We’re kind of obsessed with Lil Dicky, the cheeky young rapper whose very public goal is to represent the “upper-middle class on his frail, Jewish shoulders.”
His newest music video, for “Jewish Flow,” is here, and it’s more provocative than anything we’ve seen from him so far. In it, the year is 1944 and Dicky’s got a rap battle to win—against Hitler. As the video opens, we see Dicky prepping himself backstage “Yo, Dicky,” an unseen friend prompts, “You sure you want to battle, dude? He’s been killin’ Jews.”
Superimposed onto very real Nazi rally footage, Dicky and Hitler walk through the saluting crowd before getting on stage. Then off Dicky goes, rapping into the face of the Nazi leader.
Wearing a “Fuck Hitler” t-shirt, Dicky raps that he’s got “that Auschwitz sick gas chamber kinda shit.” He’s also getting with German women, slinging sausage links, and dunking on Nazis in a pick-up game. It appears that Dicky is working through some identity issues, rather unsubtly.
Still, he’s not the first rapper to reference Hitler in a song. In Nas’ “Revolution Warfare,” rapper Lake posits that he’s “like a modern day Hitler.” And in 2Pac’s “Got My Mind Made Up,” Method Man raps that he’s “like Hitler, sticking up Jews with German Lugers.”
I asked Dicky about the video’s emphasis on Hitler and Nazi imagery. For him, it’s similar to how Kanye and other rappers reference slavery in their lyrics, he explained in an email. “You take a past social injustice (i.e. slavery, the Holocaust) and use it as a comparison point to highlight a current place of social prominence,” he wrote.
He gets why Jewish listeners might be offended by non-Jewish rappers bringing up Hitler, though he admits (not so shockingly) that he’s not easily offended:
In theory, people should probably stick to their own lane (I don’t think myself talking about slavery would be smart), but I personally don’t care what anyone else does in music. Self-expression is what it is, people should do what they want, as long as they’re willing to deal with consequences.
No consequences for Dicky yet, though: “Jewish Flow” has more than 50,000 YouTube views. What do you think of the video?
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