In ‘Rap Shit,’ the Internet Is Real Life, Just as It Is in Real Life

In Issa Rae’s new show Rap Shit, characters stare into their phones all day and all night. The internet is a place in this show—one where you vent, make music, and learn to be the kind of person you want to be.

Rap Shit is a story about, well, rap shit. It focuses on two characters, Shawna and Mia, estranged high school friends who form a rap group, despite their differing opinions on hip hop culture. Shawna had a song go viral in college and got signed, but the deal ended up falling through. Now, she makes conscious rap in her bedroom for a very small audience of Instagram followers. (She even wears a truly ridiculous, ugly mask so that people will “focus on the lyricism.”) Mia, on the other hand, has a huge Instagram following for both her make-up artistry and her advice on how to deal with trash men. (Her baby’s father, a music producer named Lamont, is the kind of guy she warns other women to stay away from.) They both see the value in linking up with each other; Shawna has real chops as a rapper, and Mia has a huge following and a natural charisma that Shawna lacks. 

Mia’s Instagram following is a huge motivator for Shawna to reconnect with her in the first two episodes of the series. We see so much of social media in these two episodes, not only from the perspective of the characters looking at their phones, but also from the perspective of the phones themselves. In the first episode, the initial moments of the show are actually a montage of Instagram posts in Miami, where the show is set, inviting the audience to indulge in our preconceived notions of the city as we watch people drink and party in their curated posts online. In the background of one such Instagram post, serving a screaming, white bachelorette party, is Shawna, her real personhood intersecting with the imagined version of Miami that only exists online for just a moment.

You see so many instantly recognizable user interfaces on the Rap Shit: Instagram, Facetime, OnlyFans, even Twitch shows up in the second episode. In an interview with Variety, Rae said she was partially inspired by the movie Searching, which is shot entirely from the perspective of a computer screen, to nail down the look of going from app to app in the same way that we do in our real lives. She also said that including social media in the show was based on her own experience of her fandom of the female rappers that inspired this story.

“As I started to write the pilot, because I was working on Insecure, I was used to writing in a straightforward, narrative way,” she said. “As I started to do my research about the artists that I love, I realized that I fell in love with them on, discovered them on social media.

“So many artists have a presence on social media, and that’s how we get to know them,” she continued. “And then this idea of authenticity, like, we all crave authenticity, and there’s something about social media that makes you think you’re getting this authentic person and that’s what makes you fall in love with them. But that’s also curated.”

We see this in action in Rap Shit. While Mia has crafted a persona on her Instagram as a woman whose motto is “seduce and scheme,” in her real life she also struggles to take care of her daughter with a co-parent that’s never around. When she’s frustrated with him, she records a video advising her followers not to sleep with men who don’t have bed frames. She doesn’t actually feel that way, though, about Lamont, who does try to pull through for his family, at least financially (and is openly proud when he hears that his daughter does well in school and wants to be an astronaut).

Shawna, despite her protestations of being all about her lyricism, is also a character who is preoccupied with how people view her on social media. The truly goofy-ass mask that she raps in is one of the best visual gags of the series. Its absurdity is beyond description—and because Shawna is so much less savvy about social media than Mia is, she has no idea how much wearing that mask actually distracts from her music. Eventually, Mia exasperatedly explains to her that the kind of people she says she doesn’t care about—hip hop fans who only listen to female rappers who rap about their pussy—also have a vice grip on her, forcing her into the position where she’s rapping in a mask and a black hoodie in the incredibly hot Miami climate.

What’s most interesting about how Rap Shit portrays social media is how these personae act in conflict—and in harmony—with how these people actually are in life. When Shawna’s long-distance boyfriend comes across Mia’s OnlyFans page, he chastises her for starting a rap group with a woman who does porn, having only ever seen this aspect of a woman that Shawna has begun to care for as a friend. Their conflict is born out of a difference in perspective that’s impossible to reconcile, because the fullness of a human being can’t possibly be contained in a clip of someone twerking online. Still, all these accounts are a part of Mia and also Shawna, the place where they build the image of the women they want to be, the kind of people they hope the world sees them as. It’s not like these are fake—they are authentic expressions of parts of a person. As Ryan Broderick wrote in his Garbage Day newsletter last week, this is a more modern expression of what the internet is and how we use it.

“Before the pandemic, we were all, obviously, looking at internet content pretty much all the time, but there was this bizarre unspoken agreement that we did not acknowledge that irl,” Broderick wrote. “The pandemic finally forced people to stop acting like the 90s were only 10 years ago and now we live in a world where the internet is, arguably, the prime layer of reality and the physical world is a byproduct of what we post online.”

In Rap Shit, the internet’s layer of reality is the place where real stardom can be born. It’s where Shawna can figure out how to be a rapper that people actually listen to, and where Mia can take control of circumstances that are often out of her control. It’s where they can become rappers—and ultimately, it is the place that sparks their creativity.