Miles Thirst is this character that Sprite seems to have invented to shore up sales among young black people and white teenagers.

It’s sad when you can look at an advertising campaign and point out its motivation like that, but it’s so painfully obvious. Now, here’s the thing: it’s not just the weird, very white-suburban praise of hip-hop that seems to offensive to me — “If lovin’ hip-hop is wrong, I don’t wanna be right!” — nor the obvious patronizing that goes along with such a statement made, after all, with a big SPRITE sign in the background… ie. Is there anything better than hip-hop? Yes, there is: SPRITE! Drink SPRITE!

But what weirds me out even more is the Hip-Hop translator in the flash utility you can access on this page. It’s one thing — and a fine thing, I think — to investigate and notate contemporary slang for a dictionary, but it’s quite another to make a hip-hop dictionary, especially one that talks, and that has a black character translating the lingo of hip-hop into not just standard English, or equivalent white youth-culture English, but into stodgy 1950s-sounding white suburban English… all for the sake of selling their tooth-rotting cola.

But hey, go judge for yourself. As for me, I haven’t ever seen a can of Sprite in Korea, so it’s not as if I can protest in any tangible way except to post this.