Mickey Unrapped Is Somehow Worse Than a Mickey Mouse-Themed Rap Album from 1994 Has Any Right to Be
My nine year old son Declan is a big fan of various Youtubers, most notably Disney Dan, a pathologically obsessed fan of the House of Mouse with a booming, infectious laugh.
Dan explores curious and often embarrassing corners of the Disney world. That’s how I learned about the existence of 1994’s Mickey Unrapped, an officially licensed release from Disney that finds Mickey and the gang performing what can very generously be called both “rap” and “music.”
Mickey Unrapped is a failed attempt at Hip Hop. I’m not sure it deserves to be called music either. This isn’t a Hip Hop album; it’s an unforgivable insult to Hip Hop.
Drinking a Double Gulp and then urinating lustily on the graves of icons like MF DOOM, J-Dilla, Guru, 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G would be more respectful than this lukewarm garbage.
Nothing about Mickey Unrapped makes sense, beginning with its title. It is ostensibly a Mickey Mouse rap album so shouldn’t the title be Mickey Rapped or Mickey Rapping?
Mickey Unrapped suggests that Mickey will not be rapping, which both is and is not the case.
Mickey Unrapped is less a Mickey Mouse rap album than a concept album about Mickey Mouse where Mickey is just one of many annoying voices. The album is a Tower of Babel of audio irritations.
Mickey is front and center on the album cover, peeking out behind shades with his outsized pants slung low beneath his waist.
It’s a look that originated in our country’s many prisons, which were filled at the time with people who used and sold the deadly, almost inconceivably dangerous drug marijuana. Marijuana is being legalized all over the country because it turns out that it’s actually not dangerous or deadly but that doesn’t change the fact that if you smoke marijuana even once you’ll be shooting up a whole 8 ball by the end of the day.
In prisons prisoners let their pants sag because they were frequently given clothing that was too large and belts are forbidden for safety reasons. That does not explain why a whitebread icon of All-American banality is rocking the look beyond Mickey being a total fucking poser, however.
Also, I’m pretty sure that the Disney mascot is throwing down gang signs on the album cover and we all know that despite what this wannabe might want the world to think, Mickey Mouse is neither a Crip nor a Blood.
From prison yards to Mickey Mouse merchandise; it’s crazy the way white America coopts black culture to its own ends.
I know people have a lot of affection for Mickey Mouse but he comes off terribly here. I would respect his foray into Hip Hop if he acknowledged that, as a bland, family-friendly fictional cartoon mouse he was an outsider and treated the art form with the reverence that it deserves.
Instead the monsters who made this nightmare treat rap with a level of disrespect that is downright appalling. These ghouls treat Hip Hop like it’s a mood ring to be played with for a few hours then put into a box and forgotten forever.
Things kick off with “Ice Ice Mickey.” Its title suggests that the song will be a parody of “Ice Ice Baby” but it actually has nothing to do with the Vanilla Ice hit. It’s as if they wrote a dire “Ice Ice Baby” spoof and couldn’t get the rights to use the beat but they decided to go ahead with the song title anyway.
From the beginning Mickey’s lyrics are defined by terrible wordplay and dad jokes aplenty. For example, first he tells listeners to get down on “Ice Ice Baby.” Then he tells them to get up.
It’s pretty much all that bad. It literally never gets better. If you enjoyed that joke then you’ll go apeshit when he brags about “busting” a rhyme and then worries about getting the busted rhyme fixed.
“I’m chasing the jam because the jelly ran away” Mickey quips in a joke that wouldn’t be funny even if “chasing the jam” was something anyone in the history of Hip Hop had ever said.
Silly Mickey! Those are just turns of phrase. They’re not meant to be taken literally.
“The Disney posse is coming at ya!” Mickey brags of his crew. “Cut em off at the pass, hommies, I mean homies!”
It feels weird and wrong to hear Mickey Mouse using Hip Hop slang. He is supposed to embody our nation and everything that’s good and bad about it, not drop ebonics about his homies and busting rhymes.
Mickey is just one component of a busy sonic mix that includes back up singers crooning the chorus, some random human rap dude and Minnie Mouse dropping some lyrics of her own.
Minnie might actually be more of a presence on Mickey Unrapped than Mickey himself. We can all agree that that represents a milestone for feminism. Betty Friedan dreamed of a day when Minnie would get to rap even more than Mickey on an ill-fated Hip Hop album. Thankfully she lived to see her dream become a beautiful reality. Rumor has it the late feminist actually ghost-wrote some of Minnie’s lyrics.
Minnie takes center stage in a cover of Salt N’ Pepa’s ribald hit “WhattaMan”, which was the “WAP” of 1993.
“Whattaman” is a sex song about a woman dickmatized by an ecstatic sexual relationship with a dude whose monster hog sends her to the very heights of sexual pleasure. It’s about the life-affirming joy of fucking and getting fucked.
It’s consequently a strange choice for a rap album for small, slow, stupid children with abysmal taste in music. Minnie gushes about Mickey when I happen to know for a fact that Mickey is hung like a mouse. There’s nothing wrong with that but we all know he’s not packing downstairs so the whole thing feels inauthentic.
Inauthentic is a good word to describe Mickey Unrapped. Remember when KRS-ONE threw Prince Be of PM Dawn offstage because he felt he disrespected him? What Mickey Mouse does here is much worse. I would love to see KRS-ONE to do something similar to Mickey Mouse for disrespecting an entire art form. Maybe he could do it at the Gathering of the Juggalos. He’s performed there multiple times.
The once briefly popular duo Tag Team continues to milk the shit out of their one hit with “Whoomp There It Was”, a variation on “Whoomp (There It Is)” that takes the form of a story song about various Disney characters falling down in an ostensibly humorous fashion.
Watch the video closely and you can pinpoint the exact moment when the light in the eyes of the rappers goes out and you can see them regretting every compromise that led to that moment.
When Mickey Unrapped was recorded Hip Hop was red hot. It crossed over into the mainstream and introduced an exciting new gallery of stars. In a world full of rappers I cannot begin to fathom why Mickey Unrapped tapped Whoopi Goldberg of all people to perform a rap song about how dogs are good.
It isn’t until the third minute of this bewildering ditty that Goldberg specifies that she’s talking explicitly about Pluto and not just some random dog. Why is Whoopi Goldberg rapping about canines? I have no idea. I’m not sure Goldberg does either.
Having mocked and ridiculed rappers the album then turns its malevolent attention to DJs. “DJ Goof” posits Goofy as a graduate of Rap State University and I have to imagine he’s one of its less impressive graduates.
The less said about “Ducks in the Hood”, a showcase for Huey, Dewey and Louie the better, while “U Can’t Botch This” is a dire parody of MC Hammer’s big hit about more shenanigans and tomfoolery involving Disney’s core characters.
As a final insult this Mickey Mouse rap album that barely features Mickey Mouse and can barely be considered rap ends with another blast of low-wattage star power courtesy of Color Me Badd.
Color Me Badd were famous for their hit song “I Wanna Sex You Up”, a popular favorite among the ten and under set.
This inappropriate band finishes up this inexplicable Mickey Mouse rap album with “Color of Love”, an a cappella ballad that intriguingly has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH EITHER RAP OR MICKEY MOUSE.
The crazy thing about Mickey Unrapped is that it is somehow far worse than an opportunistic Mickey Mouse-themed rap album from 1994 has any right to be.
I thought it would be bad. I had no idea it could be this bad and this misguided.
Mickey Unrapped turned me against Disney as a studio and a cultural force. The monsters behind this must be stopped, through violence and illegal means if necessary.
Mickey Unrapped is some Mickey Mouse-ass bullshit in more ways than one.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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