In what’s one of the meatier publicity stunts in recent hours, General Mills’ Hamburger Helper, a sodium-packed supermarket favorite since 1971, has released a hip-hop mixtape called Watch The Stove, featuring such tracks as “In Love With The Glove” and “Food For The Soul.” Officially, the five-song collection is credited to Lefty, the product’s mascot, that creepy, four-fingered glove with the squeaky voice and the smiley face where the palm ought to be. But General Mills actually farmed this project out to real-life Twin Cities artists, including Dequexatron X000, along with students from the McNally Smith College of Music.
Though a Hamburger Helper-themed mixtape seems like a golden opportunity to underachieve, the participants in Watch The Stove made an obvious effort to create listenable, well-crafted tracks that could actually pass for real music, were it not for those copious lyrical references to a grocery store product. And their efforts have not gone unappreciated:
In addition to the downloadable mixtape, there are also two music videos that have been created for “Crazy” and “She’s In Love With The Glove.” The latter is a glorified Hamburger Helper ad disguised as a hypnotic slow jam, but the uptempo “Crazy” (no relation to the Gnarls Barkley track) doesn’t dance around its motives: “Some call me crazy. That might be true. ‘Cause if you take my Hamburger Helper, I don’t know what I might do.” As of this writing, a Manwich mixtape doesn’t seem to be in the planning stage, nor has Dinty Moore even talked to any good producers yet.