Really Scared by Lil Dicky: Selling Out For Your Dream
Early Lil Dicky explores the fears of making it.
“Really Scared” by Lil Dicky was published about seven months after the Cheltenham wizard of goof-rap had his first live show in February 2014, at the TLA in Philadelphia, my home city. It ended up on the 2014 mixtape, Hump Days. I wanted to start these posts off right and set the tone for campy, hyperdramatic stories set to music with atmosphere, but I have so much respect for those who commit to a dream, and wanted to first imprint the importance of that.
So, “Really Scared” by Lil Dicky has the revered honor of the first song post. The criteria is this: Lil Dicky’s “Really Scared” made me feel like in the midst of a vague, traumatic emptiness, that I still had a dormant fire that needed to go all out for something. Someone else was articulating their fears, pressures, their resolve for a dream, and I empathized. And he put it into words so damn well.
At one time, “Really Scared” by Lil Dicky affected a visceral hope in me, like a handful of others. Do I wanna be Lil Dicky? Nope. He’s got a funky penis. But the life path of selling out for your dream? Yes. I wrote the first couple paragraphs here last night, then went to sleep thinking I was rambling about nothing with no point and tone-deaf to the greater turmoil going on in the country.
Today I went to a local trail to read along the creek for an hour – that’s my little morning meditation. The sky turned the color slate becomes after it rains – it was that dark. I abandoned my rock and started the walk back. It downpoured so sudden and hard that branches fell around me like a line of people throwing rice at a wedding.
I took refuge under a pavilion with about 11 other bikers/runners/serial killer trail wanderers. I stood there with a camo blanket over my head, four months without a haircut, like a shaggy survivalist who came out to take a storm bath. Standing there in a warm deluge, I thought: in my movie screen head, “Really Scared” by Lil Dicky is the soundtrack to this moment.
Expression is therapy, and that means all mediums, even if your passion is to paste craft googly eyes onto Doritos and make little weird communities of Dorito people. Right now, so many are using their voice to enact change. My voice is to balance the ugliness, to make you laugh when so consistently it feels like darkness has never-ending stamina. It doesn’t.
Welcome to this space, this feral wolf child of a community where there might end up being 17 readers, but they will read content by a voice that writes with hope rather than disillusionment.
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