Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer
Directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone
Universal 2016
87 minutes

I  highly recommend Popstar:Never Stop Never Stopping to every one I know or more or less know and even strangers. That’s even if I don’t like Andy Samberg much. This mockumentary about the rise and fall of a white boy hip hop / rap star is funny from beginning to end. It is the This Is Spinal Tap of its time and genre.

A lot of the success of this comedy is due to The Lonely Island comedy group (Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer). The Lonely Island has a hip hop track record having had an album reach number 7 on Billboard in its category. Music being central to Popstar, the fact the writers and actors know what they are talking about and can write extremely believable hip hop or rap numbers make the comedy that much more credible and funny. The movie excoriates rap music and the music business with glee.

Samberg is excellent as Conner, a white hip hop musician who begins as part of a boy band named Style Boyz but soon becomes a solo act as Conner4Real. His first album, Thriller, Also was a smsh. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping pretty much picks up with the launch of Conner’s follow-up album and follows his downfall. Part of that downfall includes slowly being replaced on tour by a Black rapper named Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd)

I am not hip (or hop) enough to understand all of what this Popstar Never Stop Stopping shreds  but I did get it nails rappers and such for selling out and writing songs that are just a commercial for a product (Tupac’s song about Hennesy or Jay-Z plugging both Cristal and Moet) or a series of words that rhyme at the end of the line.

Popstar Never Stop Stopping also nails the hypocrisy of the music business and musicians in general with songs like “I’m So Humble” and the song “Equal Rights” where Conner4Real raps for equal rights for gays but ends each line with “I’m not gay”.

This is a comedy I will watch from time to time just because it is so funny, the music is so caustically dead on, and I am sure I missed a bunch of little things. It also features a who’s who of music and comedy and Ringo Starr saying doinkdedoink

Special features on the Blu-ray are numerous and include 45 minutes of deleted scenes (the frog jizz is a must see), an ordinary and short gag reel, six music videos, and bonus footage.