Lil Dicky

Origins and early life

Lil Dicky is the stage name of David Andrew Burd, born on 15 March 1988 in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, and raised in a Jewish family in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Richmond in 2010 and went into advertising at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, where he was moved to the creative department after handing in a progress report written as a rap.

Work and career

He paid for his first music video, Ex-Boyfriend, with the six thousand dollars he had been given at his bar mitzvah; it took a million views in its first day on YouTube in 2013. A crowdfunding campaign that asked for seventy thousand dollars raised a hundred and thirteen thousand, and the album it paid for, Professional Rapper, reached number seven on the Billboard 200 in 2015. Freaky Friday, with Chris Brown, reached number eight on the Hot 100 in 2018, and Earth gathered scores of performers behind an environmental appeal in 2019.

From 2020 to 2023 he created and starred in Dave, a semi-autobiographical FXX comedy that ran three seasons and made his Jewishness one of its running subjects. He had put a Star of David on the cover of his first mixtape. Of his Judaism he told the Canadian Jewish News: I am not observant in the slightest, but I definitely identify culturally with it.