The Overwhelming Consensus Is That the Hamburger Helper Mixtape Is Fire

As the dust settles from another April Fools’ Day, we’re beginning to see how companies will fare after their often ill-advised social media stunts. An Asian grocery store has some cleanup to do after advertising exotic meats like panda, minke whale and tiger meat and then doing a bait-and-switch, while Google quickly pulled its dumb “mic drop” Gmail gag. Pornhub saw better results by becoming “Cornhub” for the day, featuring hot, corn-centric content, but they’ve got nothing on the fire that is the Hamburger Helper mixtape Watch the Stove.

Hamburger Helper and Lefty—the company’s anthropomorphic, four-fingered oven-glove mascot—took aim at Kanye and Jay Z’s Watch the Throne and dropped the five-track mixtape on the unsuspecting masses on Friday, hitting them with beefy, cheesy tracks like “Feed the Streets,” “Food For Your Soul,” and “In Love With The Glove.” Posted on Soundcloud, the album features a parental advisory sticker for “Delicious Content.” And people are eating it up.

“I mean I’m thinking about the Hand, the meat sizzlin’ in the pan / I know when I’m in the jam, I know that burger gon’ go ham,” Lefty raps on “Crazy.” On the Future-esque “Feed The Streets,” “cookin’” refers to the actual cooking of food. “You catch me at the stove, I was whippin’ up a bowl / I just came back from the store, five-star restaurant at home.”

The consensus: It’s fire. Everyone from Billboard to Bloomberg to the Los Angeles Times is astounded by its quality and its success. The Root boldly called it “the best mixtape of the year.”

The surprisingly good mixtape comes from a three-month collaboration between General Mills and producers Taylor Madrigal (credited as DJ Tiiiiiiiiiip on Watch the Stove) and Bobby Raps. General Mills, based in Minneapolis, chose to work with local producers to keep it real, according to the Los Angeles Times. Madrigal and Raps also reached out to students at the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul for some additional firepower. Hamburger Helper has even put together a music video for “Crazy” and suggested that more are on the way.

It isn’t the brand’s first foray into rap culture. As early as 2013, Hamburger Helper had adopted the tone of a teenage Odd Future 4chan Stan, casually referring to followers as “bae” and boxes of Helper as “swag.” Back in October, the @Helper twitter account tweeted a screenshot of a supposedly fictitious song by “Drake & Helper” called “Hotlean Beef,” along with a picture of “1-800-HOTLEANBEEF” mimicking Drake’s own artwork. After joking around with Twitter followers about a mixtape, they decided to pull the trigger.

The result is hot as hell, putting basically every other thrown-together joke mixtape to shame—along with a whole lot of more earnestly released mixtapes. Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps inspired by Watch the Stove, on April 1 MC Hammer tweeted a selfie of him posing with the Washington, DC Spanish chef Jose Andre, saying, “Up all night having a blast Executive Producing @chefjoseandres New Spanish Hip Hop Album !!!!”

If that’s for real, they better be careful. The throne is currently occupied by a talking oven mitt.