Patrice Wilson Strikes Again

I watched Alison Gold’s ’Chinese Food’ and I’m still not sure why. If you thought Rebecca Black’s ’Friday’ was the bottom, the nadir of manufactured pop culture disaster, you weren’t paying attention. Patrice Wilson—the architect of that whole catastrophe—apparently decided the formula worked and went looking for another kid to throw into the machine. This time it’s Alison Gold, singing about Chinese food. Fortune cookies. Subtitles the whole way through.

The video is a fever dream someone decided to fully produce and release into the world. There’s a panda costume. A guy in that costume pillow-fighting with a child. Then he rides away on a rainbow. I’m not being poetic or exaggerating—that actually happens. It’s the kind of thing where you can’t decide if someone has no self-awareness or too much confidence in their own vision.

What bothers me is how systematic it all is. Wilson saw what happened with Rebecca Black—the viral backlash, the memes, the mockery—and thought: I can do that again. Not learned from it. Repeated it. Found another girl, applied the same formula, kept the production value just north of embarrassing. It’s not even trying to be good anymore. It’s just a template now.

The first one felt like an accident, or at least a miscalculation. This second one feels like a business model. Someone figured out that if you take a kid and wrap her in enough absurdity, people will watch it, and mockery equals visibility. Why would you stop?