Celebrities and rap music make strange bedfellows at the best of times, but placed in the context of a high-pressure chat show, and they make for an almost instant viral success. Last night on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show – a programme famed for its ability to craft shareable, entertaining clips that have an afterlife long after the show finishes – Daniel Radcliffe joined the long list of celebrities who’ve dabbled in rap in order to both entertain and prove they’ve got some sort of edge.
His rendition of Blackalicious’s Alphabet Aerobics, a song that’s known for its A-Z lyrical construction and tongue-twisting dexterity, was pretty much flawless. It was even more impressive when you consider that when celebrities normally show off their rap skills, it consists of them reciting a few hastily mumbled lines from a well-known classic rather than a genuinely hard-to-perform rarity.
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, such as Fallon’s rapid-fire history of rap with Justin Timberlake - but mostly, when stars rap on television they fall into one of two categories:
1) The reluctant celebrity show off
A rap-fan celebrity will arrived on the talkshow, sit on the sofa politely and after a bit of gentle prodding, will deliver a couple of lines. For a perfect example of this, take a look at Gwyneth Paltrow knocking out Ice Cube’s verse from NWA’s Straight Outta Compton on the Graham Norton show. Or for a slightly less glitzy example, Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps, who can apparently recite the whole of Rapper’s Delight.
2) The celebrity who uses rap as a satirical weapon
A celebrity will either spearhead their own jokey rap ode or be a good sport and join in with a counter-intuitive hip-hop-based sketch. Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck’s faux rap career was intentionally hideous, as was Anne Hathaway’s rap-meets-cabaret medley on Fallon, while the Saturday Night Live-helmed Natalie’s Rap saw Natalie Portman apply hip-hop cliches to an average day in her life.
But what works as a viral hit doesn’t necessarily translate into real life success. History shows that Radcliffe probably shouldn’t give up the day job: cautionary tales are in abundance here, see Shaquil O’Neal, Mark Wahlburg and even Wham who all tried to cross the rap rubicon and didn’t quite make it. As a kudos-winning party trick, however, Radcliffe’s rap wasn’t too bad at all.
