Chicken Noodle Soup, Fries, and a Soda on the Side

Much of the conversation centered around the recently released J-Hope and Becky G cover of “Chicken Noodle Soup” has focused on cultural appropriation. What is cultural appropriation? Who has the right to call it out? When is hair just hair? Who can be offended?

As a white American, I can guarantee that nobody wants (or needs) my opinion on those specific topics so this is what I am going to talk about: Why on Earth did anybody think trying to resurrect this specific 2006 dance craze was a good idea?

Let me rewind the clock for the youngsters back to the sweaty summer of 2006 in America when a talented and ambitious 15 year old kid from Harlem and her older DJ friend put together an insanely catchy song based off of one of the dances going around the neighborhood, chicken noodle soup, fries, and a soda on the side. The single made the rounds of the local party circuit--15 year old Bianca having to sneak out to attend--until it eventually caught the ear of a local radio DJ who wanted to know what this dance craze was that was sweeping Harlem.

DJ Webstar and Bianca Bonnie got some major label attention, filmed a professional video, and released the song officially in the fall of that year. It was one of the first viral YouTube hits and earned the pair national attention from baffled mainstream (aka “white”) media as well as more conflicted reactions from an older generation concerned about the way Black culture was being portrayed to that mainstream media:

"The problem is that the young people are unaware of the mockery -- the correlation between the minstrel shows of the past and the 'Chicken Noodle Soup' dance," says Chloe Hilliard, news editor at The Source, the New York-based hip-hop magazine. "It's the whole issue of airing our dirty laundry. It's one thing of laughing about it among ourselves. But it's another thing of showing this behavior to the mainstream as if this is all we do -- dance around and eat fried chicken."

Young Bianca got some money from the deal but she was also still in high school with parents who were neither interested in becoming nor qualified to be “mom-agers” and still having to deal with the realities of living in a neighborhood where a 13 year old girl could get shot and killed while leaving a Halloween party.

She wouldn’t pop back up to mainstream attention until 10 years later when she appeared on the VH1 reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York.

What did the young Jung Hoseok see while watching Bonnie's video and the other viral Black dance crazes on YouTube in the provincial city of Gwangju, South Korea?

“Chicken Noodle Soup” was no outlier. This was also the era of songs like The Dougie (currently at 50 million views on YouTube and referenced in J-Hope’s verse in his “Chicken Noodle Soup” remake) and the global spread of these formerly local neighborhood dances enabled by YouTube opened them up to a whole new audience, one that didn’t always understand the culture of what it was they were looking at, as a 2007 article from the British newspaper the Guardian amply demonstrates.

Did young Hoseok think these exotic foreign dancers were cool? Did he find them funny? Did he think about them at all beyond trying to imitate their moves? I wonder what the young Hoseok would think knowing that he and his culture have now become the decontextualized dancers on YouTube.

This is where the remake of “Chicken Noodle Soup” comes in. That kid, Jung Hoseok, has become a global superstar. He’s the J-Hope of BTS. He now has a worldwide platform and a built-in audience for absolutely anything he would like to try. His previous solo effort, the utterly delightful mixtape Hope World blew all our collective socks off with its combination of danceable beats, catchy hooks, and poignant, almost bittersweet lyrics. “Airplane,” was a special stand out for me with the achingly beautiful melody, the video shot in a vacant parking garage, and poetic lyrics drawn from his own experience talking about going from a poor kid watching planes fly overhead to actually being on one himself.

“Airplane” was one of those videos that gets it. That gets what idol magic is and what it can do. J-Hope fills that vacant parking garage with depth and meaning. His very presence turns it into a sacred space. The shot of him standing there, arms outstretched, surrounded by mundane concrete, with a plane in flight above him, is iconic. I’ll still stop and watch the whole video all the way through when it pops up… like right now.

This song and video are beautiful; it’s completely J-Hope.

So, knowing what he is capable of as an artist, and what he is capable of as a dancer (see also: Boy Meets Evil and the 3J performance @ 2018 Mama) why did the Korean man capable of gorgeous pop art that highlights his own taste and talents decide to make his next big solo work a remake of a 2006 local Black American teen dance craze from Harlem, shot and filmed across the country in Los Angeles, and featuring a Mexican-American (Californian) singer?

Well, Big Hit Entertainment just signed a deal with TikTok and judging by the slew of nearly identical pieces in mainstream (aka “white”) media outlets on the “Chicken Noodle Soup” dance challenge, a cynical observer might suspect that the desire to go viral on TikTok with a dance challenge based on a dance that has already proven to be viral may have had something to do with the decision.

Am I that cynical? Yes and no.

What I see when I look at J-Hope’s “Chicken Noodle Soup” is a genuine attempt from a Korean pop star to give mainstream American audiences what they want.

I see a man who understands the metrics behind the viral tweet of him doing Drake’s In My Feelings challenge and mixed it with his own somewhat surface level appreciation of the loudest American pop music and tendency to just tell us the things he actually likes, including problematic SoundCloud Rapper Lil Pump with no deeper meaning behind it than he finds them catchy and colorful and vibrant.

This remake of “Chicken Noodle Soup” is what happens when a very specific local minority culture is exported with no context, ingested as simple entertainment by a global audience, and then sold back to the mainstream majority culture as Camp. It’s taking the cultural product of a very specific minority experience (one that is very much looked down on in mainstream culture), stripping it of the original minority experience, and then selling it to the mainstream culture as lighthearted fun.

Is there anything wrong with that? Well, ask yourself this: would the mainstream media be as kind to this remake if it had been done by a well-meaning white kid who grew up watching dance compilations on YouTube in provincial Appalachia instead of in Gwangju?

I’m not against cultural borrowing but I do think that if a global act is going to be localizing their material and targeting a complicated market like America then they have to be prepared for questions and for pushback when a borrowed song, when a borrowed style, is challenged by the people it was borrowed from.

(Originally posted 9/28/2019)