A two-year old hip hop single whose album became a hit in the U.S. is now being angrily bashed in China and the U.S. because it talks about breaking into and entering Chinese homes.
The single "Meet the Flockers" from "My Krazy Life," the debut 2014 album by African-American hip hop artist YG, has broken the language barrier to get 13,000 dislikes on YouTube, most presumably posted only recently by irate Chinese.
In China, the single went unnoticed until posters recently criticized it on Sina Weibo. State-run Chinese media then waded into the issue, boosting the song's awareness among the Chinese public.
The Chinese community in the U.S. is so incensed it launched an online petition asking the White House to ban the single. That just won't happen given the United States is a democracy where artistic interpretation is defended under the First Amendment.
The petition's launch on Sept 21 has seen some 38,000 people sign it through "We the People," a section on the White House website for petitions. The government will have to respond within 30 days if the petition obtains 100,000 signatures.
Meet the Flockers is a "how-to" for thugs that want to break into homes and rob Chinese Americans. It became suddenly notorious after a burglary earlier this month at the home of a Chinese-American family in Georgia.
The single begins with "First, you find a house and scope it out. Find a Chinese neighborhood 'cause they don't believe in bank accounts."
And why does YG rap about burglaries? That's probably because he spent six months in jail for burglary in California before he recorded his debut single, Toot It and Boot It, in 2009.
YG's real world name is Keenon Daequan Ray Jackson. He's 26 and was born in California.
You can listen to Meet the Flockers on YouTube here to judge it for yourself. The album was a commercial and critical hit in 2014.