What You Should Know About Lil Dicky From FXX’s New Series Dave

The way rapper Lil Dicky (also known as Dave Burd) explains his "brand" in the trailer for FXX's new series Dave will give you an idea of what you’re getting into: “Imagine what 2090 looks like, but it’s being described by someone who’s from 1920." With an affinity for pastels and self-deprecating humor, Lil Dicky wants to prove that he’s a bonafide rapper and that his career in hip-hop is the real deal.

The show Dave (which premieres March 3) is based on the true life and times of millennial rapper Lil Dicky who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and slowly made his way into the hip-hop scene. But if you're unfamiliar with him, there are a few things you should probably know.

Lil Dicky finally broke into the scene he’d been trying so hard to puncture with his music video for “Ex-Boyfriend” in 2013. In a recent profile in The New York Times, Burd says he had hoped for maybe 100,000 total YouTube views in a year. The video got over one million views in 24 hours. Burd added, “That was the best day of my life, because it showed I am who I thought I was.” This sentiment of ambition and validation seems to be what fuels the FXX series.

While Dave kicks off right after the “Ex-Boyfriend” video goes viral, Burd’s life before he became a rapper was pretty ordinary. He grew up in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood in Philadelphia in a Jewish household and later attended the University of Richmond. Burd admitted that, “I had three dreams: To be a comedian, to be a rapper and to play in the NBA. All of them are ridiculous dreams in general. But being a comedian felt like the feasible thing to go for. Being a rapper and playing the NBA felt very improbable.” Turns out, Burd ended up working in account management at a San Francisco advertising agency. But. He did get to write copy for NBA ads (including their “Big” campaign).

By working at an advertising agency, Burd was able to observe the ins and outs of creative production. “Making music videos had seemed so unachievable but I saw all these things getting produced on a day in day out basis, and learned how technologically feasible creating high-end art was,” Burd told The New York Times. 

While working at his day job, he also worked on his mixtape, So Hard, which he released in 2011. After “Ex-Boyfriend” exceeded his wildest YouTube expectations, he finally dropped his full-length debut album, Professional Rapper, on July 31, 2015. It featured T-Pain, Snoop Dogg, Fetty Wap, and Hannibal Buress.

Burd is at the point in his career where he can say he’s buddies with Justin Bieber now (he makes a cameo on Dave). Burd told Entertainment Weekly that he even casually asked one of the Kardashians if they, too, wanted to be on the show to help portray his first major "Hollywood experience."

"I thought back to a night in my life where I was around celebrities for the first time...and sure enough, it was the night I met Justin and Kourtney Kardashian. So I asked both of them to be part of this episode. Justin was totally game; he’s so charismatic and natural that is was easy for him to play himself. It wasn’t a hard sell at all,” Burd told the magazine.

Bieber isn’t the only celeb Burd has connections with. In April 2019 when he released his music video for “Earth,” it featured Ariana Grande as a zebra, Shawn Mendes as a rhino, and even Leonardo DiCaprio as cartoon Leonardo DiCaprio.

For one, Burd collaborated with Chris Brown on his 2018 single, “Freaky Friday.” It performed well, garnering over 465 million listens and at this point more than 580 million views. But the problem is that he collaborated with Chris Brown.

Four years before that, Vice’s music site Noisey published an article titled, “Lil Dicky Isn’t a White Supremacist, He’s Just an Asshole” and it highlights a blog post written by Burd himself that is downright cringe-worthy. The blog has since been removed, but here's what Noisey captured:

“Every single rapper raps about shit I can’t relate to. Unless you’re an extremely stupid person that began life as a poor, violent man, only to see your fortunes turn once you start rapping, you won’t be able to relate to 99 percent of today’s rap music.”

The article brings up some of the problematic lyrics in Lil Dicky’s song, “White Dude,” in which he doesn’t flirt with being offensive; he just is offensive. He raps, “Happy that my name ain’t stupid / Dave coulda been Daquan with a few kids.”

In his recent New York Times profile, Burd explained that he regrets some of the things he’s said and decisions he’s made. “I’m maturing every day, and certain things I thought and said are a far cry from what I think now,” Burd told the NYT.