Open Mike Eagle and Baron Vaughn have gotten very good at tackling modern questions that need answers with the weekly installment of satirical music videos from their Comedy Central sketch show The New Negroes. After unpacking wokeness, racial profiling, code switching, and enthusiastic consent, their newest video takes on “mumble rappers” and the modern culture of pill-popping party music with “LIt.” This week’s guest star is Awful Records’ Father, who joins Mike in copping a squat on the couch at a house party and tripping off of a bean, as the kids say, while the world passes them by.
As they two mumble and slur their way through their dazed verses about not doing anything other that sitting at the party, the visual effects team gets busy, representing the pair’s respective trips as creepy hallucinations full of Simpsons-inspired cartoon visuals and computer generated wireframe animations. The plodding beat is meant to parody the hypnotic production of so-called “Soundcloud rap” as Mike and Father lampoon the style of rap that Bay Area rapper Kamaiyah once called “boring.”
The New Negroes‘ videos are rapidly becoming one of the highlights of the week as they address social subjects too tricky for a pithy, 140-word tweet, in a far more entertaining format than a thinkpiece. With so many of Twitter’s favorite hot topics under their belts, half the fun is seeing what they’ll run with next.
