6.5.13

Tyler, the Creator Mountain Dew Commercial


I'm late on this one but fuck it, SJFM isn't really known for its original reporting and I just heard about it for the first time yesterday. For anyone who hasn't already seen Tyler, the Creator's Mountain Dew "Felicia the Goat" ads, they were a series of ads depicting a goat voiced by Tyler demanding Mountain Dew from a waitress at a restaurant. The woman tells the goat they are out of soda, the goat assaults her, the police arrest the goat put him in a line up with some other members of Odd Future. During the lineup scene, the woman is visibly battered and the goat continues to threaten her. Mountain Dew has pulled the ad campaign after the man in the video featured above, Dr. Boyce Watkins called it "arguably the most racist commercial in history." The prof riffs for a while on his article and on the culture of death and materialism propagated in hip-hop. I'm not going to give my thoughts particularly. I'm a white dude who really likes rap, I have opinions on these things but I'm dubious about my ability to critique such an ambivalent and, I don't know, "charged" form of expression that's only now just starting to be negotiated and democratized outside of black artists. Perhaps I've already said too much. Anyway, watch the video if you're interested. I will say, if the ads are racist or not, the one linked here is really stupid. It seems to operate on a 12-year-old mental plane. Also, for anyone who hasn't picked up the new Tyler record, Wolf, it's pretty good, definitely worth a listen.

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