South Park returned to the airwaves last night, with their much-anticipated first episode of the new TV season. As the show has become known for over the years, the script dealt with several current events topics over the course of its 22-minute running time. Mostly taking aim at the White Nationalist movement and their members' obsession with waving the Confederate flag, the episode titled "White People Renovating Houses" also managed to include the music of a rap artist who has dominated 2017 thus far: Kendrick Lamar.
Well, when I say "include" his music, I don't mean just playing underneath a scene where additional dialogue is going on. Instead, K. Dot got the spoof treatment, where a stereotypical white "redneck" character sings his own version of the emcee's song "Humble." The plot, which sees out-of-work white people assume the jobs of digital home assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, a man named Jim Bob becomes Cartman’s home assistant after a court order is put in place to allow it. While inside Cartman’s home, Bob does an acoustic cover of the Lamar record. Make sure you're not in the middle of sipping on your beverage of choice while watching the clip below, because the country twist on the line "My left stroke just went viral” just made me do a ferocious spit take.
South Park isn't the first entity to use the Kendrick song for comedic purposes. Shakamania X previously parodied the song in their viral video titled "Mumble," garnering nearly 7 million views as of this writing. Lamar hasn't commented on the South Park spoof directly, but that doesn't mean he's not aware of it. It may just be that he's too busy continuing to listen to XXXTentacion's new album 17, a release that K. Dot has been a major supporter of.
The animated show, which is beginning its 21st (!) season, is no stranger to skewering big names from the world of hip-hop. Whether it's Kanye West (remember the "gay fish" outrage?), 2Pac or even Diddy, the show's writers have never shied away from taking on the genre's supposedly untouchable figures on the regular.