Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images
Controversy over YG’s 2014 song, “Meet the Flockers,” reignited this week after YouTube declined an internal request from its employees to remove the song from its platform. Bloomberg reports that employees submitted the request to YouTube’s Trust & Safety team due to lyrics that encourage would-be robbers to target the homes of Chinese-Americans. Their ask came in light of recent high-profile acts of violence against the Asian-American community throughout the country. It’s the latest wave of controversy for the song, which also saw widespread criticism and even protests back in 2016.
On the track, YG raps instructions for committing a home invasion robbery, beginning by suggesting criminals target Chinese households:
First: You find a house and scope it out
Find a Chinese neighborhood
‘Cause they don’t believe in bank accounts
Critics have claimed the lyrics are a call to action for criminals to target Asian-Americans. Others have defended the song with concerns about policing the content of hip-hop music, which has historically reflected the violence and poverty faced by many young Black Americans and sometimes found its lyrics caught in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system. YouTube’s Trust & Safety team decided against the song’s removal with similar reasoning.
“We find this video to be highly offensive and understand it is painful for many to watch, including many in Trust & Safety and especially given the ongoing violence against the Asian community,” Youtube executives wrote in an email, according to Bloomberg. They said the lyrics are otherwise a violation of the service’s hate speech policy but fall under an exception for artistic context.
“Removing this video would have far-reaching implications for other musical content containing similarly violent or offensive lyrics, in genres ranging from rap to rock,” they wrote. “We debated this decision at length amongst our policy experts, we made the difficult decision to leave the video up to enforce our policy consistently and avoid setting a precedent that may lead to us having to remove a lot of other music on YouTube.”
In 2016, a YouTube video featuring “Meet the Flockers” went viral on Chinese social media platforms Weibo and WeChat. It led to multiple Asian-American political groups denouncing the song and even holding protests in Oakland and outside the rapper’s concert in Philadelphia.
In 2017, Los Angeles Police said a trio of teenage robbers claimed YG’s song inspired them to commit a string of home invasion robberies in the San Fernando Valley.
Lyrics with offensive references to Asian people have a history of causing controversies in hip-hop. Ice Cube’s 1991 track, “Black Korea,” stands as one of the most famous examples. The song explores the tensions between Korean store owners and young Black men in his neighborhood and was marred with racist epithets and fantasies of violence.
More recently, Fat Joe addressed his verse on Benny the Butcher’s “Talkin' Back” that referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” saying the lyrics were old. Lil Pump apologized back in 2018 after using “ching chong” ad-libs on his song “Butterfly Doors,” while Wiz Khalifa defended himself that same year for lyrics that used Korean people’s eyes as a punchline.
Although “Meet the Flockers” does not have a music video, an audio stream of the song is available via YG’s official YouTube page. It has over 100,000 views, with comments disabled.
Learn more about the lyrics to YG’s “Meet the Flockers” on Genius.
