Steven Bannon Wrote a Rap Musical, and It's as Terrible as It Sounds

Watch actors conduct a live reading of Steve Bannon's rap musical 'The Thing I Am.'

May 2, 2017

Steve Bannon makes remarks during a discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference
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Before becoming a national nightmare, Steve Bannon was a Hollywood failure. The alt-right mouthpiece tried his hand at directing, producing, and writing a number of scripts that never became movies. One such project was a rap musical—yes, a rap musical—called The Thing I Am, based on William Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Coriolanus.

According to Now This, the screenplay was co-written by Julia Jones and used the 1992 Los Angeles riots as the backdrop—an interesting choice for someone who’s widely associated with white supremacy. Jones told the New York Times that Bannon had come up with the plot that imagined the Romans and Volscians as Bloods and Crips, “feuding on the South Central streets in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.”

If that synopsis wasn’t enough to make you cringe, then check out these professional actors read from the actual script unearthed by Now This.

Veterans like Gary Anthony Williams, Cedric Yarbrough, and Nyima Funk try their best to make the awkward dialogue somewhat bearable. But with character names like “Baby Gangsta” and cliché lines on top of cliché lines, there’s very little any actor could do to save the script.

You can check out a reading of The Thing I Am, posted by Now This, below.