Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#95: Pink Guy – Pink Guy (2014)
MATT KELLY listens all the way through (so you don’t have to) to two of the most imbecilic records ever made. Shame on Pink Guy.
George Kusunoki Miller is a man of range if nothing else. As Filthy Frank he pioneered a gleefully insensitive, chaotic form of YouTube humour a few degrees south of even Tim And Eric that one couldn’t find on broadcast TV. These days as Joji he produces sappy, sentimental adult contemporary muzak for premature boomers such as ‘Glimpse Of Us’. It’s hard to think of two poles further apart and that he has found success with both is impressive.
Yet there is a third persona between these two, where Miller produced comedic music. Under the name Pink Guy (a supporting character from the Filthy Frank show) Miller here produces an album of rap music that at times threatens to make Onision sound like Nick Drake. The absolute bottom of the barrel being scraped here is typified by Peanut Butter. Over the most basic preset beat imaginable, Miller uses the comedy talent that transfixed the mid-10s online comedy scene to pen such witticisms as:
“Peanut butter on my balls let the dog lick it (x8)
Hey dog, you wanna lick my balls? Yeah you do
You can call it wrong I don’t really give a fuck
Got peanut butter with extra nuts
I heard dogs like to play with balls
So I let dogs play with my balls”
Ahahaha. So funny and satire. Meanwhile, I challenge you to find a 13-year-old who couldn’t do better.
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Because I’ve heard the defence of this is that it’s satire. See, Miller is a smart and talented guy and he knows that this is juvenile garbage, so that means it’s genius right? By making something really awful and stupid, he’s making fun of things that are awful and stupid. Or maybe he’s just made something awful and stupid. As we saw with Day Above Ground’s ‘Asian Girlz’, satire isn’t just saying something dreadful. Satire is inclusive of a perspective which makes fun of and offers counterpoints to the viewpoint it presents. Otherwise, it isn’t satire of the bad thing; it IS the bad thing.
After a few verses implied to be directed at LGBT people, on ‘Kill Yourself’ Miller presents us with this chorus:
“Kill yourself, please please kill yourself
You should really kill yourselves
Please please kill yourself
You should really kill yourselves”
Ahahahaha. So funny and satire.
On ‘Balls’, a dead computer voice intones the following:
“These bitches wanna suck my balls
These bitches wanna suck my balls
These bitches wanna suck my balls
These bitches wanna suck my balls
Hello ladies, do you like balls
Give me pussy
And I will give you balls”
Ahahahhaa. It is so funny and satire. Step aside Alexander Pope, move over Jonathan Swift. Here comes a guy repeating lines about bitches sucking balls over and over.
On ‘Ladies Man’, the verse Miller raps is as follows:
“They call me Michael Vick
Because after a hot summer day
I like to come back to my house
And break my dog’s neck
I get more pussy than animal control
I keep it real hot
Like the spices in my asshole
Roses are red and violets are blue
Can I see your pussy?
I shot a boy yesterday
But I was in Florida
So it was okay
What do you call a girl with no legs?
Disabled”
Ahahaha. So funny and satire. This is the work of a 22-year-old man.
I get it if you were 13 when you first heard this and thought it was the height of comedy but if you’re coming back to this in your 20s I struggle to understand how you think this is anything other than regrettable, embarrassing garbage as someone who can do so much better just says “pussy” and “balls” over and over against farty little beats too undeveloped to pass for D4L demos.
Filthy Frank worked but there were concepts and occasionally actual points to the sketches, plus a lot of nuance and tone in how Joji voiced the character in conjunction with his physical delivery. Without any of that context, we just have a guy strumming a ukelele and singing:
“Do you know why you’re lonely?
It’s cause you’re fat and gay”
Ahahahaha. So funny and satire.
Now Joji can rap. He has a nice flow over the zesty little piano-sprinkled beat of ‘Ramen King’ and when he keeps it clean and writes an actually satirical ode to fast food with ‘Tribute To Ronald’, his potential as MC and producer is evident. Except there’s too little of that and too much of ‘Gibe De Pusi Boss’, which is five minutes of Miller incessantly saying “Give me the pussy boss”.
Ahahahaa. So funny and satire.
The kind of thing you thought of making when you were 15, but never got around to for which your adult self is eternally thankful. It’s incredible that Joji continues to succeed in such diverse fields and styles – it’s miraculous that his reputation survives the existence of this.
AND…
#96: Pink Guy – Pink Season (2017)
You know for a moment I considered writing this review with the word “pussy” in every sentence multiple times in order to recreate the experience of listening to his album but I didn’t do it because I realised it wouldn’t be funny and might make people uncomfortable or come to negative conclusions about me.
That sentence is essentially all you need to know about this album, but I’ll go on. One of the points of this list is that I am actually listening to all these awful records in-depth, multiple times, not just listening for 30 seconds and tossing off a one-liner. This time though, I was one and done. There was nothing to think about or revisit or marvel at. It’s a shallow, sad, joyless, tedious, one-note, no-joke affair running to 35 tracks and 81 minutes. They are almost all childish drivel as a 25-year-old man apparently using Frooty Loops for the first time endlessly squeaks things like “Sometimes I play with my willy and the white stuff comes out.”
As with the first record, this is hilarious satire according to defenders. Please explain what the horrifying glimpse of child abuse that is ‘Please Stop Touching My Willy’ is satirising. This is just an exhausted edge lord comedian who is tired and out of material inhaling his own farts, and farting the already farted farts out again into your eardrums. “Farting the already farted farts into your eardrums” could almost legitimately pass for a lyric on this album if it wasn’t so classy.
Do you want to hear about someone fingering Donald Trump’s asshole on ‘Gays For Donald’? Do you want to hear the awful, awful production of ‘I Have A Gun’ as Miller delivers the “hilariously satirical” verse:
“Oooh I shot kids in the preschool
I shot five in the preschool yeah
I shot five kids from my high school yeah
I shot five kids from my college”
and then rants and screams about jacking off to Nickelodeon over Sam’s Club trap beats on ‘Nickelodeon Girls’?
WHO LIKES THIS? WHO IS THIS FOR? WHO ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU? HOW ARE YOU? HOW COULD YOU? WHY WOULD YOU?
Contemplating the sort of person who listens to the vile, dehumanising ‘Hot Nickel Ball On A Pussy’ and nods their head like “Yep this is funny and sounds good and I would like to hear it again” blows my mind. What a hilarious satire it is in ‘Dora The Explora’ when he tells a four-year-old to bring her “Mexican ass over here” so she can bounce on his dick. Granted, the delivery on the deadpan ukelele-only ‘Dog Festival Directions’ is amusing as he advises listeners on how to eat dog in China, but it’s racist. (On top of this, as a Mandarin speaker the way he mispronounces ?? bothers me every time.)
And yes, there are glimpses of something meaningful on a track like the indie pop of ‘Help’ which could be interpreted as a sincere glimpse at what can happen to someone who becomes trapped in this vortex of internet filth, but even that feels like a cruel joke when the creator is creating that vortex of internet filth. And no it isn’t well produced. It all sounds so fucking bad with simple standard-issue beats and arrangements, annoying cheap instrumentation and the biggest lack of melodic imagination I’ve seen on an album this long.
I suspect Miller agrees with me about this record, retiring the Pink Guy persona a year after its release, stating that he was no longer enjoying this direction. He has also periodically removed some of these songs from streaming, suggesting regrets, and has moved on to releasing songs that make Dan Hill’s ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ sound aggressive and relevant.
Not funny, not clever, not listenable, not satire. It’s not even shocking; the constant repetition of lines about sucking dicks, homophobic, racist humour I thought we’d left behind in the ’90s (inclusive of F slurs), the ever-flowing torrent of sexual violation as comedy, the imagination-free lizard-brain vulgarity in place of wit – within minutes it’s as predictable as the tides and sooooooo boring. Irredeemable, reprehensible idiocy.
