Thursday, May 09, 2002

Yellow Fever (the bloodhound gang)

I recently came across some responses to the Bloodhound Gang tune "Yellow Fever," circa 2000. The subject was interesting to me because when Asian Americans protested the blatant racial epithets and song's saturation with negative stereotypes about Asians, some people commented that they should just get over it. The University of Maryland students protested Bloodhound Gang's performance on their campus.

Here are some links to pages I found:
1) http://www.asianweek.com/2000_04_27/news_yellowfeverlyrics.html
2) http://modelminority.com/music/yellowfever.htm
3) http://www.2tongues.com/yellowfist/
4) http://www.asianweek.com/2000_06_01/bay_bloodhoundgang.html
5) http://www.stanford.edu/~amwso/bloodhoundgang.html

To me the worst thing was that the singer said he didn't care. According to the group's MO, they're out to get everyone's goat anyway, so Asian Americans shouldn't feel singled out I guess. If that's the case, then they should own up to the charges instead of trying to evade them. Accused of condoning racism, the singer tried to turn the tables around on his accusors. He said the real reason Asian Americans protested the song was because they didn't like him talking about wanting to "bang" an Asian girl. It's true that there are differing gradations along degrees of racial prejudices, from chingchongs to hate crimes, but added up over hundreds of incidents, even with the smallest insults amount to significant damage to a person's psyche.

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