Baby Rapper is a children’s video which allegedly came out in 1998. It was made by people you’ve never heard of before and Googling their names will only bring up this tape. Seriously, there is virtually no paper trail for this thing online. Remember Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever? Well that’s nothing compared to the pop culture enigma that is fucking Baby Rapper.
Who is the titular Baby Rapper? Well, he’s a baby. And supposedly a rapper. Maybe. You see, contrary to what his job description would promise, Baby Rapper never does any, well, rapping. He is also CGI and from an ultra low budget video in the 90s, meaning he is terrifying. I’m also 99.9% certain he was brought to life with motion capture technology, as was customary at the time. Baby Rapper at least sells himself as hip, with a purple diaper to match his backwards baseball cap. And his theme song states “he can rap about anything,” but that theme song is probably lying, because again, BABY RAPPER NEVER RAPS IN A VIDEO CALLED BABY RAPPER!
So…what does Baby Rapper do? I promise this isn’t going where you think it is. After an off-screen announcer proclaims his arrival (“Ladies and gentlemen, Baby Rapper!”), Baby Rapper dances to his aforementioned theme song which sounds absolutely nothing like a rap number. It’s quite possible the only thing the people who made this knew about the genre was “backwards baseball caps.” After he jams around like a cursed Creepypasta character, the announcer tells us what we’re really about to see: “And now, Baby Rapper is going to do his impersonation of…THE BEATLES!”
Wait, what?
Yes, it turns out that Baby Rapper is quite the child prodigy, able to perfectly replicate the vocal cords of renowned rap master Paul McCartney. What follows is Baby Rapper superimposed over footage of Fleischer Studios cartoons, as was customary at the time, essentially lip-syncing to ten seemingly random Beatles songs (or, as the opening text calls them, “BEATLESONGS”). The obvious ones are included like “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be”, but why the fuck is “Paperback Writer” here? What toddler (assuming the target audience for this video was toddlers, but even that is debatable) knows what a paperback writer even is? Why aren’t the Beatles songs kids can actually sing like “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Yellow Submarine” on the playlist instead? But the bigger question is…HOW THE FUCK DID A NO BUDGET VHS TAPE FROM 1998 LEGALLY GET THE RIGHTS TO THE BEATLES?!?
Disclaimer: everything that follows is just guesswork, so if Baby Rapper is reading this, he’d better not send his lawyers up my ass. But there’s something very suspicious about this video’s end credits: they don’t credit The Beatles at all. They don’t list the songs, none of their names are mentioned, and the only copyright disclaimer is for the creation of Baby Rapper himself (so you’d better not try to steal him!). This leads me to believe, among other things, that this video was probably illegal. The internet was in its infancy, so who the hell was going to tattle to Ringo Starr about this? On another note, the Fleischer Studios cartoons also aren’t credited. It was fairly common during the 90s for cheap home video companies to exploit them as most of them were supposedly in the public domain, but again, it’s dubious they aren’t mentioned at all during the end credits.
So if you want to watch Baby Rapper for yourself, unfortunately, you’re not going to find a quality upload of it on YouTube. This is almost certainly due to Beatles music setting off the site’s copyright strike alarm bells by default. There is one upload, but it’s in piss poor quality. It has been posted on a streaming database committed to preserving such obscurities (more power to them!), which is the only reason this video has so many Letterboxd reviews. But that site requires a paid subscription. All that leaves us with is the trusty Internet Archive. So check it out before the legal teams for The Beatles or Baby Rapper learn of its existence.
Have a great night, y’all!