Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • You my monkey butt fluffernutter sweet-cheeks bunny,

  • ♫ I'm your daddy mac snickerdoodle baby-boo honey

  • - I'm gonna say it again.

  • When I started doing music, it wasn't, I didn't set out to rap.

  • Even my producer at that time, he said,

  • "You need to spit real 'bout your life, who you are."

  • And so I came out to him, I'm like,

  • What do you—I'm gay, what if I spit about that?"

  • He's said, “Well, then do it, that's what you gotta do."

  • I'm Joey Lemar AKA Deadlee, and I'm a rapper.

  • Oh, and I'm gay.

  • (laughs)

  • So baby, baby, I'm yours, dirty habits, foul moods

  • Back in early 2000 when I started doing this stuff,

  • no one had ever seen an open gay rapper.

  • To them, it was only supposed to be like a masculine guy

  • that's doing it and spitting about chicks.

  • But I was taking it further back with my rap,

  • I mean I was thinking more about Public Enemy,

  • I was a big fan of Rage Against the Machine,

  • I mean, they can make change with their music,

  • so that's kinda what I was doing, too.

  • My early fans were not the people who I expected.

  • I thought it was gonna be hip-hop heads,

  • be brown and black men, but it wasn't that.

  • And it kinda made me mad because, you know, I really wanted

  • my brown and black people to love me and like

  • what I was doing, but I was dealing with a lot of people

  • that were down-low, and they had to, 'cause that's

  • just the way that we were brought up, and the culture.

  • They say for better, for worse, so baby, baby, I'm yours

  • Dirty habits, foul moods, but we keep it on course

  • When I first came out, too, I thought I was gonna get

  • a lot of love from the gay community,

  • and it was the hardest thing to crack.

  • And even the festivals, I tried to play Long Beach,

  • tried to play LA Pride, and every time they're like,

  • "You're a little too hardcore,

  • "we don't want that element here."

  • And I'm like, "But I'm gay, what

  • "element are you talking about?"

  • They don't understand that there's

  • gay fools that look like me.

  • And we're not gonna go cause problems, man,

  • it's just this is the way we look.

  • Did I tell you it's a love song, though?

  • (laughs)

  • It's a gay love song.

  • Like you said, I'm sweet, man.

  • (laughs)

  • You know what, I think it just takes time,

  • you need to talk to people and people need

  • to look beyond the surface, man.

  • And I'm guilty of that too, man, y'know,

  • I think we're all guilty, it's just human nature, man.

  • I think we all wanna put everyone in a box.

  • And what's cool now, too, is like,

  • dude, they're not looking at me as the gay rapper,

  • they're not tripping on the whole gay thing.

  • I'm just doing music.

You my monkey butt fluffernutter sweet-cheeks bunny,

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it