Reversing the Flow of Poison

Can you say "Neenja" without "Creenging"?

I was recently brought up to speed on a video that went viral in 2016, a year that I was so down on my luck that I missed almost all of the good memes. You’ve probably heard of it, given how many views and commentaries I was able to find on it. Of course I’m talking about the only video featuring the heiress of Murphy beds unapologetically performing “I Want To Be Ninja!” in front of a crowd of white, perma-buzzed Californian wine slurpers and also one very hilariously stoic asian onlooker:

“I throw my neenja star”

The video is incredible, breathtaking even. The universal energies at play here are more rare than last month’s lunar eclipse. You have front and center one Jennifer Murphy, a force of nature so powerful that she could be a Jungian archetype. She is so embedded in the collective unconscious that I don’t know any other way to list her accolades than with bullet points. She is/was:

• A former beauty pageant contestant

• An heiress to the Murphy Bed fortune; a company so ubiquitous that their brand name is interchangeable for the generic item (a la “Kleenex”)

• A former Apprentice contestant, who was allegedly both mouth-kissed and head-hunted by Donald Trump after her appearance on the show.

• Someone who later backed Donald Trump for President.

• Also someone who got married at Donald Trump Golf Course in Los Angeles

• A YouTube personality who - 8 years after releasing the “Ninja” video and a subsequent public apology, went ahead and just re-released it as a full music video 3 years ago

[As an aside, that video is worth watching for no other reason than the fact that it kicks off with stunning production value and then slowly slides in inverse proportion to not only what I assume was her husband’s budget, but also the rising faux-Chinese-ness of her accent.]

I am at a loss for how I missed this; not only was it an absolute bop, it was viral in a time when viral videos were still “a thing” that everyone knew about. They were still clinging on to a small piece of a rapidly shrinking American monocultural awareness that allowed for things like Ellen interviewing the “Damn, Daniel” guys, or Tosh.0…existing. That monoculture is gone now, or has atrophied so severely that it’s barely worth mentioning. Either way, I’m glad I’m caught up now. Better late than never, especially because the song is an absolute earworm that I defy you to listen to in full and then go a whole day without at least humming it. Or…if you’re not so uptight, you’ll probably even be rooting for Jennifer to overcome the song’s main antagonist Chow (HAHAHAHA - CHOW!!!)

Ahhh, the good old days. 2016 was such a precious time, we barely even knew that blog posts like this would become the default way of speaking:

They definitely stayed angry.

It was a different time, one in which there was seemingly no awareness at all that this asian woman standing front and center might not have appreciated this song. A time when audiences could just take things as they happened, rather than thinking how their responses might appear…