By DAVE ITZKOFF
The New York Times
For most aspiring rappers, the fastest route to having material
circulated around the World Wide Web is to produce a work that is
radical, cutting-edge and, in a word, cool. But now a pair of
"Saturday Night Live" performers turned unexpected hip-hop icons are
discovering that Internet stardom may be more easily achieved by being
as nerdy as possible.
In "Lazy Sunday," a music video that had its debut on the Dec. 17
broadcast of "SNL," two cast members, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg,
adopt the brash personas of head-bopping, hand-waving rappers. But as
they make their way around Manhattan's West Village, they rhyme with
conviction about subjects that are anything but hard-core: they boast
about eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, searching for travel
directions on MapQuest and achieving their ultimate goal of attending
a matinee of the fantasy movie "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe."
It is their obliviousness to their total lack of menace - or maybe
the ostentatious way they pay for convenience-store candy with $10
bills -- that makes the video so funny, but it is the Internet that
has made it a hit. Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, "Lazy
Sunday" has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the
video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons
of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has
even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/arts/television/27samb.html?ex=1293339600&en=1c057b9f6aaea137&ei=5090
Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)