{"id":101853,"date":"2016-08-23T19:04:41","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T23:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101853"},"modified":"2016-08-24T11:17:18","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T15:17:18","slug":"french-fries-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/23\/french-fries-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"The French Fries Had a Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Is Kanye\u2019s McDonald\u2019s poem a parable of class struggle?<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_101854\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/il_570xn.797635601_s07a.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-101854\" class=\"wp-image-101854\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/il_570xn.797635601_s07a.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"483\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-101854\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Avoid temptation.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>When I wrote in May about the seriocomic implications of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/26\/take-me-to-the-burger-king-spa\/\">a Burger King Spa opening in Helsinki<\/a>, I thought I\u2019d pegged the most extraordinary fast-food story of the year. Reader, I blew it. In the past month alone, McDonald\u2019s has opened a \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/mcdonalds-new-restaurant-of-the-future-2015-8\">McDonald\u2019s of the Future<\/a>\u201d in Saint Joseph, Missouri, luring customers to their purportedly healthier, Chipotlified restaurant by promising all-you-can-eat fries; BK has debuted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.autoblog.com\/2016\/08\/17\/burger-king-whopperito-review-video\/\">the \u201cWhopperito,\u201d a burger-burrito hybrid that fits in your cup holder<\/a>; and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/money\/business\/2016\/08\/23\/curious-flock-kfcs-fried-chicken-scented-sunscreen\/89130838\/\">KFC has sold two thousand bottles of fried-chicken-scented SPF 30 sunscreen<\/a>. For any writer hoping to capture the texture of our greasy-fingered moment, the ineffable <em>Sturm und Drang<\/em> of life in a world where <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DennysDiner\/status\/766021725356261376\">Denny\u2019s believes\u00a0the ideal male body is a stack of flapjacks<\/a>, the outlook is grim. As Philip Roth wrote, American reality \u201cstupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one\u2019s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.\u201d And he said that before Chicken Fries were a thing.<\/p>\n<p>But Philip Roth is no Kanye West, and Kanye West won\u2019t just sit there while actuality outdoes his talents\u2014heaven forfend. Instead, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thisisinsider.com\/kanye-west-mcdonalds-poem-frank-ocean-2016-8?utm_content=bufferdb07a&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer\">Kanye West has published a poem about Mickey D\u2019s<\/a> in <em>Boys Don\u2019t Cry<\/em>, a one-off zine from Frank Ocean. It goes like this:\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>McDonalds Man<br \/> McDonalds Man\u00a0<br \/> The french fries had a plan\u00a0<br \/> The french fries had a plan\u00a0<br \/> The salad bar and the ketchup made a band\u00a0<br \/> Cus the french fries had a plan\u00a0<br \/> The french fries had a plan\u00a0<br \/> McDonalds Man\u00a0<br \/> McDonalds\u00a0<br \/> I know them french fries have a plan\u00a0<br \/> I know them french fries have a plan\u00a0<br \/> The cheeseburger and the shakes formed a band\u00a0<br \/> To overthrow the french fries plan\u00a0<br \/> I always knew them french fries was evil man\u00a0<br \/> Smelling all good and shit\u00a0<br \/> I don\u2019t trust no food that smells that good man\u00a0<br \/> I don\u2019t trust it\u00a0<br \/> I just can\u2019t\u00a0<br \/> McDonalds Man\u00a0<br \/> McDonalds Man\u00a0<br \/> McDonalds, damn\u00a0<br \/> Them french fries look good tho\u00a0<br \/> I knew the Diet Coke was jealous of the fries\u00a0<br \/> I knew the McNuggets was jealous of the fries\u00a0<br \/> Even the McRib was jealous of the fries\u00a0<br \/> I could see it through his artificial meat eyes\u00a0<br \/> And he only be there some of the time\u00a0<br \/> Everybody was jealous of them french fries\u00a0<br \/> Except for that one special guy\u00a0<br \/> That smooth apple pie<em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The one close reading of this poem I\u2019ve found, by Katy Waldman at <em>Slate<\/em>, construes it as \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/browbeat\/2016\/08\/23\/kanye_west_s_poem_about_mcdonald_s_french_fries_a_close_reading.html\">a pale, speculative allegory \u2026 You can be the conniving fries, West seems to say, or you can be the sad haters who want to be the fries, squinting out at them with your artificial eyes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I agree, largely, but I see a rich political subtext in the poem.\u00a0Even with its abundant personification, it strikes me as a pretty literal-minded parable of class struggle. I imagine West seated in some vinyl booth with a McDonald\u2019s feast spread before him, suddenly vivisected by\u00a0paranoia. He\u2019s realized what every Dollar Menu chump must, at some point: the fries <em>do <\/em>have a plan, and their plan is to make you eat them, and then to make you eat them again. They are, in their olfactory seduction, playing their role in an entrenched\u00a0multinational conspiracy, encouraging you to buy, buy, buy, to quell your\u00a0every\u00a0hunger with the cheapest and most efficient solution, creating an engine of desire and addiction that will propel you\u00a0into the oblivion of obesity and precarity\u00a0as the whole Mickey D\u2019s C-suite sucks your wallet, and then your soul, dry. The fries, like any Subway restaurant or Dunkin\u2019 Donuts or even Cheesecake Factory, put down a distinctive scent to lure you in. You trust them at your peril. West\u2019s\u00a0poem is a protest song, in essence: a comment on the many ingenious ways that global capital sticks in one\u2019s craw.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe apple pie,\u201d Waldman writes, \u201cis who the speaker ultimately wants to emulate, if he can shake off the hollow, glamorous value system of the fries.\u201d Here, too, I think she\u2019s onto something\u2014but where she ascribes an enviable quality of \u201cgenius\u201d to the apple pie, I\u2019d sooner look to Marxist rhetoric. Think about it: those pies are made of apples, and apples are\u00a0<em>red<\/em>, the color of Communism.\u00a0Just as the red ketchup \u201cformed a band\u201d\u2014i.e., unionized\u2014with the salad bar, cheeseburger, and shakes, against the fries, so, too, has the apple pie chosen another path, free of jealousy. If the ketchup\/salad\/burger\/shake band represents the possibility of a labor movement, the pie represents total Communism. Be the pie, West says, and you can break the cycle of despair that forces fast-food chains to devise ever sillier gimmicks (remember the KFC sunscreen?) to trap you.<\/p>\n<p>David Foster Wallace once criticized John Updike for his refusal to use brand names in his fiction: \u201cWhen his characters go out to eat fast food they go to Burger Bliss instead of Burger King, as if in fiction you can\u2019t use the regular product name.\u201d No one could accuse West of that kind of evasion. But if you look at the passage of <em>Rabbit Redux <\/em>to which Wallace refers, you\u2019ll see that West\u2019s poetic vision is essentially Updikean\u2014the two have more in common than you think. \u201cAmerica is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,\u201d Updike once wrote, and in\u00a0<em>Rabbit Redux\u00a0<\/em>his Burger Bliss is, despite its bullshit name, chockablock with the same false promises as West\u2019s fries:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>He stops at a corner grocery for a candy bar, an Oh Henry, then at the Burger Bliss on Weiser, dazzling in its lake of parking space, for a Lunar Special (double cheeseburger with an American flag stuck into the bun) and a vanilla milkshake, that tastes toward the bottom of chemical sludge.<\/p>\n<p>The interior of Burger Bliss is so bright that his fingernails, with their big mauve moons, gleam and the coins he puts down in payment seem cartwheels of metal. Beyond the lake of light, unfriendly darkness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>If he could only leave, he\u2019d see that the darkness isn\u2019t so bad.\u00a0But there he is, mired in faux-friendly\u00a0blandishments, drowning in that lake of light. Smelling all good and shit.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is Kanye\u2019s McDonald\u2019s poem a parable of class struggle? When I wrote in May about the seriocomic implications of a Burger King Spa opening in Helsinki, I thought I\u2019d pegged the most extraordinary fast-food story of the year. Reader, I blew it. In the past month alone, McDonald\u2019s has opened a \u201cMcDonald\u2019s of the Future\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13633],"tags":[24124,14345,2823,3127,24122,3156,154,20082,13858,615,1497,20474,7703,5658,99,7221,165,24123],"class_list":["post-101853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-tomfoolery","tag-burger-bliss","tag-capitalism","tag-class","tag-class-struggle","tag-close-readings","tag-communism","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-fast-food","tag-french-fries","tag-john-updike","tag-kanye-west","tag-katy-waldman","tag-kfc","tag-mcdonalds","tag-philip-roth","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-rabbit-redux"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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