Review: RapGPT at The Stables Basement
RapGPT at The Stables Basement
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
At its core, RapGPT was a virtuoso demonstration of controlled chaos. Pitting his supercomputer ADHD brain against a tailor-made AI generator, Perth freestyler Macshane turned the audience into both muse and menace, feeding off our worst impulses and spinning them into something improbably clever.
Macshane is, indisputably, freakishly talented. A decade of freestyle rapping—as hype man, collaborator, and professional improviser—has sharpened his instincts to the point where language becomes reflex. That skill was the show’s load-bearing beam. Without it, RapGPT would have been indistinguishable from a chaotic open mic. With it, even the dumbest prompts alchemised into something sharp. This wasn’t novelty rap or algorithmic gimmickry—it was a skilled performer stress-testing his craft against the looming spectre of AI.
The opening skit eased the room into participation by harvesting prompts from our own pockets: objects pulled from phones and bags became the raw material for impromptu verses. It was a clever sleight of hand—nothing was “out of thin air”, yet everything felt volatile. The tone was set early: smut would rise to the top, because of course it would. A mahogany canoe. An earring reimagined as a cock ring. The crowd learnt quickly what kind of night this was going to be.
Threaded through the chaos was the show’s nominal premise: the cultural panic around AI. The familiar dystopian fears were aired—loss of creativity, disconnection, people outsourcing thought itself—before being quietly undercut. What RapGPT ultimately proposed wasn’t AI as an enemy but as an accelerant. A tool. A chaos engine. Something to grind against a hyperactive ADHD brain already running at dangerous speeds.
The RapGPT software—essentially an anonymous audience-input system with a cute name—powered a series of escalating games. Their outcomes were wildly variable. Emoji prompts birthed an R&B pastiche and increasingly unhinged sexual euphemisms that R. Kelly himself might not have dared broach. A time-traveller narrative leapt through decades, landing randomly in 1975 Saigon—a technically “pho-nomenal” improvisation (though one wondered what else could have emerged, particularly given Macshane’s aside about running the same game in Europe and landing on 1939, Austria).
Later rounds leant harder into discomfort and exposed the limits of audience creativity. Anonymity inevitably led to filth, but that was part of the experiment. A ten-stage “everyday routine” involving crying and wanking, despite Macshane’s endurance for navigating smut, sat uncomfortably close to low-rent open mic comedy. When the material sagged, it wasn’t Macshane reaching for lazy laughs; it was punters defaulting to the lowest common denominator once handed the microphone—even digitally.
AI-generated images accompanied prompts about strange hobbies—furries, medieval roleplay, toenail hoarding—skating close to taboo while relying on algorithmic guardrails. The unease wasn’t accidental. RapGPT thrived on the tension between what people submitted when unaccountable and what an artist chose to dignify with attention. That contrast sharpened the show’s subtext: not all taboos were equal, and not all improvisation was distributable in an algorithm-policed world.
By the final challenge—a Frankenstein freestyle stitching together the audience’s psychic clutter—Macshane proved his point. He wasn’t a monkey dancing for the crowd. If anything, the hierarchy inverted. We were the monkeys, flinging genital obsessions and intrusive thoughts, while he chose which projectiles to dodge, absorb, or alchemise into quick-witted gems.
As democratic as it seems in theory, RapGPT isn’t for the overly sensitive or the prudish. And for those who find the AI element degenerative, it arguably warrants a closer look. Macshane wasn’t outsourcing creativity to AI or the crowd. Instead, we contributed to a live experiment in authorship, agency and the filthy id of participatory culture that was vivid, funny and very much alive.
CAT LANDRO