A former Vice comedian, i.e., nigh-guaranteed to make the Controversy Index…
[Video]
[4.00]
Alex Clifton: Millennial dadaist humour regarding mental illness and the impending destruction of our future distilled into a two-minute song. I’m not entirely sure I like it, but it is certainly a Big Mood.
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Every time I listen to “Jesus Is The One (I Got Depression),” I’m torn between thinking that it’s masterful satire about the intersection of race and mental illness, or that it’s just here for shits and gigs. On one hand, we get surprisingly blunt social commentary. Some early lines hint at ethnic/racial oppression (“Free Palestine,” “This is the trap game Abraham Lincoln”), but then Fox gets even blunter: “My show got canceled because white folks don’t trust me.” (Jokes are supposed to get less funny the more you hear them, but I will never not audibly cackle at “I wanna get a whip and crash it into white-owned businesses.”) However, there are too many references to Betty White’s premature death, dipping balls into Thousand Island dressing, and Dorito dust dick for me to take him seriously. Is he trying to raise awareness of depression in communities of color–where mental illness is more difficult to talk about–by making a joke out of it? Is he just trolling us? I may never decide, but one thing is for sure: this is endlessly more listenable than Julia Michaels and Selena Gomez.
[7]
Hannah Jocelyn: The title is just a reworded Brockhampton lyric, but that’s the least of this thing’s problems. Making “Free Palestine” an ironic ad-lib — though Fox insists it’s sincere — helps no one on any side of anything. The last line’s generic gross-out humor deflates any genuine jokes. This whole song is made for the Chapo Trap House subreddit to recite the lyrics line by line. Looking forward to more of these dumb collaborations between Twitter pundits and producers until Lauren Duca and Pi’erre Bourne release “Your Neck Will Be Broken (Watch Your Back) ft. Pod Save America” a year late.
[2]
Thomas Inskeep: So these assholes are needlessly mocking both mental illness and Christianity just for fun, and then adding in as much random vulgarity as possible? Yeah, fuck these idiots, and fuck this shit.
[0]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: It gets old quick, and the humor is only really funny in the context of it being a freestyle, but I think it’s important to consider how few songs approach mental health in a way that’s similar to how countless people do so on the internet. It explains why this is so popular, and that’s really the big takeaway.
[5]
Katie Gill: This is an objectively stupid meme song, but the line about Betty White made me laugh harder than anything else I’ve heard in the past few weeks so sure, it’s getting a [7].
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: I have no idea if Zack Fox is funny or not. All I know is that when he immediately stopped the pedestrian walkabout beat made for him by Kenny Beats, and started rambling about how this was the Abraham Lincoln 16 bars ago, I laughed. I guess that’s the point.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I’m revealing my age, which is roughly twice that of the target audience, but back in my day this would at least come with a Flash video on Albino Blacksheep.
[3]
Kylo Nocom: Never before has a song come pre-packaged with a “hoes mad” reaction GIF! This isn’t fun to listen to, let alone funny; it sounds exactly like what you’d expect a cash-in on Twitter comedian humor to be. It’s an Adult Swim rap potpourri of non sequiturs (“I put my dick in a bag of Doritos” is the only line the kids on Tik Tok care about from this song, bar maybe the chorus), “ironic” misogyny (for how much longer must we suffer men talking about how horny they are and pretend this is humor?), and general cornballery (the entire opening is just awkward). Zack Fox’s voice cracks make him sound like he’s just complaining on the mic, which suits the whole misanthropic irony vibe, but it’s not attractive in the slightest. I long for the day we send all these online funnymen to the moon, where they can all talk about how avant-garde Tim Heidecker and Eric Andre are or something.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Accept this song as a hip-hop “Valley Girl” — a parody of airheadedness recorded for and by airheads.
[3]