Shaboozey's been making music for a while now (I stand by the fact that 2018's "Winning Streak" is the best thing he's done), but the past year or so has seen the Virginia rapper and singer blow up big time.
He was featured on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, and his song "Tipsy (A Bar Song)" has been the No. 1 single in America for the past six weeks. His rise has felt pretty organic, though it turns out he's been aided by a healthy dose of fibbing and misinformation.
Yesterday, Billboard published an interview with Ethan Curtis, founder of digital marketing agency PushPlay and head honcho at WtrCoolr, a PushPlay spinoff that creates "fan fiction" for artists. The grift involves pop stars' teams (in this case, the crews behind artists like Shaboozey and Young Nudy) hiring WtrCoolr to edit TikTok videos full of generally harmless (but still untrue) lies about their client's lives.
This includes the fib that Shaquille O'Neal is a major Young Nudy fan, or, more egregiously, that Dolly Parton is Shaboozey's godmother. It's a bizarre thing to claim, particularly when Parton's team could easily disprove the story. The Parton fabrication was posted by ShaboozeysVault, a WtrCoolr-created fan account that, prior to its deletion, had dedicated TikTok and Instagram pages.
In the Billboard interview, Curtis described WtrCoolr as "huge fans of pop culture, fan fiction and satire. We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars." In other words, lying.
When asked about the disinformation of it all, Curtis said:
I don't know if anything is really bad. We don't claim for it to be true, and we're just having fun, weaving stories and basically saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if?" or, "Wouldn't it be heartwarming if?" I don't think we're really ever touching on stuff that's of any importance, that could lead to any negative energy or backlash. We're just trying to make fun stuff that fans enjoy. Just fun little moments. It's no different from taking a video out of context and slapping meme headings on it…
I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new post-beef collab between Drake and Kendrick would be received, for example. They could say, "Can you create a post about this and we can see if people turn on Kendrick for backtracking, or if fans will lose their shit over them coming together?" We could see if it's a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their careers… I mean, if it's been so successful on socials, why wouldn't it be so successful in real life?
The whole thing is super lame and slimy, and it reveals just how much content on TikTok and Instagram is completely fabricated and made with the intention to dupe you. Bleak stuff!