Hang out with enough professional-grade rappers and you’ll notice a number of shared traits that differentiate them from civilians—that they’re capable of superhuman feats of lateness, for instance, and can amass collections of hangers-on as impenetrably dense as the entourages of A-list Hollywood actors. You’ll also find that they tend to be ridiculously funny.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In case you needed a refresher, this month the trio’s self-titled 1984 debut LP got the deluxe reissue treatment from Tin Pan Apple, the label founded by their ambitious Swedish-born manager, Charlie Stettler. The rerelease should also remind present-day listeners that the Fat Boys deserved their fame. Because they weren’t above treading novelty-act territory (they’d probably gotten famous for exactly that reason), the years since the Fat Boys’ 1991 breakup have been unkind to the group. Their outsize comic personas—the alarmingly huge restaurant tabs, the way they’d mug goofily for seemingly any camera pointed at them, their roles in the 1987 movie Disorderlies—have stuck in the public’s memory far better then their prodigious musical talents.
Listen past the high jinks on Fat Boys, though (the reissued CD comes in a tiny pizza box), and you’ll hear the group for what they were: ambassadors for a radically avant-garde music scene who were willing to do whatever it took to bring a highly skeptical mainstream around to their art, up to and including playing up their chubbiness, rapping about pizza, and covering golden oldies. There’s a good reason the Fat Boys—then called the Disco 3—were the surprise walk-on winners of the 1983 talent competition that landed them their deal with Stettler. They rapped as hard or harder than any of their early-80s NYC contemporaries, and one reason their shtick landed as well as it did was that these undeniably hefty men so often astonished potential fans when it turned out that verbally—or, in the case of the late Darren “the Human Beat Box” Robinson, nonverbally—they were as quick and nimble as little deer.
The aforementioned line comes from the best Riff Raff track so far, “Cuz My Gear,” on which he collaborates with rapidly ascendant Chicago rapper Chief Keef. When Riff Raff isn’t making songs with comedians and other Internet rappers whose legitimacy is frequently questioned (Kitty Pryde, Kreayshawn sidekick Lil Debbie), he’s making them with straight-faced, serious acts, which is far funnier. The first minute of “Gear” sets the scene with ominously booming pianos, a twitchy trap beat, and a typically catchy chorus from Keef—and then Riff Raff bursts into the song like the Kool-Aid Man, except this time the Kool-Aid Man is on something and he’s crashing a gangbanger’s funeral. The effect is even more jarring on “You Never Know,” a featherweight piece of emo-tinged electro-pop by an otherwise unknown Los Angeles group called Bright Matter. Riff Raff appears in the video, but his personal brand of chaos magick is so effective that even while you watch footage of him and the band walking through LA and getting their hair blown around in slow motion, you can have a hard time believing that any of it actually happened.
