If You Thought "My Humps" Couldn't Get Any Dumber the Magical Pooping Glitter Baby Unicorn People Would Like To Prove You Wrong
When you have written about pop culture as long as I have, you amass a long public record of being egregiously wrong about a lot of things. Over the course of my twenty six years in the business, for example, I have gushed effusively about the God-like genius of both Kanye West and Louis C.K, both of whom turned out to be creeps.
I was once a loyal Entourage fan and I enthusiastically praised the Black Eyes Peas during the Bridging the Gap phase of its career. Then they added Fergie to the group and dumbed things down on a level never imagined possible and I went from evangelizing on the group’s behalf to being deeply embarrassed by their mere existence.
Will.I.Am became rich and famous writing and producing jams that are as mind-numbingly, brain-bogglingly, almost inconceivably stupid as they are catchy. And they are VERY catchy.
This was entirely too much monkey business for me to get involved with.
I watched and listened with mortification as Will.I.Am and his cohorts single-handedly made pop culture stupider and tackier, and not in a fun way either. Yet nothing could have prepared me for “My Humps.”
“My Humps” was supposed to be a sexy song about a seductive vixen luxuriating in her bold, unabashed sensuality but its lyrics feel like they were written by space aliens with only a vague, fuzzy, incomplete understanding of human behavior and human sexuality or some manner of Artificial Intelligence.
The Grammy Award-winning number three smash celebrates the female form using language better suited to medical journals. When Fergie brags about her humps, she’s referring to the sexy curves of breasts, hips and butt but I can’t help but think about famous humps throughout history, most notably the humpback of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
There’s nothing wrong with being a hunchback or a humpback. I myself have a formidable hump born of long decades of terrible posture and while it’s nothing to be ashamed of it’s not something I would brag about in a lascivious R&B song either.
When I think of lumps, meanwhile, my mind understandably goes to lumps of the cancerous and malignant variety. I think about those horrible little bumps that indicate that you, a loved one, or a pet might only have months to live. I certainly do not think of the curvatures of sexy women.
I at least took solace that “My Humps” was as bad and as tacky as it could possibly get, that it represented a nadir for pop culture and western civilization that could never be challenged, let alone topped.
I was wrong. Dear god, was I ever wrong.
The Black Eyed Peas were recently in the headlines when BMG, the company that owns the rights to “My Humps”, sued the makers of Poopsie Slime Surprise toys for copyright infringement to the tune of ten million dollars, arguing that the unauthorized replication devalues “My Humps”, that it robs it of its fundamental dignity and renders it somehow coarse and rude, even distasteful.
Instead of soulful, meaningful, socially conscious wordplay like, “"Whatcha gon' do with all that junk? / All that junk inside your trunk? / I'ma get, get, get, get you drunk / Get you love drunk off my humps” the jingle cynically substitutes vulgar nonsense like, “Whatcha gon' do with all that poop? / All that poop, woo, woo / I'ma poop, poop, poop, poop, oh yeah.”
Using a smutty, tacky ode to boobs, butts and hips to sell toys for children feels like a colossal error in judgment but it’s only the beginning where the Poopsie Slime Surprise people are concerned.
What is Poopsie Slime Surprise? According to People, it’s “unicorn figurines that poop glittery slime.” The offending commercial features four disturbingly sexualized baby unicorns with skimpy outfits and bare midriffs shimmying and singing suggestively about how proud they to possess so much magical glittering feces and how central unusual excrement is to their day to day lives.
“Gonna get loopy off my poopy” the shit-obsessed horned horses tease nonsensically before promoting “Poop on” as a core philosophy.
I know that children are obsessed with poop as well as unicorns and glitter but the commercial and the toys both seem wildly inappropriate and offensive. You don’t need to be a prude to think that a commercial like that has no place on the airwaves.
Here’s the thing. The commercial is clearly a knock off of “My Humps.” But I suspect that the toy makers will argue that their commercial is a parody of “My Humps” and parody is protected as free speech under the first amendment. Noted perverts Larry Flynt and Luther Campbell fought for our right to make glittering feces-themed parodies of already idiotic dance-rap idiocies.
So while the commercial may be dumb and terrible and offensive it might still be protected speech. The Black Eyed Peas may be screwed in that respect although even in this context I have a hard time feeling sorry for them, as I’m sure Will.I.Am can dry his tear with a handkerchief made out of one hundred dollar bills coated in diamonds.
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