About

The Upside Downs is an animated rap group created by comedian Ray William Johnson of =3 fame. This is the second animated rap group created by Johnson, following 2011's Your Favorite Martian.

Origin

On October 8th, 2020, Ray William Johnson posted a piece of test animation featuring himself rapping as a stark-white character in a flame-patterned hoodie to Instagram^[1] (shown below). The description reads, "Just testing out some animation. I just created this character so he can rap in my videos. He’s a lot cuter than I am 😂 What should I name him?" The video gained over 5,200 likes in 3 months.

On October 29th, Ray William Johnson officially announced "The Upside Downs," a new animated rap group made to showcase Johnson's rapping. On that day, Johnson released the group's first song and music video, "BANG," to TikTok^[2] and Instagram,^[3] garnering over 380,000 views on the former (shown below).

The description on the Instagram post reads:

Say hello to my new animated band: The Upside Downs. 🔥 This is the first time I’ve sat down and animated an entire video all by myself. Took me about 2 weeks for this 1 minute of video. I wrote the song, @kellyfarrellcoaching sang the hook, and I co-produced the beat with my very talented buddy @davynathan. 🎵 Since I can’t/won’t bring YFM back, this is as close as it’s ever gonna get. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Plz show this some love and I’ll make some more 🙇🏻😊

Spread

On November 8th, Johnson uploaded the second video and song, "Wolverine," to TikTok,^[4] garnering over 263,000 views in 2 months (shown below, left). On December 24th he uploaded the third video to TikTok^[5] for the song "I'm Speaking," garnering over 118,000 views in under a month (shown below, right).

As of January 18th, 2021, The Upside Downs have four songs and music videos. Extended versions of each are available on his YouTube^[6] channel.

Various Examples

Search Interest

N/A

External References