Pink Guy - Pink Season

With the year coming to an end soon, I wanted to quickly (yeah right) go over five albums outside metal that I just really want to talk about and recommend. Rather than try to mash them all into one post near the end of December, I think I’ll try to space them out between now and then as the year is coming to its close and is probably going to sneak up on me.

The first album I want to bring up is one that came out very early this year, Pink Season, by Pink Guy.

The musically inclined, but otherwise illiterate, character that has now more or less taken over the Filthy Frank Show had been teasing his second mixtape/album for much of 2016 as Frank seemed to be kind of slowing down, but still as filthy as ever. Pink Season has ended up seeming like a last hoorah for the Filthy Frank Show as George Miller seemingly quickly abandoned it to pursue his chillwave / ambient hip hop career under the Joji alias. With a number of Joji singles and a Joji EP released this year, alongside the Pink Seasonproject, it’s kind of highlighted an unfortunate observation. George is clearly in a space in which he’d rather produce serious, Joji music (and possibly has been for a while), but the career he’s been given a chance at has come much as a reward of his work in what he excels at more: Filthy Frank. I never begrudged him wanting to do Joji as well (though his sudden forsaking of his role as Filthy Frank has been disappointing). He has every right to express himself as Joji as well. The disappointment comes from how he’s leaving something he’s the best at to do something he’s just okay at. As the internet’s most disgusting purveyor of memes and offensive humor, he is excellent; as a chill, somber singer over atmospheric hip hop beats, he’s very average.

Pink Season, while a hard and weird thing to listen through from beginning to end, is full of good-bad comedy and very fun songs that deserve to be repeated, but not in public. Mostly comprised of Lil B level hip hop like the Donald Trump anthem and “FLEX LIKE DAVID ICKE”, the project contains a few bangers like “Furr”, “Pink Life”, and “Rice Balls” full of genuinely clever bars, along with weird ukulele tangents like “I Will Get a Vasectomy” and the viral uke-rap “STFU”. The album is diverse and enigmatic, and there’s hardly any guessing what comes next from song to song. A lot of the songs are from the show and revealing of how long George worked on this thing. The album features a parodic mockery of Blink 182 and a banjo intro that turns into an absurdly stupid and offensive racist rap in an offensively stereotypical southern accent, along with a host of other hilarious voices. It’s definitely not for the easily offended or the uptight who disallow the slightest bit of socially unacceptable behavior in the name of comedy, but for those who don’t get upset over hearing very obviously non-serious racist and sexist jokes that highlight the stupidity of the racist and sexist viewpoints they parody, Pink Season is a ton of fun.

I hope that George still does find satisfaction and success with his work as Joji, and perhaps after so much filth he just needs a break to do some chill shit. I’d certainly love a return of the Filthy Frank Show, but perhaps this unofficial hiatus is for the best to keep the show from turning stale or even ending it on a high note. As Pink Guy himself croons, “being edgy is okay, but the same ten jokes in a row that’s not okay, okay, okay”.