Enough of using sex to get clicks, says Singaporean YouTuber of his peers, who also criticises their ‘shallow’ mainstream styles
- Satirical Singaporean YouTuber Sneaky Sushii has won an army of fans who love his attacks on the city state’s most popular internet figures like JianHao Tan
- He says the style of a lot of YouTube stars is indicative of a creative scene in Singapore that would rather stick to a well-trodden path than to innovate
For all the success that Singapore’s legion of popular YouTubers have achieved – and some, like JianHao Tan with his media empire, have achieved a lot – they aren’t without their critics. The most vocal and beloved of these is satirist Sneaky Sushii.
With 105,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, Sneaky Sushii is small fry compared to some of the YouTubers and social media figures he frequently attacks. Still, he has carved out a niche for himself in Singapore’s saturated YouTube scene and made criticising popular figures into something of a career, armed with scathing one-liners like: “Just because you got a few people to sign up for a free yoga treatment doesn’t make you the next [serial entrepreneur] Gary Vaynerchuk.”
Jay – who declines to reveal his full name – says he dropped out of film school to become a full-time YouTuber because he wanted to make content that he’d enjoy watching himself. That, and he simply couldn’t stand the “shallow” formula that most other popular channels follow.
“Find a semi-hot influencer, gather the ‘t**** committee’ and put them in all of your thumbnails. That’s like 90 per cent of the job done,” he deadpans in his first video, “How Not To Be A Singaporean YouTuber”, which has since been removed from his YouTube channel but can be viewed on Facebook. He adds: “And don’t forget to insert that spicy future bass soundtrack.”
With an editing style heavy on memes and pop-culture references, the 20-something-year-old tears down the formulaic content of popular Singaporean channels, calling out the exploitation of women’s bodies for clicks and bemoaning modern internet culture for the shallow cesspit that it is. Fans love him for it.