Ark Music Factory, the people who unleashed Rebecca Black’s musical car-seat dilemma Friday on the world in 2011 are back, and their demonic hellspawn latest musical release is worse than ever. Where Friday was offensively bad, Alison Gold’s Chinese Food is just plain offensive, managing to straddle the unconventional niches of both racist and creepy.
Gold, who looks to be not a day over 13, laments how hungry and grumpy she is after spending all night clubbing. Doing away with the concept of rhyming altogether, she reads a Chinese food menu like she’s RB listing days of the week, makes it rain chow mein, and is inexplicably underscored by multi-lingual subtitles. Eventually she romps in a park with her fortune cookie-predicted “new friend”: a big, cuddly, creepily ticklish panda bear who turns out to be Patrice Wilson, CEO of Ark Music Factory, “producer” of the track and “rapper” of “creepily driving Rebecca Black and her friends around” fame. Wilson goes on to drop a deplorable verse featuring the sort of Asian posturing and accent that died out with WW1 propaganda, and then creepily joins Gold and a bunch of her pubescent friends at a sleepover-slash-pillowfight and plays Monopoly (because it rhymes with broccoli), landing his piece on the questionable generalisation (if not a straight up racial slur) “Oriental Avenue”. Did I mention he was creepy?
The problem here seems to be that while Ark Music Factory accidentally stumbled upon comedy gold with the almost adorable naiveté of Friday, Chinese Food feels forced, contrived and produced only to generates hits based off its controversy value (a fact that we’re well aware we’re contributing to).
If Patrice Wilson wants use off-colour, racist “humour” to get hits, that’s his business. What’s worrying is the inevitable shitstorm that is going to rain down on poor Alison as this video gains viral momentum. Surely she has Rebecca Black-aware parents who could have warned her off this? Let’s hope it’s a hoax. If it is, our money is on Jimmy Kimmel being behind it.
