About

Brent “brentalfloss” Black is a musician, comedian and gamer known for his “With Lyrics” series on YouTube. He currently has more than 280,000 subscribers on YouTube and has released two full-length albums that have reached the top ten in the Bandcamp and iTunes comedy charts. He also performs at music venues and gaming conventions in the USA, Canada and UK.^[1]

Personal Life

Brent Black was born in Dallas, Texas on April 12, 1984. Brent wrote his first song, named “The Dreamer” by his sister, when he was 12. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma, and his master’s degree in musical theatre writing at New York University. During his time at NYU he co-wrote a musical with composer Rob Broadhurst called “I’ll Be Damned” which had a limited run at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City in 2010.^[2]

YouTube

Black created his YouTube account on October 23, 2006. His earliest video, “The Ultimate Mario Medley (2007) ”, was uploaded on May 3, 2007. His channel is mostly known for his “Video Games ‘With Lyrics’” videos; a series of music videos where Brent sings about a video game to the tune of the game’s own theme. He currently has 58 of these videos with more than 2.2 million views in total. His very first “With Lyrics” video, “Mega Man 3 Title WITH LYRICS”, was uploaded to YouTube on July 28, 2008 and has more than 1.3 million views.

Black also plays a role in the series My Life as a Video Game as the character Menu, a supercomputer A.I.

Music Career

Brent Black has released three studio albums under his stage name, brentalfloss: What if This CD… Had Lyrics? (2010), Bits of Me (2012), and Flossophy (2014). Each of these albums contains several of his “With Lyrics” tracks along with other cover pieces and original songs. He also released a G-rated version of What if This CD… Had Lyrics? titled What if This CD… Had G-RATED Lyrics?. Black also released two albums under his own name titled Shades of Gray (2005) and Benchwarmer, Vol. 1 (2013), and an EP titled The Super-Secret EP (2011) under the name “DJ Super Secret”.^[3] Links to purchase Black’s merchandise can be found on his website.

brentalfloss: The Comic

In 2011, Brent Black, along with Dan Roth and Andrew Dobson, created a video game-themed webcomic series starring Brent, his friends and many familiar video game, television and real life characters. The first page was created on July 12, 2011 and the final comic was posted somewhere around the end of August 2013; totaling to about 200 pages. Some of the comics can be found on the brentalfloss website, but the website that the comic got moved to, brentalflossthecomic.com, is no longer working. Pages can be found in the brentalflossthecomic Subreddit, and Tom Preston’s DeviantArt gallery.

External References