Anime Rap
| Synonyms: | |
| See also: | Nerdcore, Filk, Fan Song |
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Anime Rap is a subgenre/subcommunity of Nerdcore music that is characterized by a focus on anime characters and rap music. Anime rap musicians may also make music about non-anime topics such as video games, but the community is heavily focused on anime as a rule. The community also contains artists who are not rappers themselves, but who will regularly feature as vocalists on others' songs or feature other artists on their own songs.
Songs created in this community will typically be published on YouTube in the form of a video styled similarly to an Anime Music Video, but with heavy emphasis on the song lyrics. The lyrics will generally be embedded into the video's visuals alongside the character(s) featured in the song, as opposed to being standard subtitles.
History
This community began to develop in the late 2010s, and has grown significantly in the last few years. Rustage, who has been credited with a significant amount of the popularization of the subgenre, has 1.4M subscribers as of March 2024, and only had 20k subscribers in 2018. Other notable anime rap musicians often boast subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands.
Many early anime rap songs were raps about an anime or an anime character from a third-person POV, but in recent years it has become much more popular for songs to be sung/rapped from a particular character's first-person perspective.