YG’s ‘Meet the Flockers’ Returns to Streaming With Anti-Asian Lyrics Removed

YG’s 2014 debut album My Krazy Life has returned to digital streaming services after briefly disappearing this week following controversy over anti-Asian lyrics in its track “Meet the Flockers.”

Genius reports that the new version of My Krazy Life available now on Spotify, Apple Music, the iTunes Store, and YouTube contains an edited version of “Meet the Flockers.” The original lyrics to the song (“First: You find a house and scope it out/Find a Chinese neighborhood/‘Cause they don’t believe in bank accounts”), which for years have been criticized for their anti-Asian sentiment, have been changed to YG rapping, “Find a, find a neighborhood.”

The change comes amid a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year during the coronavirus pandemic, including a mass shooting last month that targeted Atlanta-area massage parlors and killed six Asian-American women. Last week, Bloomberg reported that employees at YouTube had called for the song’s removal from the site, a request that was denied in an email from executives to staff on March 22nd.

“We’ll start by saying 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,” the email read. “One of the biggest challenges of working in Trust & Safety is that sometimes we have to leave up content we disagree with or find offensive.”

The email went on to say that while “Meet the Flockers” violated the company’s hate speech policy, the video would stay up due to an Educational, Documentary, Scientific or Artistic exception, citing its “artistic content” and noting the concern about setting a precedent that would lead to the removal of other music videos. The original YouTube video for “Meet the Flockers” has since been replaced with the edited version.