By stacy lee kong

You’ve probably seen clips of Drake’s recent viral interview with Bobbi Althoff, but just so we’re all on the same page: the 55-minute chat takes place in a (potentially his?) bedroom. The duo are snuggled under the covers on their respective sides of the bed, mic stands extending awkwardly over the blankets. Drake periodically sips some kind of fruity drink, while Althoff, a TikTok momfluencer turned podcaster, really leans into the awkwardly deadpan persona that earned her 5 million followers on TikTok and 1 million followers on Instagram. Her questions are rapid-fire, super personal and rarely follow any sort of conversational logic. She’s also aggressively, performatively uninformed about the rapper, his music and hip hop in general. At various points during the interview, she professes not to know Lil Wayne or Tyga, the song “Rack City,” or what a thot is, much less how to spell it. Drake, meanwhile, oscillates between charming and charmingly exasperated. (I admit that I laughed out loud when Althoff said she didn’t know who Lil Wayne was and his response was to say, perfectly seriously, “Stop this right now.” Adonis’ dad has entered the chat.)

The whole conversation is genuinely very funny, which is just as much due to Althoff’s character as it is Drake’s willingness to play along. But, it’s perhaps a little odd that the rapper is there at all. He largely stopped giving interviews in 2014, after Rolling Stone published quotes where he criticized Kanye West’s Yeezus, which he says he never did. He was also upset that the mag “took [his] cover from [him] last minute.” (That was because Philip Seymour Hoffman died the same week, which explains why Rolling Stone—correctly, I’d say!—made the decision to put the actor on the cover instead.) So… why’d he carve out time to spend an hour with Althoff, fielding questions about how much money he makes, the celebrity he’d hook up with if he could hook up with anyone, with the caveat that he can’t choose someone he’s already hooked up with, and the last time he went through someone’s phone? Probably for much the same reason he’s been trying to find time to link up with the similarly awkward Amelia Dimoldenberg for an interview on her wildly popular Chicken Shop Date YouTube series: these appearances are tailor made to produce viral moments, making them excellent marketing vehicles. (This is also why he allowed his son Adonis to do his first interview on Barstool Sports’ Sundae Conversation with Caleb Pressley back in February—Drizzy may not have been actively promoting a new album, tour or book at the time, but he absolutely understood the value of a cute, funny interview with his kid for his own brand.)

But… is it weird that both of these women are building careers through their interactions with rappers? I mean, kinda. And that’s just one reason why I think we should be paying attention to the burgeoning trend of deadpan white ladies who become extremely successful by interviewing Black people. (Yes, I know it takes three things to make a trend and I only have two examples, but I have been thinking about this for ages, so let’s just call it early trendspotting, okay?)

First, some background

In case you’re not one of those 5 million followers/she’s never showed up on your FYP, Althoff is a young mom—she’s 25—who gained an audience on TikTok for her satirical videos about marriage and motherhood. Her earlier content revolved around her daughters, who she only identifies as Richard and Concrete, and her husband, who played along in her sardonic videos, which covered topics like the fact that she never smiles and why they never kiss. (There was also a running bit about how breastfeeding had made her breasts two different sizes.) Though she used to share more details about two-year-old Richard, including her real name, birth date and photos of her, she decided to stop after posting a skit about how the then-six-month-old was a genius who had already learned to speak. People immediately flooded her comment section to call Richard ugly and stupid and, as Althoff told Teen Vogue earlier this year, she immediately realized that while she’s “decided to make it [her] job to entertain people… it’s not [her] kids’ job and [she doesn’t] want to make it their job.” For a while, she continued producing skits, scrupulously editing them to make sure her daughters’ faces never appeared and no one said their real names, even in the background. Then, this year, she decided to largely stop making parenting content, opting instead to launch The Really Good Podcast.

According to Yahoo and her TikTok page, since launching the podcast in April, she’s also interviewed disgraced YouTuber Colleen Ballinger, Pretty Little Liars’ Jenna Marshall, comedian Deric Cahill, TikToker Morgan Presley, actor and comedian Rick Glassman, YouTuber Funny Marco, musician Forrest Kline of pop rock band Hellogoodbye and rappers Armani White and Lil Yachty. Interestingly, the only interviews that are up on the podcast’s YouTube page are with Black men and Glassman… and yes, we will absolutely come back to that. For now, though, I want to explain why we have to talk about both Althoff and Dimoldenberg if we’re going to talk about this style of interview show. That’s because Althoff’s interviewing technique is a direct extension of her comedy—and it’s very similar to Dimoldenberg’s.

If you’ve never heard of Chicken Shop Date, the story is honestly made for a women’s mag profile: a 17-year-old Dimoldenberg came up with the concept of taking grime artists on ‘dates’ at chicken shops—fast food outlets in London, U.K. that sell chicken in various forms (fried, nugget, peri-peri) to a customer base of mostly Black and brown, working class people—for a column in a magazine published by her North West London youth club. She began filming them and posting them on YouTube in 2014, while she was earning a degree in fashion journalism from Central Saint Martins in London. She kicked off the YouTube series with British rap icon Ghetts, followed by DJ Logan Sama, rapper Avelino and other grime staples, but as her profile grew, so did the stature of her interview subjects. Eventually, she was taking the likes of Sean Paul, Jack Harlow, Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluuya, Phoebe Bridgers, Kehlani, Shania Twain, Lewis Capaldi, the Jonas Brothers and Jennifer Lawrence to chicken shops and asking them questions like what’s the worst date they’ve ever been on (Lawrence), if they’ve reached peak cuteness yet (Harlow) and their favourite lyric they’ve ever written (rapper Central Cee).

Key to her appeal, much like Althoff, is her stilted, almost stiff persona. As an interviewer, Dimoldenberg is sarcastic, clever and snarky, makes ample use of awkward silences and will ask questions you usually wouldn’t get in more traditional celebrity interviews, including whether they’d ever date a fan and what their kinks are. And, nine years after she posted her first Chicken Shop Date, she’s remarkably successful. She’s interviewed celebrities on various red carpets, including the Golden Globes (you might recognize this one) and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, worked on several Vice documentaries and landed high-profile brand ambassador gigs for companies like Olay, Levis and Coach. She’s even responsible for a trending TikTok sound—“my money don’t jiggle-jiggle, it folds,” from her interview with Louis Theroux.

These interviews aren’t just funny because the interviewers are deadpan; it’s also because they’re conducted by white women

Not to kill a joke by explaining it, but: the type of comedic tension Althoff and Dimoldenberg’s interviews convey is extremely compelling. As writer Izzy Ampil argued in Buzzfeed earlier this year, “awkward celebrity interviews are compulsively watchable. Especially the flirty ones. Seeing these charming, normally unflappable people get caught off guard feels like a delicious insight. It’s a peek into the humanity underneath celebrities’ tightly controlled PR personas and years of training to perform for the public eye.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this style of humour, obviously. Fish-out-of-water comedies are a cinematic and television staple—hello, The Nanny, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Schitt’s Creek, Legally Blonde, Thor, etc.—and deliberately awkward interviews have captured viewers’ attention for decades. Iconic Canadian interviewer Nardwuar is probably the best example of a celebrity interviewer whose quirky personality and deeply researched questions combine for a sort of excellent inelegance, but Zach Galifianakis of Between Two Ferns, Eric Andre of The Eric Andre Show and Ziwe Fumudoh of Ziwe all display a similar comfort with chaos and willingness to ignore unspoken social rules in their interviews.

But what sets Althoff and Dimoldenberg apart is that their humour also depends on stereotypical ideas about themselves—and their interviewees. As Refinery29 writer Shaznay Martin explained last year, “Dimoldenberg cleverly uses the juxtaposition of an awkward white girl in a chicken shop as her whole gimmick, drawing in viewers because it’s something they haven’t seen before.” Similarly, Althoff’s performance of ignorance about even the most mainstream of hip hop figures, songs and concepts is meant to highlight her entry into a space where she doesn’t truly belong. There’s obviously plenty of potential for hilarity in this approach, but I also find it kind of… odd, maybe? Unlike Ziwe, for example, where host Fumudoh used blunt questions about race to slyly subvert traditional power dynamics, Althoff and Dimoldenberg are leaning into stereotypes in a way that doesn’t feel subversive at all.

This is true regardless of the actual race of their interview subjects. Because sure, neither woman exclusively interviews Black people, but they have both clearly made proximity to Blackness part of their strategy. For Dimoldenberg, that was by focusing on grime at the beginning, though as she’s raised her profile, she has ‘transcended’ that space and now exists in the pop culture mainstream—where, notably, her subjects have become mostly white. Meanwhile, Althoff’s TikTok might feature snippets of other interviews, but her YouTube page, the most official record of her podcast, only shows the episodes she recorded with Glassman, Funny Marco, Armani White, Drake and Lil Yachty—only men, almost all of them Black. 

Don’t worry about those industry plant rumours. Let’s talk about access and privilege instead

The bigger issue for me, though, is around access. With Althoff, this is about who she’s able to land, and why. While her fellow YouTubers and TikTokers are good but predictable gets, it’s pretty wild that her three-month-old podcast has managed to land rappers like Lil Yachty and especially Drake. This was surprising enough that the internet wondered if she was an industry plant. Usually applied to musicians, here, the term implies that she was trying to appear indie but actually had the financial and business backing of Big Media. I think this accusation is silly because… she’s not pretending to be indie? She recently signed with WME, a talent agency with massive reach and connections, and the email listed on her YouTube page for business inquiries goes to her team there. Her podcasting set-up is also nowhere near indie, which I can say with authority because my set-up is a hope and prayer that my living room won’t be too echo-y and a $130 mic that I bought from Best Buy. So: I don’t think she’s trying to hide the fact that she has help. But her success so far absolutely speaks to who gets opportunities, industry support and even just trusted before they’ve even proven themselves.

With Dimoldenberg, it’s a bit more complicated because she’s built her media empire over the course of nine years, which speaks to a certain amount of authentic engagement with the culture she’s covering. But at the same time, she’s a middle-class white woman with what seems like a fair amount of privilege who has achieved success by actually entering spaces that are typically frequented by people of colour, and profiting from it. In 2017, Vice published an ode to the London chicken shop, saying, “chicken shops are more than a part of London—they are London. Or at least, they're London for the people who never have and never will identify with the glossy new-build flats and overpriced themed cafes that the city seems to be drowning in at the moment. For many born-and-bred Londoners, particularly those of us who are black or brown, chicken shops are more than a place to eat cheap food. Scattered around the city, your local chicken shop symbolises everything from your ends (Morley's in South London, Sam's in North) to the people in your community… Chicken shops have long been a symbol of defiance on high streets that are becoming more unrecognisable to the people who live near them.”

It’s not clear to me whether Dimoldenberg had her own nostalgia for chicken shops—or even, frankly, if she liked grime—when she came up with the concept for her YouTube channel. In 2019, she told Notion magazine that the idea for Chicken Shop Date came about when she started going to that youth club as a teen. Everyone there “was super into rap and grime and I wasn’t, I just didn’t understand it,” she said at the time. “I knew about maybe Dizzee Rascal but that was it. So everyone there got me really into it and talking about music. That’s kind of how everything started. I thought a great way to introduce people to grime culture was through a date-format interview.”

As Refinery29’s Martin argues, while “Dimoldenberg is likeable and isn’t directly harming anyone [and] celebrities are actively choosing to appear on the show… some Black people are feeling that it’s unfair for a white woman to benefit from a show format which has core elements that are rooted in Black, working-class and minority culture. Many have been asking, if a Black person did this exact same show, would they have achieved the same level of success? The conversation is really about white privilege and access. People are wondering why it’s so easy for white people to enter and succeed in our cultural spaces. Particularly, when many Black creatives and Black talent in the UK media industry are struggling to secure gigs and be seen, whereas white people can gain status and visibility in minutes.”

These women are genuinely hilarious, have clearly worked hard and aren’t doing anything wrong, per se. At the same time, their success perfectly illustrates inequity in the entertainment business and raises questions about the state of celebrity journalism—especially when people who won’t sit for interviews with traditional journalists, who might ask probing, serious or even difficult questions, will talk to them.

And Did You Hear About…

The NPC streaming trend on TikTok, and the debate over whether it’s fetish content or not.

Vox’s excellent reminder that the guy who told the U.S. House of Representatives that the government is in possession of actual UFOs may just be repeating hearsay. Also: a bonus explanation of how and why UFO-related claims have been getting more mainstream attention recently.

This Slate explainer on Sound of Freedom, the Christian, conservative film about child-smuggling that is killing it at the box office (through somewhat shady means) and also, surprise, surprise, misrepresents its subject matter.

The TikTokers whose schtick is showing how two very different songs—for example, Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” and Sza’s “Nobody Gets Me”—are actually the same.

Vulture’s excellent roundup of anonymous stories from striking writers, actors and crew members, including how much they actually make.

This Twitter thread (yes, I’m still there) of weird things people did as kids. Related: Children are hilarious and bizarre.

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