When Rappers Get Anime
Tobi Lou is a rapper from Chicago (born in Lagos, Nigeria) who made a song about Sailor Moon because he loved the show. That sentence wouldn’t have meant anything interesting ten years ago. Anime was the thing you hid, the thing that made you strange.
It’s weird to think about now, but the 90s were fine with anime. Dragon Ball, Pokémon, it was just there on Cartoon Network, kids watched it, no one thought much about it. Then something happened in the 2000s. Anime became code for something specific—lonely guys, tentacle porn, the weird intersection of desire and fantasy that made normal people uncomfortable. The stigma was real and total. Good shows were still being made, beautiful films still came out, but the culture had decided anime was diseased.
That assessment stuck way too long. You needed permission to care. For years you’d have to qualify it, make excuses, find the ones that were acceptable
—Akira was okay, Spirited Away was art, but admitting you watched the regular stuff, the stuff you actually loved, meant you were admitting something wrong about yourself.
Then the streaming services got involved. Kill la Kill landed and was just gorgeous and weird and impossible to dismiss. Your Name made real money. Netflix threw resources at it. Crunchyroll stopped being a joke. Somewhere in there the culture shifted. It became possible to care about anime without explaining yourself. The permission slipped into place quietly, and suddenly people like Tobi Lou could just make a song about Sailor Moon because he loved her, and no one had to read anything into it.