Rappers Keep Getting Mountain Dew in Trouble
Mountain Dew has had a bad week in advertising.
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First, there was the Tyler, the Creator-made "Most Racist Ad Ever," in which a white woman tries to identify the person who beat her from a police line up consisting of black men and a goat. As a dignified British publication attempted to explain:
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The talking goat, named Felicia, threatens to beat the woman if she identifies him to police, saying: "Ya better not snitch on a playa." The woman then runs away screaming: "I can't do this, no no no."
Charming. The ad has since been pulled.
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And then, waaaaay back in February, Lil Wayne wrote this lyric: "Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till." For those who don't know what he means there, allow me to clarify: Lil Wayne is comparing the sex he hopes to have to the fatal beating a 14-year-old kid sustained in 1955 because he was black.
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For some reason, this upset a lot of people (including Till's surviving family members), and the record label responsible for track apologized and pulled it. Wayne said nothing until this week, when a letter of "apology" he wrote to the Till family appeared online. (Wayne can be partially excused for taking 75 days to respond; after all, he spent part of that time being possibly dead.)
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It wasn't good enough for Till's family, and it's not good enough for PepsiCo, which has now dropped Lil Wayne from its year-old "DEWeezy" promotion deal, saying in a statement that his "offensive reference to a revered civil rights icon does not reflect the values of our brand." Funny how it took PepsiCo 75 days to come to that conclusion.
Lil Wayne's publicist said the split was an "amicable parting" due to "creative differences."
