I first heard Views from the Reg in my first year, at the Ethics Bowl’s Halloween party.

In hindsight, this was the most fitting place to hear this album: Ethics Bowl is notoriously nerdy and philosophically pedantic.

As I later learned, it was tradition for the fourth-year hosting the party to put the album on for background music. What I first thought was generic rap music quickly transformed with the lyric “Fuck Harvard!” and was followed by the most incredible diss track I’d ever heard.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Average Johnson,” they replied.

Jacob “Average” Johnson (A.B. ’19) produced the rap album Views from the Reg in UChicago’s very own Logan Center. He released the album in April 2018, spring of his third year. Since then, it has been a staple of undergraduate culture at UChicago. This album captures the entire UChicago undergraduate experience: it’s specific enough to only apply to this place but broad enough that you can listen to it each year you spend here and have a totally different perspective.

Johnson is currently working toward a Ph.D. in animal behavior at University of California, Davis, but when I spoke with him over Zoom this week to discuss his undergraduate rap album, he seemed to remember it like it was still 2018.

“It felt like on campus there was such a strong culture, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was exactly, but there was some sort of emotional zeitgeist at the school that I felt really strongly,” Johnson told me. “I wanted to make something that every undergrad at UChicago will be able to listen to. And I wanted it to, like, encapsulate a little bit of what it feels like to be here for four years of your life, if not more.”

The first track on Views from the Reg is called “Return of the Curve,” what Johnson referred to in our interview as the “thesis statement” of the album. It references some of the most longstanding and widely felt experiences of UChicago undergraduates: pretending to do work in the Reg, having “five majors at the same time,” and of course, “it’s a vicious competition for how average you can be.” This throughline is continued in such hits as “Math and Sosc,” which parodies Rihanna’s “S&M”—instead of kinky sex, though, students are getting their masochism fix through problem sets.

Johnson’s lyrical presentation lands somewhere in the realm of Bo Burnham and Bill Wurtz. He’s earnest and funny, with a certain “just an average white guy” charm. This album only works because of the earnestness with which it’s performed. Johnson sees “tryhard” criticism and seems to say, “Yeah, I am trying hard. Why does that bother you so much?”

“It’s about things that are so ridiculously niche that it would be absurd to write a song about them,” Johnson said. “The album is kind of a bit that doesn’t know when to stop.”

Views from the Reg is lauded for giving audiences “Fuck Harvard,” a completely original diss track that opens with the infinitely memorable introduction: “Fuck Harvard! You stupid easy ass school. If I wanted good grades then I would’ve gone to you!” For the UChicago zeitgeist, this song captures the widely held contempt for Harvard that we all know is neither productive nor mutual but persists nevertheless.

This song holds some of the best examples of Johnson’s lyrical talent. It’s a non-stop stream of high-level roasts, with the occasional strategic rhythm break to make lines such as, “You first admitted women in nineteen seventy-seven?” pop. Another line rhymes “discourse” with “I am so high on this-horse,” which is simultaneously hilarious and what we can all appreciate as “some UChicago bullshit.”

Despite this, Views from the Reg is aware of the privilege inherent in complaining about UChicago. “I definitely did wrestle with this love of intellectualism, of craving that rigorous academic inquiry but also recognizing, even when that album came out, that it is a time when this feels increasingly cloistered,” Johnson said. “The joke is that ‘Ah, Harvard, you’re so elitist. My school isn’t elitist at all!’ But we are.”

While most of Views from the Reg still rings true in 2025, there are a handful of lines that date the album as undeniably 2018. Johnson jokes of his admission to UChicago that “I was poorly selected, like Donald Trump’s cabinet,” hearkening back to the day when incompetence was the biggest issue with the presidency. Similarly, “man in a fedora” makes an appearance in “Ain’t No Space in Mansueto,” and Alpha Delta’s “bar night” was lost to COVID just two years later. Yet, some parts of UChicago culture remain immutable—most notably, the nonstop grind to “take my rightful place in the middle of the curve.”

If “Return of the Curve” is the thesis statement of Views from the Reg, it’s fitting that the last track, “I Kinda Like it Here,” summarizes the core idea of Johnson’s album: despite how much UChicago beats us down, this is still a pretty great place to be because of the people we’re here with. Johnson came to appreciate this during college as he saw his fellow students experience hardship and rise to the occasion.

“A lot of people will suggest to you that [as] humans get more selfish, we turn more inward and are less likely to help others when we are in a stressful or harsh environment,” Johnson said. “But what data actually shows is that when things are at their bleakest, people become more kind, more generous, more willing to help one another.… What I was seeing was everybody kind of going through it and the ways in which, instead of making people worse to each other, it was making my fellow students better to each other.”

For most of us, Views from the Reg is a fun musical outlet to hear the horrors of UChicago expressed alongside some fantastic saxophone. What is less frequently discussed is that the album, in capturing the essence of the UChicago experience, brings attention to how utterly average we all feel all of the time. The constant competition, the impossible number of readings and papers and assignments we get in a week, the nine-week quarter that pushes life of the mind to extremes—90 percent of the time, it feels like each of us is barely hanging on.

Johnson himself remembers this feeling seven years later. “[Gen chem] was humbling,” he said. “I’d done pretty well in whatever high school class I was in, and then to see myself be in danger of failing a class—I was like, what? But that feeling of barely making it, just skirting by, that was what first inspired me to write ‘Return of the Curve.’”

Despite the horrors, Johnson is grateful for his time at UChicago and for all of the things he captured in his album, good and bad.

And as for what he misses most about UChicago? “I have yet to encounter a student climate that feels like it felt at UChicago,” Johnson said. “It was this moment, [as] someone who had grown up and been bullied for caring and for having those absurd levels of knowledge, and then seeing all these people who had all of these different topics they were passionate about and realizing I am just another fish in the pond. By the standards of this school, I am average.”

At the end of our interview, I asked Johnson if he had anything he wanted to say to the current UChicago student body. “Whether it’s people or places or discontinued LEGO products, caring about things is awesome. Never be ashamed of the weird little subtopic you obsess over. Nothing brings me greater joy in life than listening to my friends nerd out in absurd detail about what brings them joy,” he said. “Apathy is how they get you. Caring is how we survive.”