What would you do if you found out that you had an extremely contagious disease that required you to remain in quarantine for the several months? If you’re like most people, you would probably cry and cry and cry… and then curl up in the corner and commence eating your hair.
But if you were Christiaan Van Vuuren (a.k.a. The Fully Sick Rapper), you would make a series of kick-ass viral rap videos that would launch you into the firmament of Internet stardom.
If you’re an avid fan of the viral video space, you’ve probably seen Van Vuuren’s vids by now — among them a trio of parody rap songs that deal with being stuck in quarantine after catching a bad case of Tuberculosis.
The concept might sound rather after-school-special-esque — or, frankly, lame — to the uninitiated, but Van Vuuren’s amateur videos are a hell of a lot more entertaining than a lot of the schlock that professional comedians churn out. Why? Because they’re coming from a very real place.
After seeing Van Vuuren’s raps popping up all over the Internet, Mashable sat down for an interview (via Skype) with the 27-year-old Aussie, direct from his hospital room in Sydney. (We’ve embedded the video portion below for those who aren’t fans of big blocks of text.)
Getting Down with the Sickness
Up until December of this past year, Christiaan Van Vuuren had a proper nine-to-five job in media sales that required him to pull a suit jacket over his tattooed arms and have lunches with clients and the like.
During one of these lunches, however, Van Vuuren started coughing up blood. Soon after, he found himself in the hospital, where the doctor told him that he had a hole in his lung, which Van Vuuren describes as roughly the size of an Aussie 50 cent coin. The diagnosis? Tuberculosis — a disease he likely contracted four years ago during time spent in South Africa. The affliction lay dormant until a recent trip to South America.
Van Vuuren was admitted to the hospital at the start of December, and at the time he thought he would only be there for roughly two weeks. Still, the seclusion took its toll. “I was itching to get out, banging on the walls,” he says. “That was when I made that first rap song, ‘I’m Not Sick, But I’m Sick Sick.’”
He wrote the rap and recorded it using Garage Band. “At the start, it was just to make mates laugh,” he explains, but after friends convinced him to make a video for the song and upload it to YouTube, a local radio station covered the story, as well as Australian morning program Today. At that point, the video had around 10,000 hits. “I was a bit embarrassed that that many people had seen me without my shirt on and in the shower,” Van Vuuren says.
Going Viral
Van Vuuren was let out of the hospital around the first of the year, but after his condition worsened, he found himself back in quarantine, where he made his second video, “Life in Quarantine.” This time, the video spread to the States, where it was picked up by sites like College Humor. Currently, it has garnered more than a quarter of a million hits in less than a month.
The popularity of the video came as a shock to the former punk rocker (Van Vuuren has a musical background, but he admits that he hasn’t messed around with instruments in any real capacity for five years.) He’d never even used Garage Band or iMovie before. “It’s unreal, it’s giving me something to do. I feel like I’ve got a nine-to-five job now,” he says.
And that feeling of purpose had been a boon to the media man-turned-rapper. “I’ve taken my focus off of when I’m going to get out of here and when I’m going to be healthy,” he explains. “I try to apply [my energy] more to what I can do while I’m in here to have not wasted the time. I think the worst thing would be — and I think it’s made me feel the worst when I’ve been in here — is the whole world will keep on spinning out there and and I’m here in this room doing nothing.”
One look at Van Vuuren’s YouTube channel shows that he’s done a lot more than wallow: there’s his parody raps as well as a couple of other joke songs about his ukulele and hopeless crush on Today host Leila McKinnon, as well as his own take on MTV’s Cribs and a sketch about a hospital-bound Storm Trooper. Van Vuuren also plans to start making webisodes about his time in quarantine.
Getting Social
In addition to being a video-editing virgin, Van Vuuren also says he’s “as green as they come” when it comes to social media. “In the industry that I work in, in media, I’ve gone to these courses before where they’re talking about the power of social media,” he recalls. “And they’re like, ‘All right, let me demonstrate something: Who of you hasn’t got a Facebook?’ And I look around realize I’m the only person in the whole room of about 140 people who has their arm up.”
That all changed after coming down with TB. Now, Van Vuuren has a Facebook page with close to 6,000 fans, as well as a newly launched Twitter account with a burgeoning list of followers.
And, surprisingly, the trolls seem to be keeping their distance. “I don’t know whether everyone’s just like, ‘Oh, it’s so cute that he did that and he’s sick and he’s in a hospital, let’s watch that!’ And then as soon as I’m not sick anymore people are going to go, ‘Uhhh, you weren’t really that funny,’” Van Vuuren says with a laugh.
Either way, he thrives off of the support this community gives him, members of which send photoshopped images of the viral star in various exotic locals and photos of themselves replicating moments from his videos. Van Vuuren also gets more than his share of marriage proposals from fawning female fans.
“I’m sure that’s what God helped us make the Internet for or why the Internet is here,” Van Vuuren says (referring to his supporting fans, not the marriage proposals — per se). “It’s for things like that. Because when you’re so lonely and in such a place on your own, you can be around so many people or be supported by so many people.”
The Fully Sick Rapper
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