Rap World is this year’s funniest music movie

There are many great music documentaries about the creation of an album, from The Beatles’ Get Back to Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster. At their best, they capture artists at their most creative or, in the case of Metallica, lay bare the petty squabbles between recording sessions. Rap World, a new mockumentary starring comedian Conner O’Malley, takes that framework and applies it to a group of white rappers in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania filming themselves as they try to make an album in one night, despite having no songs or real focus to speak of.

Rap World, which was written by O’Malley alongside his co-stars Eric Rahill and Jack Bensinger, is profoundly dumb and all the more enjoyable for it. Set in 2009, it captures a time when social media existed but the general public were not acutely aware of how to appear on camera or how quickly the footage could be widely shared. There is a nostalgic feeling to the footage made accurate to the era by director Danny Scharar (alongside co-director O’Malley) shooting on digital video cameras from the era. It gives the 57-minute film a unique grainy texture, the kind of thing you might stumble across on YouTube after an intrepid fan ripped the footage from a DVD stored in a wallet alongside Superbad or the proto-Jackass series, CKY.

O’Malley, Rahill, and Bensinger play the aspiring rappers as their mission to lay down tracks for the album is repeatedly waylaid by trips to McDonalds and crashing a party they aren’t invited to. There are brief moments of musical inspiration, including a scene inspired by the clip of Jay-Z hearing Timbaland’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” beat for the first time, but at its core Rap World is about procrastination and the type of guys more interested in being known as rappers, but not the actual rapping part of the job.

Speaking shortly after the movie was released on YouTube last month, O’Malley, Scharar, Rahill, and Bensinger spoke about their own procrastination in getting the DIY project made, as well as their memories of 2009, and why Ludacris put paid to one of their most elaborate ideas.

THE FADER: When did the concept of making a mockumentary about a group of white rappers recording an album first come to you?

Conner O’Malley: It started during the pandemic. We had a bunch of time and everybody started to do stupid stuff online. Jack and I made a video a few years before, in like 2018, where we used a DV camera I bought it off of eBay and it came with old tapes that had footage of these teenagers on it. They were just hanging out in their house playing Guitar Hero. It was such a time machine and we realized that that if you had a camera you could shoot a period piece that was longer than the typical YouTube video.

Was there any reason you decided these characters had to be aspiring rappers?

Jack Bensinger: I think that was a certain type of guy back in the day that really resonated for this type of project. I remember, especially after 8 Mile came out around the same time as CKY, that suburban white guys started to think this stuff was easy. They would watch 8 Mile and think, ‘Well, I guess white guys can rap better than anyone in the world.’ This was around the same time as battle rap was a big deal, things like Scribble Jam and King of the Dot.

Do you have an idea of the music your characters would have been into? Besides Eminem?

Eric Rahill: There are hours of footage that we didn’t use where we were just driving around in a Subaru Outback playing music from 2009. Lots of John Mayer and Nujabes, in particular.

What are your personal memories of 2009? Do you have songs or albums that take you back there in an instant?

C O’M: I would say “Empire State of Mind “by Jay Z. I worked on a cruise ship doing improv for Second City. They always played that song as we left, like we were in a bad Vietnam war movie or something.

ER: I remember playing [MIA’s] “Paper Planes” back then and getting the chills every time that would come on my iPod. It made me feel really powerful.

In the rare moments that your character do actually rap they’re clearly not very good at it. Is it hard to write bad raps on purpose? Or is it actually kind of easy…

C O’M: My character is really into Immortal Technique and really wants to kind of have conscious conspiratorial raps. “They're gonna put barcodes on everybody's necks”-type conspiracies. That was quite easy to tap into.

JB: These is one line were I say “Doing a bukkake on Benghazi. That was a real freestyle. And I had to pull myself back because I was like, damn, this might take you out of the movie because my lyricism is too good.

I noticed in the credits that Mikal Cronin made a lot of the music in Rap World. He’s maybe best known for being in Ty Segall’s band. What’s your relationship with him and how did he come to be producing beats for you?

C O’M: I have known Mikal for a while and he's worked on a lot of other projects of mine. He's incredible. I feel like I've worked with other people sometimes on comedies to create an original score and they go a little bit too jokey. But Mikal really gets it. He understood that the job was to make music that a dumb guy in 2009 would think is cool. And he understands how to make music and character.

Even though 2009 was not that long ago, it feels like a different time due to the way the internet works now. Was it important to you to capture that slightly more innocent time?

ER: Yes. People acted so differently around a camera because there was just no sense as to where it was going to go. It was just novel that someone has this thing out and the self-awareness was much lower. I think that helped inform how we acted with these cameras in the movie. There's a different look in people's eyes. They look so much happier.

Danny Scharar: Nate Varrone's character, Riley Byro, is the best example of someone turning on a camera performance but even then his reference is like a TV host almost.

Procrastination is a big theme of the movie. You guys all seem very prolific creators but is that something you ever struggle with?

C O’M: No. I actually have to stop myself. I have to function in vacation time for mental activity because I'm so productive. I have multiple Amazon businesses selling burgers and pizza.

JB: We’re the opposite of The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They wake up at 4 a.m. to work out. We wake up at that time to watch fucking stupid YouTube videos, eat dumbass ice cream sandwiches, and things of that nature.

C O’M: To answer your question, though, the movie is reflective of our personal procrastination. For example, we showed up on set and realized that we hadn’t written any lyrics at all. So we had to like stop production for three hours and start writing lyrics.

JB: I think there's something really beautiful about these like losers who still have dreams, despite their circumstances. The procrastination is almost them saying, “we haven't failed yet, because we haven't done it yet, so it's still possible.”

C O’M: Jack, Eric and I all came up in the Chicago comedy scene. You see a lot of that kind of guy, somebody who's like not actually pursuing comedy, but they're just using it to mask their need to drink an 1800s level of alcohol every day.

One thing we talked about a lot is how comedy is this backburner dream a lot of people have going in their lives. Something you can point to and say, ‘I’m still working on that.’ That is where I think these guys are creating from.

ER: I think what’s sweet about this movie is actually these guys probably just wanted to be chilling, but couldn't admit that. What they want deep down is to be sitting really close together on the couch playing Mortal Kombat and eating popcorn.

Finally, Rap World has been screened at a bunch of film festivals throughout the year and I read there is a version that includes a lot more music from the era and a scene where you guys dance to a Ludacris song? What happened there?

C ’OM: So the original credits sequence was us dancing to “Move Bitch” while the credits of Tropic Thunder played behind us.

DS: It was Jack's idea to have the credits for our movie happen over the credits of a different movie, which I think is the first time that's ever happened.

C ‘OM: We unfortunately had to get rid of it because we heard that Ludacris is incredibly litigious.