Easy cooking recently just got even better. With the drop of Watch The Stove, Hamburger Helper’s April fools mixtape, creating a Hamburger Helper meal became so much more entertaining.
Lefty, the Hamburger Helper mascot, has been tweeting out progress reports on the new mixtape to build up hype for the project, in the months leading up to the release. The five track mixtape quickly went viral on soundcloud, the first track, Feed the Streets, gaining 2.56 million views within five days of the release. Feed the Streets is a certified banger, a hype track that people can’t help bobbing their head to.
The project was undertaken by music students at the McNally Smith College of Music in Minnesota when General Mills reached out to the school. Toki Wright, a rapper and producer who works at McNally Smith and is the department head for the nation’s first hip-hop studies program jumped at the chance to give his students this project.
And if the lack of experience of the producers doesn’t shock you, the topics might. Hip-hop is a genre mostly full of bravado, in which the artists show off their glamorous or gangster lifestyles to show that they are better than all of their competition. Watch the Stove takes an interestingly opposite approach to hip-hop than most of the famous artists these days. Instead of showing off a rich party lifestyle, the artists of the mixtape decide to glamorize Hamburger Helper, the cheap food brand.
The last song of the mixtape, In Love With the Glove, perfectly illustrates this as there seems to be an almost sexual feeling between the girl mentioned in the song and Hamburger Helper. The hook states that “She’s in love/ with that glove.” So while this does refer to how “she” might love the meals themselves, it may also refer to her actually loving Lefty, the mascot.
Even more ridiculous are the two music videos that were created with the project. The video for Crazy features young artist Theory rapping against a mac-and-cheese backdrop while describing the ease and cheapness with which Hamburger Helper can be used. In In Love With the Glove, you can see a young, beautiful woman dancing, drinking champagne, and going on car rides with Lefty in a hilarious fashion.
What was originally meant to be a fun April Fools project turned into possibly one of the greatest marketing schemes of all time. Not only did it flawlessly promote Hamburger Helper, getting even me to consider buying some, it jump started the careers of a few young artists in one of the best ways possible. Probably the hottest mixtape of 2016, I can only hope that the Hamburger Helper group is able to whip up some more fire in whatever studio they’re cooking in.
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