Rappers are known to exaggerate for street cred. Mostly to create an aura of either authenticity or mythos to get fans to buy in. It’s the nature of the game. But there’s exaggerating, and then there’s just lying.
A viral clip of one particularly outrageous lie is making the rounds again, three years later. It’s from Memphis rapper Big Boogie’s Feb. 17, 2023, appearance on the Bootleg Kev podcast, where Boogie claimed he’d been offered a scholarship to be drum major at a “big college in Jacksonville.” (Drum majors conduct the marching band and keep it in tempo. Not to be confused with the drum line.)
Per Boogie, he turned the offer down to focus on rap. The offer was worth $5 million, he says — though he started at $15 million before quickly talking himself down. After a visibly stunned Bootleg Kev presses him, the number softens again to “somewhere…in the millions.”
What makes the clip so funny is the sheer audacity of the lie. Boogie clearly has no idea how college scholarships work, and clearly doesn’t care. The whole exchange occurs within the first 3 minutes of a 40-minute podcast. Kev spends part of it confused about Boogie getting paid to “play the drums,” even though Boogie had just clarified he was a drum major, not a drummer. Oh, and the school wanted him for a decade, too. A decade of undergrad drum majoring.
None of this needs fact-checking. But I have the time.
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The largest school in Jacksonville is Florida State College at Jacksonville, which does not have a marching band. The dollar figure doesn’t hold up either: the highest-paid NIL (name, image, and likeness) athletes in college sports top out at around $5-6 million total for elite performance over a full season. Meanwhile, the powerhouse band program at The Ohio State University operated on an endowment of roughly $15 million as of 2019; no band would blow a third of its budget on a single drum major. And even setting the money aside, no freshman walks in and becomes drum major on day one. At Ohio State, you can’t even be an assistant drum major until your second year.
And yet here we are, three years later, watching Big Boogie’s greatest lie go viral all over again.
Clip farms and reaction accounts have been reposting Boogie’s lie for months now, with one account doing it once a day for an entire year. Other accounts have taken it even further, using the clip verbatim as a script for sketches of varying scenarios. One has a cameraman asking a realtor about the biggest deal he ever lost. Another has two Mormon missionaries on a doorstep, one explaining to the other why he skipped college. There’s even an account called Big Band in Jacksonville (one of several, actually), posting in-character as the school’s social media intern, insisting the offer was real.
Why a three-year-old clip is suddenly popping off again, who knows? But it’s relatable in the way that we’ve all had a friend in middle school lie about some really stupid stuff.
To his credit, Boogie did go back on Bootleg Kev in 2024 to clear things up. According to him, the offer to “play the drums” was real — just not for a million dollars. He also copped to making up the numbers because he wanted the clip to go viral.
So yeah. In the end, Big Boogie is still lying.
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