The power of rap beef propelled Kendrick Lamar to the Super Bowl Halftime show this year, and you know the Fortnite makers at Epic can't resist that kind of pop culture clout. While the battle royale game still hasn't managed to secure a Kendrick skin, it is building its own rap beef between the rapping pickle Big Dill and real-life rapper artist T-Pain.
Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2 kicks off on February 21, and in the lead-up to the release Epic has been making a, uh, big deal out of Big Dill. The first trailer for the new season features Big Dill robbing a bank, and it's intercut with a Beastie Boys-style music video, which features Big Dill rapping alongside a humanoid hot dog as part of an apparent cartoon rap supergroup called Tasty Bois.
The accompanying music track, Runamok, is no match for the sonic heights Fortnite previously reached with the Butter Barn Hoedown, but it's catchy all the same – and it's just the tip of the iceberg for the lore Epic has built to accompany Big Dill.
Epic's build to the new season has also included a series of highly dramatized newslike videos detailing a feud between Big Dill and T-Pain. T-Pain alleges that during a collaborative recording session, the pickle swiped a laptop full of music and started dropping diss tracks using the beats he lifted. Big Dill alleges that this all started because the human rapper ate his pickled family at a club.
It's all deeply, deeply stupid, but it's been presented with such goofy earnestness that I'm quickly becoming obsessed with each new lore drop. I play Fortnite roughly once every six months these days, but the absolute absurdity of Big Dill has me more than ready to push up my biannual check-in when Season 2 releases overnight.
