The Cardboard Robot Defense

The South Park episode where Cartman disguises himself as a robot from Japan—AWESOME-O 4000, tinfoil and cardboard, voice pitched to mechanical flatness—works entirely because Butters believes it. Cartman deserves everything that happens to him in that episode and then some. Butters deserves better than he gets. The robot is stupid and obvious and completely convincing, which is the whole point.

Money Boy, an Austrian rapper named Sebastian Meisinger who had spent several years building a mythology around "swag"—a concept he adopted from American hip-hop and then occupied with such absolute commitment that it became his own—cast the AWESOME-O robot in his video for Awesomo. The track’s message, distilled: he is awesome. That’s it. No depth-feint, no vulnerability performance, no hooks toward anything more complicated. Just the assertion, made with increasing certainty across the length of the song, that he is, in fact, awesome.

He had a reputation for erratic social media behavior and idiosyncratic takes on genre conventions, the kind of thing that had made him polarizing among people who paid attention to that corner of European hip-hop. Awesomo quieted some of that for a while. The cardboard robot helps. It’s difficult to stay genuinely annoyed at someone standing next to a cardboard robot—there’s something disarming about that level of obvious absurdity, the willingness to make the joke entirely at your own expense while also insisting you’re the coolest person in it.