1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear

#62: Bart Baker – Greatest Hits (2022)

Even MATT KELLY has his limits, and he’s reached them with this abominable musical “satire” which redefines tastelessness.

WARNING: DO NOT READ.

Look, I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll give you a sentence. When you read that sentence, you can make a decision about whether you want to continue reading. Are you ready? Bear in mind you may not even want to read the sentence. This is your last chance to stop. Okay, here comes the sentence.

There is a song on this record called ‘Pussies’ about a man who gets an erection when he inhales his cat’s farts.

Are you still there? I sure hope not. Because if that didn’t clear the room, I’m not sure I want to be in the company of those who stayed. They may be Bart Baker fans.

Ten years ago Baker was a huge presence on YouTube, king of the music parodies, a gross-out Weird Al. But God, has this aged like milk. Mixed with vinegar. Left behind a radiator. In an irradiated shack in the Mojave desert.

There’s some genuinely stomach-churning material here whether it’s a paedophile Santa singing about the contents of his sack while trying to rape Justin Bieber, or the appallingly transphobic ‘Used To Be A Guy’ which is so grotesque I don’t even want to describe the horrors lurking in its lyrics.

Naughtiness and irreverence are a key part of the parody genre and shock humour certainly has its place in the style. But the masters do it with wit and precision whereas Baker just hammers the tasteless sex comedy button over and over, and also has a troubling tendency to punch down.

And this collection doesn’t even contain his most hated song, the infamous ‘Stupid Hoe’. Never fear, it does contain ‘Cock Cakes’ wherein Rihanna gorges on penis-shaped cakes till she shits and vomits while Chris Brown beats her.

It’s hard to remember that this is intended to be comedy – perhaps it could’ve been with a sharper delivery such as you might find on South Park. As it is though, songs like these have me questioning my position on freedom of artistic expression.

There’s an occasional flash of competence – the Selena Gomez impersonator is quite good and it approaches funniness with the amusing parody of ‘Little Mix’s Hair’ which depicts the girls trying to escape from a washed-up Sean Paul who wants to feature on the song. However, these blips of quality do not compensate for a tsunami of shit so uncomfortable and unfunny (e.g. the “hahaha suicide is funny” parody of Zayn and Taylor’s ‘I Don’t Want To Live Forever’). I actively want to stop writing about it. So I’m going to. Fuck this.