White Girls Rap Chris Brown's "Look At Me Now", Savagely Assault Themselves

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Look at them now; look at them now; look at them now--they're subverting implicit stereotypes about race and gender! In the last month, Chris Brown's "Look At Me Now" has gone from a hilarious street single by a disgraced-and-then-undisgraced ex-teen-star to the progenitor of an unlikely YouTube trend: White women trying to spit Busta Rhymes's Busta-Rhymesian verse. The first and best of these came from a trained singer named Karmin and her fiance/hypeman, who recently got an appearance on Ellen (and possibly some paper) for their troubles.

This one video was only the beginning; there are now pages upon pages of covers, all of them filmed with webcams, all of them insisting first and foremost upon their white-girlness. (In case you were interested--by which I mean, in case you are or have been a Culture Studies major--Karmin and fiance are also the first YouTube hit for "look at me now black girl." "look at me now asian girl," on the other hand, picks up some new [and Asian!] contenders.)

This is just how YouTube memes travel; if Thomas Edison had invented YouTube at the turn of the century, instead of the movie camera, the first major film might have still been The Great Train Robbery, but the second, third, and fourth would have been Awesome Train Robbery, Look at this Train Robber, and White Girl Robs from Train.

Now, look; I'm a man of the world, and I realize that some people find this really creepy, because Chris Brown viciously assaulted some famous woman like a million years ago. But they're the same squares who found it off-putting when famous, pregnant actresses got really into lip-syncing "Cease to Exist" back in the late sixties, or that time those adorable dogs painted the Michael Vick mural.