Shari Vaidya - Q2 Blog 7 - Is the “American Dream” Truly Even American?
Around a week ago, British underground rap artist EsDeeKid announced his dates for the North American and Australian leg of his Rebel Tour.
This tour accompanies his album, which was released earlier this year under the same name, and since its release, his music has blown up. At the beginning of 2025, the Scouse rapper had fewer than one million listeners on Spotify; in just a couple of months, he has amassed more than five million listeners on the same platform.
This sounds like an “American success story” straight from a box office hit, right? An underdog grinds out music for around a year, and all of a sudden, he is put on the map? It sounds too good to be true.
Which makes me ask: was the “American dream” ever even American? Or has it always been the dream of success under capitalism?
It is not just the success story of EsDeeKid that has me asking this question; his lyrics tend to reference the fast life and the shiny cars that our own home talent reference in their own art.
“Music into money, imma never stop working”
“No days off, I was plotting with nothing had money all over me calendar”
“Remember back home, I was starving”
All of these lyrics mixed with the harsh Merseyside accent of EsDeeKid elude a very… Rocky Balboa-esque swagger in his music. It presents a message of “I am so hungry for success that I am going to keep on going till that hunger is satiated.”
All of these aspects piece together to create a story that, if EsDeeKid were American, the American Dream would have definitely been accredited to some extent in regard to his success.
But EsDeeKid is from Liverpool, not America, so how American really is the “American Dream?”
*A fun deep-dive has also been the internet’s newest conspiracy theory that Timothee Chalamet is in fact EsDeeKid (the rapper does not show his face), as Chalamet’s new film ‘Marty Supreme’ is supposed to show a fictionalized American success story!
Hey Shari! I love how you tied a rapper’s music into the American (or not-so-American) Dream. I think your point that the American Dream may not really be American is completely valid, since even though it originates from the idea of the “pursuit of happiness” that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence, this idea in turn was adapted from the works of many Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, changing the line from “life, liberty and property” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The father of capitalism (and said to be that of economics), Adam Smith, argued for free-market trade in which the most hard-working people could get the most benefits, which is exactly the ideal American Dream. In your writing, your allusions to EsDeeKid’s music and connections from the music to the American Dream really effectively helps draw our teenage and Gen-Z audience in, and your many rhetorical questions help us reflect on our own opinions of the American Dream in a way that is necessary for deep topics like yours. Overall, thank you for a fantastic piece!
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