These Dr. Seuss, Dr. Dre Mashups Are Brilliant—and Are Now Going Viral

In these strange times, content that brings us joy is very welcome—and Wes Tank is doing exactly that. The filmmaker and rapper from Milwaukee is spending his time in quarantine rapping Dr. Seuss’ children’s books to Dr. Dre’s beats—and he’s going viral.

Tank, who gained thousands of YouTube followers in a matter of days, has put out a number of the mashup videos on his channel over the past few weeks, but the most watched, with over one million views, is of him rapping Dr. Seuss’ book, Fox in the Sox over Dr. Dre’s “What’s the Difference” and “Let Me Ride.”

Anyone who has picked up one of Dr. Seuss’ books can tell you how difficult the tongue-twisting words can be to read aloud. Yet, Tank makes it through the whole almost 6-minute video without tripping over any of the words. (Although he admitted to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel it took him 30 takes to get it right.)

Other Dr. Seuss and Dr. Dre video mashups on his YouTube channel include The Lorax over “Still D.R.E,” “California Love,” and “Lil’ Ghetto Boy,” One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish over “Deep Cover,” “The Next Episode,” and “The Real Slim Shady” and Green Eggs and Ham over the beats of “Forgot About Dre.”

While Tank has recently gone viral, and, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, even made it to the front page of Reddit earlier this month, he has actually been creating these mashups for almost five years. He first got the idea after coming across a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and performed it at a basement show in Minneapolis around 2015—and the crowd loved it.

"I don’t know what prompted me to rap it. I had this flow in mind, and just happened to have a Dr. Dre beat on my phone that I used for freestyles,” Tank told the outlet. “I started slowly realizing more Dr. Seuss books and Dr. Dre beats could go together. It felt like I unlocked an achievement in the video game of life. It was meant to be.”

Tank, who had to pause projects for his video production company TankThink, used the pandemic to finally put out the Dr. Seuss and Dr. Dre mashup videos he’d been sitting on. He explained he wanted to put out something positive.

“I think this is helping families a little bit to cope and to have something positive that is going to make you laugh, and is not cynical, and it’s not the news," Tank told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “There are so many kids out there who have no clue about what is going on in the world and that naivete is sort of fragile, and everybody’s parents are a little tense. So when people send videos of their kids glued to the screen watching this, that just warms my heart.”

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