Roll over Nickelback, and tell Rebecca Black the news. There’s a new contender to the ‘Worst Song Ever’ crown.
Combining the most cringe-worthy elements of commercial pop music into a three-and-a-half minute audio-visual orgy of misguidedness, this auto-tuned, heavily manufactured slice of fluff has almost overnight brought music to a new all-time low.
And the inspiration for this new nadir? Oriental cuisine.
Introducing ‘Chinese Food’, the new single from 14-year-old ‘singer’ Alison Gold, which arrives courtesy of Ark Music Factory, the very same vanity record company that slugged the world with Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’, who are attempting to strike viral video gold a second time.
But where ‘Friday’ drew from the benefits of a calendar day reserved for “partying, partying, partying” (ad infinitum), ‘Chinese Food’ instead focuses on the joys of fortune cookies, egg rolls, and noodles, while exploring the little-known links between clubbing and being hungry with a lyrical incisiveness usually reserved for lobotomy patients.
Just how horrible is the wordsmithery? Well, the first verse opens: “After balling I go clubbing/Then I’m hugging/Then I’m hungry and I’m walking on the street/and I’m getting getting getting getting grumpy grumpy.”“I love Chinese Food/ You know that it’s true/ I love fried rice, I love noodles, I love chow mein/ Chow m-m-m-m-mein.”
But the teen obsession with enjoying Asian cooking is best communicated in the marquee chorus of “I love Chinese Food/ You know that it’s true/ I love fried rice, I love noodles, I love chow mein/ Chow m-m-m-m-mein.”
If you think skewering a 14-year-old’s writing abilities is unfair, keep in mind that there’s only two years that separates Gold from 16-year-old New Zealand sensation Lorde and her natty globe-conquering single ‘Royals’. Besides, Gold probably had little to do with the song’s creation – merely a vehicle for the ruthless marketing domos at Ark Music Factory.
Worse still is the accompanying video for ‘Chinese Food’ – which has already racked up over two million views on YouTube and been labelled by online sources as ‘racist‘, ‘offensive‘, and the ‘worst song of the year‘.
The clip stars the young Alison Gold (in an unsettling amount of make-up) as she traipses through a sunny field before hitting her local Chinese restaurant, flailing giddily while singing about her love of broccoli, chicken wings, and using “chopsticks to eat pot sticks(?!)”
To add to the music video’s intense racial stereotyping, the entire clip is accompanied by subtitles that shift between different languages – except the lyrics in Chinese, which are seemingly the ones that most require translation.
Things however take a bizarrely disconcerting twist when Gold receives a fortune cookie telling her she’ll “make a new friend” before she catches the attention of a man in a Panda suit. The pair then frolic about in the grass, awkwardly tickle each other, and host a sleepover before the Panda reveals himself to be Ark Music Factory founder Patrice Wilson.
The Nigerian-born brainchild behind the song is already beaming with all kinds of wrong – surrounded by slumber party pre-teens – before he begins rapping while surreptitiously squinting his eyes, putting on an ethnic voice, and butchering the rhyming thesaurus: “Get me broccoli/ While I play Monopoly/ Don’t be a busy bee/ Cause it’s your fantasy/ To eat Chinese food.”
Do keep in mind that this is the musical genius behind ‘Friday’, and in fact the vehicle singer of that particularly dreadful tune even weighed in on ‘Chinese Food’. “What the hell is this?” wrote Rebecca Black in a tweet (that has since been removed), according to NineMSN in a tweet.
Can you stomach the full horror of Alison Gold’s ‘Chinese Food’? Find out below.
