Maybe this is presumptuous of me, but my first thoughts on seeing the rap section are:
1) the setting and lyrics are pretty similar to the original video, except
2) the "rappers" are white
3) the makers of the video believe it is difficult to identify a white person as a rapper without any additional cues, so they dress up in a way that makes it easier to identify them as such.
4) BP (? the one in the yellow shirt) reminds me of Ali G, and I wonder if this is a coincidence or not

Eh... it's making fun of white people with self deprecation. Specifically how white people cannot rap. Their mocking themselves and the horrible lyrics found in the original song.

But yeah, Alan B is right. Definite Ali G vibes.

Very cute in my opinion. It isn't mocking rappers it is as one comment said self deprecation - the best form of comedy as any shark can snip at someone else's faults.

Very well done parody in my opinion.

Racism among Whites correlates to church attendance. I'm guessing that these White people have very high church attendance to be making a video encouraging attendance of church.

@Alan B The rappers are White because they didn't have any Black people in their church. It's a parody of a popular video. That video has a digression @2:30 where rappers come in. All that is needed to identify the people in the parody as rappers is to have them start rapping @2:30. Turning them into gross stereotypes is just racism.

Ali G wasn't mocking rappers or Hip Hop. He was mocking the appropriation of Hip Hop culture by Whites. Ali G was mocking the racism and thoughtlessness on display in this very video.

@:] The fact that these people can't rap isn't parody. It's just lack of talent.

@Shanay Sock-puppet alert.

I think it's a stretch to call this 'mocking rap'. I'd say there are more grounds to accuse the original video of racism, given that it appropriates an element of black culture, apropos of absolutely nothing, in an incredibly clumsy way. I think the parody is actually trying to sidestep that whole tricky area, and I agree with previous commenters that this is more of a "white guys can't rap" joke than a "rap is stupid" joke. In any case, the rap in 'Friday' IS stupid, as are all of the lyrics to the song, and the parody video draws attention to the vapid lyrics in general, not just in the rap section.

Wait, I thought “Gang Fight!” was the original and “Friday” was the parody.

Lisa, your critique is that the rap segment didn't mimic the original video as straightforwardly as the rest of Sadie B.'s video, hence that segment must be making fun of rappers not the video.

The second video's rap segment follows the original's structure as closely as the rest of Sadie B.'s rap; that is, nothing about the segment jumps out at me to diverge so radically that we should label it a ridicule of rap/rappers.

The original lyrics are something along the lines of "Chilling in the front shot, in the back seat, I'm driving cruising, fast lane, I'm switching lanes, with a car by the side, passing by is a school bus in front of me..." I suspect the part of the parody video that you'd find ridicules rappers is the inane set of observations, "Oh look there's a tree and a fire truck and a car, that car is orange, nothing rhymes with orange." But it seems clear to me that ridiculous catalog of passing observations mimics the ridiculous catalog of "there's a car, there's a bus." If this isn't the part that's purportedly ridiculing rappers, I don't know which segment it would be; the other parts of the "rap" either explicitly parallel the original (a comment about front seats, etc), or talk about the main point of the video (the excitement of Sunday/Easter/church).

Or, perhaps you'd claim the ridicule stems from the get-up of the "rappers." That seems to me immediately to be the shrugging attempt at self-deprecation, we're white, we know we can't rap, and we acknowledge it by what we're wearing. Whether the attempt was successful or not – that I won't say. I do agree with the comment above that they didn't have to dress in the way to convey they were rappers. But it certainly is a stretch to say that because they dressed in such a way they must be ridiculing rappers; the immediate interpretation is self-deprecating irony.

All in all, the critique that this segment must be ridiculing rappers because it does not stay as "true to the original" in its mimicry is simply not accurate. The lyrics are stupid and inane because the original's were stupid and inane. It diverges where the content of the rest of Sadie B.'s content diverges; Sunday, not Friday. The get-up is over-the-top and unnecessary, but in an attempt at ironic self-deprecation and acknowledgement that they can't rap.

It's hard to say without a ridiculous amount of research, but my impression was that the "rappers" might be in leadership roles within the church, like pastors or something, and that their cameo in the video might be a bit of an in-joke to the children's groups.

The outfits were a little ridiculous, of course, but it wasn't really offensive or based on making fun of rappers as blatantly as I was expecting. Again, I think the joke was just those men in clothing and setting that is incongruous to what people in the church may expect from them, like running into a strict teacher in a bikini at the beach, and the humor is meant to derive entirely from that.

I think the irony here is that the video comes off as making fun of Christians. If I hadn't known it was produced by the church I would have assumed it was like one of the millions of youtube parody videos out there.

I get what you're saying. There may be other factors driving the exact choice of actors or their actions, but there is a HUGE difference between Sadie's mimicry of Rebecca Black and the men's imitation of the rapper. In "Friday," the man rapping is mostly adhering to the common tropes of today's pop-rap videos: flaunting his wealth via jewelry and a car, wearing fairly trendy but subdued clothes, in an urban setting that's almost fairy-tale like, and his rap is pretty distinctly related to the song. The parody seems like it was directed by someone who hasn't actually watched a rap video for about 2 decades and even then only saw a couple by the Beastie Boys and maybe one Weird Al parody: loud sweatsuits and fur coats, sunglasses-at-night, 'MC Monkiers' that are pretty outdated, throwing up random hand signs that don't mean anything, and rapping about 'oh look that car is orange.'

I'm not saying this is a direct bash on rap, but the fact is, rap has been used as a covert excuse to mock black people or blame blacks for society's ills for like 30 years, with very little basis, and the fact that they can't even find something resembling a modern-day rapper's outfit is at least eye-roll worthy to me. If anyone's wondering, more 'dressy' clothes, both subdued and over the top, are becoming popular among rappers and their fans, along with skater clothes. Some rappers still wear casual clothes, but it tends to be more 'baggy jeans and a shirt.' I haven't seen a rapper wear a brightly colored track suit in YEARS onstage or in a video, and I think it's really been out of fashion for longer than I've been old enough to pay attention, frankly.

Rap and rappers deserve to be mocked.

Everybody is out there to get us, even youtube parodies.

my guess is that the rappers are the youth pastors who likely came up with the idea of the parody, or at least helped produce it. it looks like "sadie black" goes to one of those huge (commercialized) churches that televise their services - sorry i don't know the more respectful name for them, mega-churches? anyway, those types of churches often have "hip" youth groups that remake pop songs all of the time, not just for the sake of viral video fame. i don't see the harm in this video, despite my desire to find it as or more obnoxious than the original, i laughed out loud at the random observations the rappers made.

Content of the rap aside, the clothes do make kind of an interesting point– similar to the eponymous combat boots/studded belts/leather jackets &c. of punks (a similiarly lauded and maligned movement), hip-hop, despite being counter-cultural in origins and individuality promoting in its ideals, still relies and enforces a degree conformity on the part of its adherents. This isn't as noticeable when mainstream fashion and hip-hop are in alignment, but displaying the older trends (which themselves stood in stark opposition to the pinstripes and power-suits of the era) does draw attention to the fact that it is a cultural uniform, not just a set of clothes. Granted, this is most likely completely accidental on the part of the makers of the video, but the effect remains the same– the viewer is struck by some nagging feeling, conscious of how these (if you'll pardon the sexism of the idiom) "clothes make the man." For those who feel that the wardrobe is reflection and parody of the black community, its an affront. For those who feel those clothes reflect and parody hip-hop (which last time I checked, was a multiracial movement from the beginning) it might not be. Or the clothes could be interpreted as reflecting the commercialization of hip-hop, which is both heavily racialized and frequently problematic, making it... subversive? Or offensive. Or neither. Idk. I think the comment string adequately demonstrates that the symbols being used have to many fluid layers of meaning for the video to be purely a reinforcement of cultural/structural racism. But I feel like you almost always get this sort of butterfly effect with comedy, unless it's especially egregious.

I think most everyone can tell that something is a bit off, whether it's on purpose or not, whether it's racism or just a chance to get the congregation to laugh at the leaders (if they are that).

Ultimately though, the CCC version is not a parody at all. The video as a whole is more of a tribute version, faithful to the original with changes to make it their own.

The rap part, however, if shown by itself without the rest of the video around it, would be a parody of the original.

And that, I think, is where the problem is.

The debate would probably be about whether this 'divergence' (As someone up top wrote) was on purpose, and just accidentally a bit racist, or whether it was created in all honesty and was just racist. Or was it not racist at all? I think it'd be neat to find out the story behind it.

So, I would ask the question: Is this evidence of ingrained racism by white people towards ethnic cultural phenomenons? Is this that much different than a white sorority girl dressed up in a skanky Native American costume?

Wait, ridiculing rappers is racist? Am I reading that right? Not ridiculing them for selling drugs, getting drunk, shooting each other or any other negative stereotype about rappers, just ridiculing them for being rappers is racist?

What am I missing?

This article was written by a real thinking writer. I agree many of the with the solid points made by the writer. I’ll be back. GHD SPORTS APK