‘Popstar’: Behind the Lonely Island’s Hilarious Music Mockumentary
He was drumming like Buddy Rich when he was a baby. In his teens, he’d formed a Beasties-meets-Backstreet boy band called the Style Boyz (you remember their hit dance, the “Donkey Roll,” right?). By the time he was in his twenties, he was a solo pop juggernaut who sold out stadiums. His name is Conner4Real, even if the bad-boy singer played by Andy Samberg in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, isn’t real at all. But with his fawning entourage, featherweight R&B-meets-EDM hits and such feats of public idiocy as passing out on a hoverboard, you might mistake him for a genuine Top 40 star – in particular, a certain Canadian chart-topper.
“Oh, we love Bieber!” Samberg says, as his Lonely Island partners, Popstar directors Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, nod in agreement. “For the record, Conner isn’t based solely on him, or anybody specifically.” They reserved their affectionate mockery, they say, for the modern “popumentary”: those high-gloss, fan-friendly tour documentaries like Katy Perry: Part of Me and One Direction: This Is Us. “We watched a lot of those,” Samberg says. “We just sort of grabbed different elements from everywhere, and then amped them up to an absurd level.”
“I mean, it wasn’t like there was an outbreak of R&B musicians putting their dicks in boxes,” he adds, referencing his famous SNL duet with Justin Timberlake. “It was a good excuse for a joke. But there’s nothing we find funnier than taking something goofy and making it seem as much like the real thing as possible.”
Still, there’s definitely a resemblance between the “Sorry” singer and Samberg’s narcissistic goof. You can also see a bit of Macklemore in Conner’s earnest gay-rights ode, “Equal Rights” (where he keeps reminding you that he’s straight by yelling “titties!” and “Lynyrd Skynyrd!” between verses), and a pinch of Kanye West in his elaborate public proposal to his girlfriend, which ends with Seal getting mauled by wolves. “There’s a scene in the Katy Perry movie where she does this cool, kitschy magic trick during her show,” Samberg says. “We thought it’d be funny to have Conner do that – because it’d probably go horribly wrong.” (Spoiler: It does.)
“I mean, it wasn’t like there was an outbreak of R&B musicians putting their dicks in boxes. But there’s nothing we find funnier than taking something goofy and making it seem as much like the real thing as possible.”
-Andy Samberg
The three of them also watched a number of hip-hop documentaries — they all cite the notorious Li’l Wayne portrait The Carter as a favorite — to look for inspiration, partially because of the influence it has in the modern pop landscape and partially because, according to Taccone, “we tend to skew towards rap music because you just get to tell more jokes per line. Five times more per line, I think.” He pauses. “I just made that statistic up.”
“Didn’t Lin-Manuel Miranda say something like that about Hamilton, though?” asks Schaffer. “I seem to remember reading somewhere that it has more lyrics than any other Broadway play in history by, like, tenfold. You get to jam pack stuff in with rap.”
So really, you’re saying Popstar is the Hamilton of musical mockumentaries?
“I mean, you said that,” Taccone says, fake-humbly shrugging, “we didn’t. But if you want to say that …”
“… And this will definitely be equally as successful!” declares Samberg, making a goofy face.
“Your quote is already on our poster,” Schaffer claims.