Ryan Celsius (stylized as R y a n C e l s i u s °) is the pseudonym of a Washington, D.C.-based music curator, disc jockey, video artist, music producer and YouTuber.

Quick Facts Personal information, Occupations ...
Ryan Celsius
Personal information
Occupations
YouTube information
Channel
Years active2011–present
GenreMusic
Subscribers598,000[1]
Total views182.5 million[1]
100,000 subscribers2017

Last updated: January 30, 2024
Close

His YouTube channel features visual mixtapes, combining underground hip hop, phonk and lo-fi tracks with nostalgic anime and movie visuals. Trappin in Japan, which began in 2017, is among the channel's most popular series.

Career

Thumb
Screenshot of a Ryan Celsius YouTube video, showing a first-person perspective of a Japanese highway

Based in Washington, D.C., Ryan Celsius began producing music and making videos in 2005.[2] The same year, his production hardware was stolen, and he lost all the music and videos created.[2] Celsius stated that the event made him stop producing music for eight years.[2]

In the early 2010s, Celsius got interested in the vaporwave culture, including vaportrap and simpsonwave.[3] He opened his YouTube channel in 2011 as a "personal project".[2] The channel's video mixtapes combine underground phonk, trap and hip hop music with nostalgic visuals from popular anime clips and movies.[2][4] Most of Celsius' tracks come from independent artists.[4]

The Trappin in Japan series, which began in 2017, is among the channel's most popular,[5][6] featuring visual mixtapes with first-person footage of people driving or walking through Japanese streets,[4] coupled with clips from nostalgic films such as Akira,[4] and imagery from The Simpsons.[6] He cites YouTube channel Emotional Tokyo as an inspiration for the series.[3] The series, among others, was key to popularizing the phonk genre.[7] Celsius' channel also holds 24/7 live streams of visual mixtapes.[5]

In January 2019,[2] Celsius was hired by indie record label Amuse to build their lo-fi music division.[8] In summer 2019,[9] Celsius' YouTube channel was demonetized and several videos were "shadow banned" due to "misleading thumbnails" in his videos.[4] Celsius stated: "the YouTube policy team cannot understand the link between Japan, trap music, anime, The Simpsons, so since they don't understand my content it must be misleading".[4]

In 2020, Celsius worked with Westbrook Media to create a lo-fi mixtape for Will Smith's YouTube channel.[10][11] In 2021, he performed with Flying Lotus in New York,[12] and was the visualizer maker for the official music video content of the TV series Yasuke.[13]

References

Wikiwand in your browser!

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.

Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.