Without the benefit of radio play, name recognition, or a humming publicity apparatus, “Chinese Food”—as performed by perky tween singer Alison Gold and produced by Patrice Wilson—entered the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in late October 2013. The song captures the broad menu of Chinese American cuisine, rhyming chopsticks with potsticks. The video, which features Gold cracking open fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant (actually a Mongolian restaurant passing as a Chinese restaurant) and Wilson dressed in a panda costume, was viewed on YouTube one million times in twenty-four hours following its release. It was Wilson’s biggest success since Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” a 2011 single widely dubbed “the worst pop song of all time.”

At ARK Music Factory, which launched Black, and later at his own label, PMW (Pato Music World) Live, Wilson has established a reputation as pop music’s most notorious vanity publisher. For a fee, parents can buy a packaged deal—single, video, image consulting, the whole schmear—in hopes of launching their aspiring teen idol to superstar status. Wilson has been called out for exploiting rich kids. He’s been called a pedophile (in his videos he often appears, rather curiously, alongside a cast of otherwise-parentless child actors). But haters, it’s well known, are gonna hate. Patrice Wilson has managed to short-circuit the whole flywheel of cultural appreciation. Like Tommy Wiseau, the savant-ish writer/director/producer/star behind the cult film The Room, Wilson has proved that people will buy (and maybe even secretly like) things even if they profess to hate them. To paraphrase The Simpsons, people will show up just to boo something.

Less interesting than Wilson’s role as a business-savvy producer making music that subdivides the lowest common denominator is his apparent delight in doing so. Talking to Wilson over the phone, it quickly becomes clear that he’s not some rapacious producer debasing a medium that’s already been plenty debased. Instead, all his songs about eating Chinese food, Thanksgiving turkey, jumping rope, or the day of the week actually reflect his personality: giddy, guileless, and willfully silly to the point of being self-consciously stupid.

—John Semley

I. OLYMPIC HOPEFUL

THE BELIEVER: You grew up in Nigeria?

PATRICE WILSON: That’s correct. My mom is actually Irish British. She went to Nigeria, where she met my dad. My dad is Nigerian. But he went to college and grew up here in the States, in Iowa, but he moved back to Nigeria. He ran a big factory over there. But we’d go back and forth. We’d spend half a year in London, half a year in Nigeria.

BLVR: There seem to be a lot of intersecting cultural traditions, and looking at your résumé, a lot...