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The Toilet Bowl Cleaners

Poop Poop Poop Poop Song

The biggest hit of Matt Farley's toilet-humour band The Toilet Bowl Cleaners: a two-minute song named for the word children shout at smart speakers, and by his estimate streamed millions of times on Amazon Music.

By korczis 2 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

The Toilet Bowl Cleaners made Poop Poop Poop Poop Song as pure novelty, comedy for the youngest listeners: humorous, playful and gleefully irreverent. Its title tells you most of what you need to know, and that is deliberate.

Song Summary

The Toilet Bowl Cleaners are not a band but one of about eighty names under which the Massachusetts songwriter Matt Farley releases music through his own label, Motern Media. The band sings almost only about one subject. Farley explained the idea to Connecticut Public Radio: there are millions of songs about love but not many about poop, and he figured that children type the word into search bars and could discover him that way. BuzzFeed News reported in 2022 that this song is by far his most popular, streamed, he estimates, about eight million times on Amazon Music.

Musical Breakdown

No source we found describes how this recording sounds, so this review does not describe its parts. It runs just under two minutes and opens its album, The White Album (With Brown and Yellow Stains), released in 2012. BuzzFeed found Farley’s songs surprisingly good and spread across a broad range of styles; Wikipedia notes that most of his output is piano and voice. Press play and you will hear the rest.

Concepts in Focus

The Toilet Bowl Cleaners are a stage persona taken to its logical end: an invented band for one topic, beside others for birthdays, cities and people’s names. The persona lets Farley be ridiculous on purpose, and even surprise: the band’s eleventh album, Mature Love Songs, contains no poop at all.

The title is the song’s hook in a modern sense. A hook usually lives in the music, but Farley’s lives first in the words people search for, a practice radio called search engine optimisation. Once smart speakers arrived, BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos found, the searchers were often children shouting at Alexa: Farley says 80 per cent of his Amazon Music earnings come from poop songs. Compare Kelis – Sugar Honey Iced Tea, whose title hides its rude word in a euphemism.

Artistic Context

Farley, born in 1978, has released more than 26,000 songs, many of them very short, and has made low-budget films. He was recording around 200 songs a month by 2015. He rejects the label of spammer.

Impact and Reception

NPR reported in 2022 that 90 per cent of the plays of such songs came from Amazon Music, and Farley’s Amazon income shot up around 2017, after a cheaper Echo Dot arrived and its price was cut. By 2024, Wikipedia records, this band and its sister act had earned him about $469,000. Listen once, and imagine a five-year-old asking for it on repeat.

Learn from this track

Introductory

What you will learn

  • Explain how a song's title can be written to be searched for, and what that says about how listeners find music on streaming services and smart speakers.
  • Describe a stage persona that is a whole invented band, and why one songwriter might release music under dozens of names.
  • Discuss whether a song written to be found can also be a good song.

Listening guide

  1. the title The one word repeated four times: the word Farley reasoned children type into search bars, and later say to Alexa.
  2. the voice Matt Farley himself behind the band name; most of his catalogue is piano and voice, though no source we found describes this recording's instruments.
  3. the whole song Under two minutes long, like many of Farley's very short songs, each built around what people search for.

Concepts in this track

stage persona

10 tracks

An invented identity that a musician performs as: a mask, a character, a cartoon band or a pair of robots. A persona lets artists play with fame and image, keep their private selves hidden, and make the character part of the music's meaning.

hook

99 tracks

The short, memorable idea a song is built to stick with you: a sung phrase, a riff, a synth line. A hook is designed for repetition and usually arrives early.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. Farley says he is the greatest songwriter of all time and is hurt when he is called a spammer. Where is the line between search-engine songwriting and spam?
  2. Most of this song's listeners are probably children asking a smart speaker for a rude word. Does it matter who a song's audience is?
  3. The Toilet Bowl Cleaners' eleventh album has no poop songs at all. What does a persona allow a songwriter to do that his own name does not?

References

  1. BuzzFeed News. Kids Yell 'Poop' At Alexa, And These Musicians Profit (2022). Article
  2. Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR). Digital-savvy musician earns money from silly songs. Interview
  3. NPR. When kids yell 'Alexa, play poop!' you'll hear these songs (2022). Interview
  4. Wikipedia. Matt Farley. Encyclopedia
  5. MusicBrainz. Poop Poop Poop Poop Song, recording. Database

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