Panda Suit, Rainbow Exit, No Survivors

If you thought Rebecca Black’s Friday represented some kind of floor—the lowest point the pop machine could hit—you hadn’t met Patrice Wilson yet. Wilson is the producer behind that particular catastrophe, and apparently the whole experience felt so good he needed to do it again, this time with a young girl named Alison Gold and a song called Chinese Food.

The video is a genuine marvel of wrongness. Fortune cookies feature prominently. There are subtitles for reasons that remain unclear. A man in a panda costume shows up to have a pillow fight with a 12-year-old, then exits on a rainbow—and the timing relative to any hypothetical police response is left as an exercise for the viewer. It makes Friday look like Kubrick.

What disturbs me isn’t the sheer incompetence of the music, which is almost soothing at this point. It’s the specific energy Wilson brings to these projects—an adult man in a bear suit asserting creative control over a preteen’s image with absolute confidence. There’s a genre of internet badness that’s accidental and therefore kind of pure. This isn’t that. This was planned. Someone sat in a room and wrote the panda into the script.

Alison Gold will be fine. Rebecca Black survived and thrived. The internet has a short memory for this stuff. But Wilson keeps going, and I keep watching, and I honestly can’t tell if that says more about him or me.