No one batted an eye when I admitted to not knowing who Ninja was. However, nearly everyone was shocked I didn’t know about Drake. I mean… I know who Drake is. He’s the rapper who dances funny and has countless memes associated with him. It’s just that if you were to play me a song from him, I’d have no idea it was him. I am perfectly comfortable being the old man of the internet. Despite my confusion over the whole thing, I’m happy that this event brought joy to people. There’s a lot of (stupid) divisions in gaming, so it’s nice when something brings the community together. Will we see something like this happen again? Given the numbers this stream pulled in, you can bet your ass it will. When it does, I’ll be ready with this all-too-appropriate video. Before we talk about this latest piece of Fortnite news I just want to take this opportunity to share this very important and relevant tweet from Chance the Rapper earlier this year. Since Fortnite started making more money than you could possibly imagine basically much every day, Epic has been spending it pretty charitably as far as huge companies go. Most notably, they opened the Epic Games Store giving developers a much more generous cut compared to Steam. However, so far none of that Fortnite money has willingly gone to the originators of its beloved dances. So now those dancers are using the courts, the ultimate battle royale, to make some moolah from their moves. And if you remember Carlton you probably remember his in/famous swaggy nerdy Carlton dance, itself inspired by steps from Eddie Murphy and Bruce Springsteen. When you think of that dance though, you think of Carlton, even if the performer is some generic Fortnite character. However, Ribeiro did not give his permission for Epic Games (or NBA 2K for that matter) to use his dance, and so now he’s filing a lawsuit. And he’s not the only one. Ribeiro joins rapper 2 Milly and viral internet star (?) Backpack Kid in taking on the biggest game in the world for profiting off of their dances. Although Backpack Kid’s sense of ownership over the “flossing” dance is much more questionable. Also, while Epic did get permission for Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence for Turk’s Poison dance, actor Donald Faison says the moves were still “jacked.” And again, to take it back to Chance, the whole trend of big corporations exploiting popular Black art without supporting Black people is pretty gross. It’s not like Fortnite is broke.
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