Early on an autumnal morning, David Burd is in a car traversing through Los Angeles on the way to make an appearance on the radio station 92.3 FM.
“I’m riding shotgun with my manager, Mike (Hertz),” explains Burd, better known by his stage name, Lil Dicky. The radio spot is part of an avalanche of notoriety that has continued to come his way since a music video for his debut single, $ave Dat Money, became a bona fide viral smash on YouTube, netting almost 10m views in three weeks and elevating Burd, known as a comedic rapper, from success on YouTube to the mainstream. “Deep down, I always had a belief I would get on the charts,” he says of the track’s recent vault onto the Hot 100 after its internet success. “The fact that it’s transcending YouTube is more of a relief than anything.”
Chart success has been a long time coming for Burd, especially considering he began his rap career in the unlikeliest of ways. The rise of the rapper, who hails from Cheltenham, Pennsylvania (population 4,810), started when he landed what he dubs “a boring job” at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an advertising agency based in San Francisco best known for the Got Milk? campaign. “I came into the account management department, the business side of things,” says Burd. “It’s kind of the bitch work, to be honest with you.” While working with brand names such as Doritos, Burd was tasked with putting together a report every three months to outline how the company’s ads were affecting the sales of products like chips.
“It was such a boring report that got up to the highest people in the agency, and I felt like nobody cared about it,” he says. Sensing the company’s loose atmosphere, Burd took a leap of faith and one month, instead of writing the report in a simple Word document, he recorded himself rapping it instead, later passing around an MP3. “I knew I would get rewarded for trying something different, but I didn’t know that people would actually take to it,” Burd says, noting that the sales-rap blew his employers away. “Everyone was singing the song around the office.”
Burd was later promoted to a creative position within the influential company and while working on campaigns for the likes of the NBA finals by day, he was recording a mixtape and producing videos for singles by night. The first, a comedic song about his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend (called Ex Boyfriend), became a hit, with subsequent videos garnering Burd an avid following. All the while he was straddling the delicate line between comedy and rap. “I always dreamed of being an entertainer, and the more reasonable approach was to take the comedian route because the constant feedback from my life was that I was funny,” says Burd. “It felt like the right dream to have, because becoming a legitimate rapper felt as unrealistic as playing in the NBA. But rapping works like a sport ... the more you do it, the better you get at it.”
Success on YouTube is difficult to obtain outside of the confines of the streaming service, and even with immense viral success, it’s almost impossible to translate internet fame into a long-term career. (Take a look at acts like South Korea’s Psy or Norway’s Ylves.) Burd saw this hurdle and devised a plan. Leaving behind mixtapes, he tapped into his fanbase and launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for an official debut album, raising north of $100,000. Then, he took the better part of a year and a half crafting 200 tracks, the bulk of them comic riffs on rap culture.
The most notable was $ave Dat Money, which he happened to convince two of the hottest names in the game, Fetty Wap and Rich Homie Quan, to guest on. “The song in a nutshell is about how all rap songs are about spending money, so this is an ironic twist on that,” says Burd of the concept. “I thought it’d be cool to flip it on its head. With Homie, I wanted to get a guy who raps about the luxury lifestyle. I also wanted a more elevated hook, because I don’t sound as cool as I need to all the time, and I don’t think there’s anybody cooler than Fetty Wap.”
Burd knew $ave Dat Money was his best shot at having an actual hit and wanted to make a music video that was as special as the song, soon brainstorming with director Tony Yacenda, a frequent collaborator. “Tony said, ‘Why don’t we actually try to pull this off without spending any money?’ Personally, I felt it was a great idea, but it was risky. I didn’t want to make a music video full of rejection footage.” Undaunted, Burd and Yacenda devised a variety of creative ways to spend as little cash as possible and still craft a seemingly legitimate rap video that would at least appear to have cost a fortune, boasting scenes on a yacht and in a mansion, and cameos from the likes of Sarah Silverman, Hannibal Burress and Mark Cuban.
First, the team “borrowed” the set of a major label music video T-Pain was shooting, then a Lamborghini dealership lent them a car in exchange for free advertising. They even filmed a portion inside an actual mansion in exchange for asking fans to donate to Planned Parenthood, at the mansion owner’s request. “When we got the house on the second day, I was like, ‘Jesus ...’” Burd says of the charmed shoot. “We filmed for six days and every day was better than the last. I don’t believe in things happening for a reason, but this was fucking ridiculous.” (A 20-minute documentary about the making of the video was later uploaded.)
The viral success of $ave Dat Money is the cherry on top of the fact that when Professional Rapper, the album Burd funded on Kickstarter, was finally released this summer, it shot to No 1 on the comedy, rap and independent album charts. “All of this has reaffirmed my faith in humanity, because I’m very cynical,” notes Burd, still riding shotgun on the way to that radio station as part of his mainstream victory lap.
