About

Thug Notes is a YouTube educational entertainment series hosted by Sparky Sweets, PhD^[5] who explains and analyzes classical literature in African American Vernacular English.

Online History

In early May 2013, the URL thug-notes.com^[1] and Facebook fan page for Thug Notes^[2] were created. The YouTube channel^[3] launched on June 3rd, 2013 with an episode explaining Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment.^[4] His reinterpretation of the novel recieved more than 75,000 views in a month and a half.

Reception

The day after the series launched, TubeGeeks^[6] lauded the series for its analysis, which he describes as "peepin' motifs," and compared the series to Quirk Classic, a publishing company that retells classic novels with zombies^[7], androids^[8] and sea monsters.^[9] Over the next two weeks, Thug Notes videos were featured on WebProNews^[10], Guyism^[11] and MTV Guy Code,^[12] On June 24th, his review of Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird (shown below) was submitted to the /r/Videos subreddit^[13] where it generated nearly 11,000 upvotes, more than 3,000 points overall and nearly 350 comments.

The same day, the video was submitted to Buzzfeed^[14] by a community contributor. On June 25th, the Daily Dot^[15] published an article on the show that was shared nearly 330 times. Since June, Thug Notes has been featured on College Humor^[16], Complex^[17], BroBible^[18], the Huffington Post^[19], Tastefully Offensive^[20] and the Inquistr.^[21] As of July 2013, Thug Notes has more than 65,000 subscribers, 801,000 views and receives an average of 17,000 views per day.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References