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A 2-Year-Old YG Track Is Under Fire for Encouraging Robberies Against Chinese Americans
By ESTHER WANG
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OP
10/24/2016
YG’s “Meet the Flockers” is blowing up on Chinese social media for its offensive lyrics, but the controversy also illustrates a cultural misunderstanding of hip-hop.
In 2014, the Compton-born rapper YG released his major-label debut My Krazy Life to widespread acclaim, with one critic calling it a “classicist read on Southern California gang life” coupled with “a refined flair for storytelling.” Buried in the middle of the album was a scant two-minute long track called “Meet the Flockers,” a nod to YG’s own past as a convicted felon that kicks off with him rapping the lines “First, you find a house and scope it out / Find a Chinese neighborhood, cause they don't believe in bank accounts.” Never released as a single, it at most merited a passing mention in reviews of the album.
The social media outrage has now morphed into a campaign against YG and the song, including a White House petition created on September 21 with the vague (and in all likelihood unconstitutional) demand to "ban the song from public media and investigate legal responsibilities of the writer” that’s already garnered more than 62,000 signatures, as well as a planned protest of YG’s upcoming concert in Philadelphia by a group of Chinese American organizations. Even San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim has weighed in, calling on YouTube to take down the video and for Def Jam and YG to denounce the song.
It’s no surprise, then, that Chinese American immigrants are up in arms over the song. The concerns are real, but the response doesn’t only miss the forest for the trees, it overshoots it altogether and lands somewhere in the realm of farce. Calls for censorship, after all, rarely address the issue their proponents seek to fix. And since this is America, in an ironic but predictable twist, the campaign against the song has also revealed the casual, unchecked anti-Black racism underpinning the outrage of many of those who have protested “Meet the Flockers.” While the originally circulated video has since been deleted from YouTube, scores of upset (and presumably) Chinese and Asian Americans have found other versions of the song on the platform and left angry comments, rife with the n-word. (One commenter wrote that he now agreed with the killing of innocent Black Americans by police officers.)
Thinkin' every brother in the world's out to take
Like “Meet the Flockers,” and the campaign against it, “Black Korea” also speaks to a messy, complicated truth born of experience. I can’t help but think too of what Jay Caspian Kang wrote in the wake of the Peter Liang protests earlier this year, when tens of thousands of mostly Chinese Americans took to the streets in support of the NYPD officer who fired the bullet that killed unarmed Black man Akai Gurley. As Kang wrote, looking ahead to a future moment of political mobilization, “the message will certainly still be clumsy and riddled with contradiction.” It appears that he was right.
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