EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY HOW TO
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY FULL
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY SERIES

But when the numbers grew, I was intimidated by it. I would get letters and drawings from fans, and I felt I understood who that person was, with their own sense of opinions and feelings. PS: When I was making smaller videos and they were getting like 10,000 views, I had a sense of who my audience was. When you think about your work having billions of views, how does one even wrap their head around that figure? We did some great shows with a lot of great people, but there was something about that bond that we shared that kept us close. That ended up being the ticket that took off. That was the unique thing to the two of us. LA: The thing the two of us always had in common was rap music, for whatever reason. That taught us a lot to push something until it worked. We did improv shows in lunch rooms together at different schools. I toured and did concerts around the Midwest. We wanted to do improv open mic nights as much as possible, but in Chicago that was tough. PS: We were just always trying to perform.

Had you guys known all along that you wanted to perform and make content as a duo?

EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY HOW TO

It taught us how to chase what we wanted. You have all these places within Chicago to dream and strive for. Lloyd Ahlquist: It's such a great place to dream. I've heard you guys reference Chicago as being such a monumental staple of where you are today. We improvised there for a long time, and we did it because it was fun. There’s such a purity in Chicago when it comes to performing. We remember grinding away in Chicago trying different versions of music and comedy, both together and solo. But I bet your stop in Chicago has to be a special one for you guys. Thursday, you can catch them at Reggies (2105 S. The duo, which recently spoke with RedEye by phone from its current home base of Los Angeles, began a 51-city, 14-country tour in L.A. But it wasn't until 2010, when they linked up again after individually moving to California, that “Epic Rap Battles of History” was born. Shukoff and Ahlquist met in Chicago at a party in the early 2000s and later traveled around the Midwest in the same improv group (MISSION IMPROVable). They’ve even collaborated with Snoop Dogg, “Weird Al” Yankovic and comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Since 2010, the duo has seven certified gold singles and averages 20 million views per upload. Tens of thousands of comments follow below the video. At the end, they ask their viewers to vote on who won.

EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY FULL

The video now has more than 35 million views.Įach video is beautifully simple: Shukoff, 36, and Ahlquist, 38, are shown as celebrity personas (in full costume) conducting a rap battle against one another.

Their first video-John Lennon V Bill O’Reilly-was created with one old microphone, a laptop and a recording studio they built out of a spare bedroom. Like most notable YouTubers, they started minimal and DIY.

EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY SERIES

The duo-better known online by their handles “Nice Peter” and “EpicLLOYD”-created the widely popular “Epic Rap Battles of History” Web series on YouTube in 2010, to date amassing 3 billion total views and 12.5 million subscribers. Everything they create together is YouTube gold. There’s no exact science to it for whatever reason, certain pieces just take off, bouncing around the world until, oftentimes, the subject is forgotten entirely or turned into a punchline.īut when you’re Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist, the chaos never stops. “Viral video” is a phrase recklessly thrown around the Internet like food in a high school cafeteria (or maybe that was just my high school).

Epic rap battles of history