“Chinese Food” proves unsettling

He’s baaaack. After teaching the American public that both Friday and Thanksgiving are really, really awesome, singer and songwriter Patrice Wilson has now brought us a song, performed by Alison Gold, that’s all about Chinese food! Cue the gaggle of tweens listing things that they like about Friday/Thanksgiving/Chinese food and having parties about Friday/Thanksgiving/Chinese food. Enter Patrice Wilson in a weird costume as he randomly hangs out with these girls without their parents there.

All of Wilson’s viral hits have the same, inexplicable pattern. While viewers can’t help watching his videos over and over again, he knows what he’s doing. He’s producing something so ridiculous that people can’t help but watch it.

“Chinese Food,” however, isn’t just a pointless, autotuned song. It’s also blatantly racist, inaccurate and stereotypical of the Chinese culture, which Wilson doesn’t even try to understand.

It starts off with an Asian man cooking noodles (which are Japanese?) and speaking Chinese? It’s unclear. Cue Alison Gold, who is pretty much the whitest, blondest most pageant-like girl he could’ve found to sing about her undying love of Chinese food.

For some reason, this 12-year-old girl has been clubbing during the middle of the day (after she was balling). And then she was hugging? What does hugging even mean in this context? Wait, she’s old enough to go to prom? No way.

Then she kicks over a garbage can to show how grumpy she is since her nonexistent parents have left her alone for so long that they forgot to feed her. It’s okay because she has a special power where she can find Chinese food at all times.

She enters the restaurant, which is also owned by a child. The nauseating chorus begins. Wilson is a fan of children yelling enthusiastically during the choruses of his songs. In “Friday,” it was “partying, partying, YEAH!” in “It’s Thanksgiving,” Nicole Westbrook made Thanksgiving a little Canadian by crowing, “With a turkey, EH, mashed potatoes, EH.” And now we have, “I love Chinese food, YEAH!”. Originality is obviously Wilson’s strong suit. She goes on to declare her love for fried rice, noodles and then gets especially sassy about her “chow moo moo moo moo mein.” Did she just do a shoulder brush? Who taught her that?

It wouldn’t be a Patrice Wilson production if she didn’t list absolutely everything about her day, so of course she had to read us the entire menu, consisting of egg rolls and wonton soup. Could this get anymore stereotypical? Also, the song does not even describe traditional Chinese food. This Chinese food place even has chicken wings. No wonder she loves it so much.

In every video Wilson appears, he is usually dressed in ridiculous regalia for a rap breakdown and in very close proximity to a bunch of children. This time he’s dressed as a giant panda. Together, Gold and Price frolic through the park after Gold eats a magic fortune cookie. Let’s read between the lines here and think about what was in that fortune cookie, because it sounds and looks like she just ate a special cookie and can now see soup in the sky.

If that’s not weird enough, Wilson is sitting in the middle of Gold’s bedroom, playing monopoly.

“Yo!” he says, “Get me broccoli, while I play monopoly.”

Then the camera zooms in on Oriental Avenue on the monopoly board. (Did that really just happen?!) From there, things continue to not make sense or have any meaning. Wilson’s usual business.

By the end of the video, Wilson is dancing at a sleepover with Gold and a bunch of her Japanese geisha friends. Surely, anything Japanese is obviously also Chinese. And then he disappears in a rainbow? Again, what was in that fortune cookie?

Another point of concern are the subtitles. What language is that? Apparently, it’s not good enough to just insult Chinese people. The video moves from Chinese characters into various European languages — Russian, Turkish and is that Greek? There’s no way that these are translated correctly; the lyrics don’t even make sense in English.

It’s easy to blame, Gold, the arbitrary, pre-teen girl who just wanted to live the American dream and become famous. Rebecca Black, no matter what she does in the future, will always be known as that “Friday” girl. But all of these girls are just kids who want to sing. Instead, we should think about why American popular culture makes it okay for Wilson to profit off of these kids by writing songs about nothing and be as creepy as humanly possible. What’s next for Wilson to completely ruin? Indian Food? Hanukkah? Let’s hope that Wilson doesn’t come anywhere near the Fourth of July again (he certainly didn’t mention it enough times during “It’s Thanksgiving”). It seems that the entire song is determined to be racist and completely ignorant. Even so, maybe it just aims to terrify anyone from playing Monopoly with a man dressed as a panda. The jury’s still out.