambling problem. I also don’t have much sympathy for the MLB or any other professional sports league in these situations because they have gleefully hopped into bed with sportsbooks and moral quandaries like this are bound to come up with their incessant promotion of gambling. I’m fascinated to learn more about this and let’s just say I’ll be very curious to see what the MLB does if Ohtani’s connection to this scandal is the worst case scenario.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently approved a bill that would ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, in America. But there’s a catch with this proposed ban. If ByteDance sells TikTok to an American company, the ban will go away. This is not the first time that American politicians have gone after TikTok for their Chinese connections. The theory is that ByteDance could give sensitive personal data to the Chinese government and put Americans at risk. There’s currently no evidence that ByteDance has done this. Here’s a sobering reality: banning TikTok in this country does next to nothing to protect your data. Some have rightfully pointed out that this is nothing more than “security theater” and there are several companies that mine sensitive data from American citizens every day. Just about any media company you interact with is doing the same exact thing, but no one in Washington D.C. seems concerned about how they could benefit from that data. It is embarrassingly transparent that the real goal of this bill is to get ByteDance to sell TikTok to one of America’s tech giants and get it within the walls of this country. Don’t take it from me: just ask Rep. Mike Gallagher, the lead GOP sponsor of the bipartisan bill, who said “what we're after is, it's not a ban, it's a forced separation.” I find it hilariously ironic that the house voted 352-65 in favor of this bill, which still has to get approved by the Senate and it’s unclear when that will be voted on today. It turns out that the one thing both sides can agree on is the potential of making a lot of money and making their future re-election campaigns easier to leverage. If you want to be outraged by how much data is mined from your Internet usage, that’s fine. But singling out TikTok purely because they’re owned by an American rival is elite hypocrisy and a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work in the real world.