Four Island

One of my myriad of strange hobbies is making what I call "shitpost music". It's a hard to define genre, but for me this takes the form of tracks that are generally 20-30 seconds long, featuring a lot of samples from various things mixed together in a bizarre and comical way. It's pretty much the audio equivalent of the kind of stuff I'd post on Twitter.

I haven't talked about it on this blog before, because I mostly did it between 2014 and 2018, when I was not updating Four Island. It's also fairly sophomoric at times (I mean, my stage name is The Third Vagina, so like what do you expect). Plus, I've fallen out with the people who used to inspire me to make this kind of thing.

However, I'm happy to say that after a seven year hiatus, I've released a new shitpost album: How To Knock Over A Laundromat (Part 1)! (link)

It was fun to work on a project like this again, even if it's not exactly "high art". I mean, maybe it's art you'd come up with when you're high. I've never been high but I've watched TV before. Anyway.

If you'd like to listen to it, here's an embedded player! You can also click through to see it and maybe even download it on Bandcamp.

Since it took so long to make this album, I thought it would be fun to write a track-by-track commentary post. I did put thought into it, despite how ridiculous it is. You can listen while you read, if you're interested!

First of all, I should explain the title and cover art. They're a reference to an inside joke with my friend Jett. We were speaking in funny voices one day, and ended up roleplaying as Mickey Mouse and Goofy. And for some reason, we decided that they were going to do a heist together in which they knock over a laundromat. But -- not in the way you think! The dynamic duo decided that they would literally pick up the building and turn it over on its side. It's probably only funny to us but I like it a lot. Thanks to my friend wheatcake for doing the drawing that's in the cover art!

Now let's get into the songs.

1. Ace of Wands

   This might be my favorite track on the album, and it's one of the newer ones, since it was made in 2025. There's two main samples here, the first of which is a Gabbie Hanna video I'm kind of obsessed with. I don't really know much about Gabbie Hanna -- I was exposed to this by a commentary Youtuber I watch -- but the way she speaks and moves in this is pure poetry. Something really tells me that she is "acting different". It's also kind of apropos for my first shitpost album in seven years! I am back, and yknow what, I'm a pretty different person compared to the me of seven years ago. You can hear me harmonizing with her when she says "I'm acting" in the track.

   The other main sample is from a trashy BL anime called Descendants of Darkness. It doesn't make any sense at all and the romance is pretty problematic, but it's also got some excellent voice acting. One episode takes place in a casino on a cruise, where someone is killing people and leaving tarot cards behind as a message. A victim is found with the Ace of Wands (hey, that's the track title!). We then get this legendary exchange:

   Princess

   The beginning. That is the Ace of Wands. It's a tarot card. It's the first card. It means the beginning.

   Woman with red hair (speaking really quickly)

   The beginning? What are you saying? You must be JOKING! Is somebody going to be murdered again? This cannot be happening!

   The way she says "joking" really sounds like "Joe King", like she over-pronounces the "o". It's very funny, and my friends and I say it all the time. I knew I had to sample it. This felt pretty apropos to include as the first track, since it's the beginning, the first track, it means the beginning.

2. Thanks to all of my subscribers, the people who have made this all worthwhile. It was with you that I waited in full expectation of my demise that one day I stepped through the doors of an abandoned Splash 'Em Out in southern Kentucky, a hack saw in one hand and a counterfeit euro in the other. It was your hands that I was holding when Mothula from The Legend of Zelda suddenly appeared from behind the rotting carcass of an empty Tide stick, and viciously attempted to vacate my senses. Alas, poor Yorik! I have never met thee. With fifteen spin attacks and a neat but inevitably fumbled kickflip off of a partially assembled hamper filled with polyester pants and Hawaiian shirts, I took down that demon and claimed the day in the name of Esther P. Jordans, a name I have made up (if it resembles the name of any person, living or dead, please let me know because that would be really random!).

   Okay, I really let this track title get away from me. To be honest, it doesn't really mean anything, aside from the fact that I really like The Legend of Zelda. And I talk too much.

   This is the oldest track on the album, and I probably made it back in 2019. Originally, this album was going to be a bit different from my previous work in that it was just going to be one track stitched together like a mixtape. The primary inspiration for that is M.I.A.'s Vicki Leekx, which I do actually sample on the next track. Anyway, I eventually decided that I wanted to split things up in a more natural way, especially since the mixtape version at one point just had a very long sample of Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You in it (which is a beautiful song but was not very interesting in the shitpost).

   I feel like this track exemplifies one of the purest forms of this genre, in that it's so frenetic and sample-heavy. It harkens back to previous works like 380 and I'm just doing this while my russian hw complies. This kind of track is one of the hardest to make, but I enjoy it a lot.

   We also see a few of the album's motifs make their first appearance here. This is an artifact of it originally being one long mixtape, but I think it ultimately helped make things feel cohesive. We've got MAD TV's Frank Caliendo playing John Madden and we've got Patti LaBelle's disastrous performance of This Christmas at the 1996 National Christmas Tree Lighting. And while you don't actually hear Stephen Fry or Hugh Laurie's voices, the sample of "You need a new ballcock" is from A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

3. 22:00

   This is the other part of the mixtape from 2019. The title is a reference to hakuna stigmata's 04:00, as well as this track's repeated cry of "Ten o'clock?!" It's also just an amusing contrast with the previous track's lengthy title.

   While less frantic than the previous track, 22:00 still packs a lot of different samples. You can feel the mixtape inspiration here, as it flows between the different sections. We start with Frank Caliendo again, a muddy snippet from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Nicki Minaj's Stupid Hoe, and then the Spongebob characters come in. This track heavily samples the episode Procrastination, where Spongebob puts off doing his boating school essay and eventually realizes that it's 10 o'clock and he's only written one word.

   Spongebob screaming "Ten o'clock?!" is the slowest part of the track. Whenever there's repetition in a shitpost, you walk a fine line between too few repetitions and too many. Hopefully I got the balance right here. I really like how ominous and pained his distorted cry sounds behind the sample from Vicki Leekx. Now we hear some more of those motif samples, including Hugh Laurie for real this time, as well as Frank Caliendo and Patti LaBelle again.

4. ass-eating repository (The Halls)

   Well, I told you it was sophomoric. "ass-eating repository" is one of those crude things I just randomly say, because it's funny. What does repository even mean in this instance? Like a Git repository?

   Like Ace of Wands, this track also has two main samples. First, we have the infamous "Serena ChaCha vs. Everyone" fight from RuPaul's Drag Race: Untucked. I was really into RPDR back in 2022/2023, and while I didn't make this track until 2024, I knew I wanted to include some drag queens arguing. There's some really iconic lines in this fight, like Alyssa Edwards's "Bitch sit your ass down and shut the hell up!" and Detox's "I've had it -- officially!", the latter of which I didn't even actually include.

   The other main sample is the backing track, which is from the soundtrack of a game called Shivers, and is called, well, The Halls. It's a bit of an inside joke between my brother Kevin and I. It's such a simple tune, but it does a great job encapsulating the atmosphere of the backrooms that it gets played in. Including it in the track automatically makes it funnier, to me. And isn't that what matters?

5. Best Youtuber Apology

   I'm lying. This is not the best youtuber apology. Colleen Ballinger's apology video features her playing a ukelele and singing a little song called Toxic Gossip Train about cancel culture and not actually disproving any of the allegations made against her. It is an utter trainwreck (pardon the pun) that I can't look away from. I know a lot of people are sick of even hearing her name, and I do not usually like Internet drama, but I am in awe of how spectacularly bad this is.

   I, of course, soup the song up quite a bit, and now you can get up and dance while she embarrasses herself! There's a bunch of other samples in here, my favorite of which is my friend Angel's rant about alcohol enemas. One time, when we were doing a Twitch livestream and playing a visual novel, she gave an impassioned speech about how dangerous alcohol enemas are. Then, a mutual friend of ours edited the speech so it sounded like it was in favor of alcohol enemas instead of against. Obviously Angel needs to apologize for saying something so negligent!!

6. Vagisil Commercial 1985 Colorized

   Here is where the Frank Caliendo samples come to a head. This track's anchor is a MAD TV sketch where John Madden does an ill-fated advertisement for Vagisil, a product he obviously does not use. I've found the John Madden sketches to be funny for a long time, and it's surprising that they never made it into my earlier shitpost albums.

   The backing track is from the soundtrack for the Pokemon Dream World, a website that acted as a companion to the generation 5 games, Black, White, Black 2, and White 2. I never actually played the Dream World, as I took a break from Pokemon between generations 5 and 6, which I regret because the Dream World was taken offline in 2014. I included this here 1) because it makes the track sound like such a serene advertisement, and 2) because I'm sort of part of an effort to recreate the Dream World for future fans to play.

   One sample I want to draw attention to is "So guys, what'll we do with this hole?" It's from Cardcaptor Sakura, in an episode where, well, there's a big hole. Tomoyo Daidouji's English voice actor kind of sounds like she'd forgotten how to do Tomoyo's voice, leading to this really funny line. I told my friends right away that I was going to sample it, and then I remembered I had a half-finished track about Vagisil absolutely waiting for something like this.

7. Cock Goblin

   This track's title is a reference to the list of banned words on the Nintendo 3DS. There's a lot of things on there that make sense, but then there's also items that seem unnecessarily specific, and which are already covered by more general filters. One of the most amusing ones, to me, is "cockgoblin". Like, a play on gobblin'? Or like the fantasy creature..? Why?

   I made this song back in 2019 for a collaboration with other artists on the "record label" I was a part of that focused on making shitpost music. I'm not with that label anymore, and I liked this track, so I figured it'd be a good fit on my new album several years later. I'm pretty sure real artists do stuff like that all the time, right?

   I can't really even explain why this track is funny. It's a sample of Jennie Garth and Michael McMillian from What I Like About You that kind of nosedives into complete nonsense. We get a callback to my previous album's > Getting Neighked <, and then it ends with Neil Cicierega's It's Gonna Get Weird, an unused theme song for Gravity Falls. This whole thing just sounds funny to me. Sometimes random nonsense works.

8. Boon city

   I love A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Everyone knows this. I've done long samples of them before in Marjorie Is Dead and existentialwave. This track features a snippet from them I've long wanted to sample:

   Stephen Fry

   Well, that, uh, represents quite a boon.

   Hugh Laurie

   Oh, an enormous boon.

   Stephen Fry

   Well we're always on the lookout for enormous boons.

   The backing track is a melody of my own composition! I had been listening to tracker music, and decided to download OpenMPT and make something myself. The result was quite chaotic but I think it goes well with the rest of the song.

9. anterior motion -- Obligatory track that will make everyone uncomfortable

   I'm not sure why I called this "obligatory"; looking through my back catalog, I don't really see many other tracks that have this kind of energy. :) is the most obvious, but Consider The Vaginal might count as well.

   The song is laid over top Crystal Castles's Empathy, edited to sound muddy and distant. We start with a sample from one of my current favorite things: The Summer Hikaru Died. He says "Impossible... How could you tell? I thought I was a perfect copy." TSHD heavily deals with both 1) what it means to have an identity, and 2) how hard it is to be gay. I thought it was a pretty accurate way to start the track.

   What follows is my distorted voice reading a poem I wrote earlier in the year about some personal issues I've been dealing with. I won't go into the details here, but if you listen closely you can probably pick out some key word, like "gay" and "I want my body back". I do feel like it was somewhat cathartic to make this track. And I put it on a shitpost album just to, as we say, "maybe everyone uncomfortable".

10. Kimi no "歯"

    It means "your teeth" in Japanese, written in a mixture of Latin letters and Kanji for some reason. It's a reference to Taste of Death by Mori Calliope, where she says "Kimi no the end", which I just find amusing. Mixing languages within one sentence is fun! Even though I did not actually do that here.

    Here's where the Sabrina the Teenage Witch samples were leading to! I have loved Sabrina since high school, and there's a handful of bits that I've always wanted to sample. The biggest is from the Rumor Mill episode, where Sabrina has to start a nasty rumor about herself (which will come true) in order to end a spell, and she decides to go with the rumor that she has no teeth. This culminates in a scene where Salem is the head of a group of gangsters, because that was the rumor Sabrina had started about him. One of the gangsters stands up and says "Hey guys. That Sabrina got no teeth." And then he just walks out, alongside the rest of them. It's beautiful.

    This also samples the episode Tick Tock Hilda's Clock, which is, bizarrely, about Hilda almost losing her biological clock, which would prevent her from ever having children. This is a show for teenagers, right? While Hilda's clock is missing, she behaves very erratically, including yelling "If I don't get that clock back soon, I'm going to off somebody!", which was sampled both here and in Best Youtuber Apology. My favorite line of hers from that episode, though, is "I'll be fine, I may just experience some IrrATIonAL MOmeNTs!"

    There's a handful of other fun samples in here, and then it ends with another favorite line from Sabrina. In Lost At C, Salem starts a business selling products for cats. At one point, he is flung across the room, and ends up in the kitchen. He sees a jar of peanut butter and says "Mmm, peanut butter? Interesting..." This is not the only time it's mentioned that he loves peanut butter!

    I also snuck in a couple of references to past shitpost albums! You can hear Sir That's Not My CD Drive (volume warning) right when things are getting really chaotic. I like that track a lot because it exemplifies my older style of nonsense that was just, loud and distorted. Also, I've used a sample of Nelly Furtado laughing from her song Bucket List on every one of my albums (except A S S E X I S T E N T I A L I S M), and this is where it landed on this album!

11. Pink the Evil CUNTRESS

    Another one of my favorite shows ever is Steven Universe. This track is pretty heavy with spoilers for both the main series and the movie.

    Reveal if you don't mind Steven Universe spoilers

    There's a character in that show named Pink Diamond, who is incredibly important to me and I and my friend Tooth will talk your head off about her for hours. While the show does do a lot to empathize with her struggle, at the very end they start demonizing the crap out of her for no reason. She's a very complex character and I think she deserved better. So, the title of the track is a jab at people villainizing her. And the bit at the end where Steven, her own son, calls her a war criminal.

    Pink Diamond's voice does not feature on this track, but instead we get Spinel, a character who was hurt by Pink's actions and does not like her. She sings a song called Other Friends which is actually quite a bop despite the fact that I don't like what it's saying. I've edited it to be clearer about what Pink Diamond really got up to during her happy ending: visiting Ram Ranch, of course.

    There's a couple of samples in here I've been excited to use. One is Pho King Badd Bhech by rapper and convicted felon Razzlekhan. What felony was she convicted of? Stealing millions of dollars from a bitcoin exchange. Jarvis Johnson did a video about her and her other music, which is really entertaining. The other song sample, which has a similar #GirlBoss energy, is Skinny Legend Anthem by Ava Louise, who Danny Gonzalez did a video about.

    Finally, we've got Kelsey Kreppel saying "That's true, that's true", which is an inside joke between me and my friend Angel. We don't talk about her husband.

12. Track 3

    The joke is that this isn't the third track. Haha.

    This is a pretty simple song. It's based on a little impromptu ditty that I started singing while livestreaming with Angel: "I spread the cream cheese on the toast. Then I throw away the toast," sung to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. We had a joke about the main character in the visual novel we were playing being keto, and I was like yeah he has a little song about eating cream cheese. And halfway through singing it I remembered that you don't eat bread if you're keto. Brilliant.

13. Nasa's Victory

    Okay it's kind of hard to explain the track title if you're not in the know. My friends and I have an inside joke about NASA giving people orchiectomies because they want to take photographs of spherical things with their Hubble telescope and it honestly makes no sense. I have nothing against NASA. I am not a flat earther writing diss tracks about Neil deGrasse Tyson like that one guy did. It's just funny to have random jokes sometimes.

    (I need to point out that autocorrect tried to change "orchiectomies" into "hysterectomies". Literally the opposite of what I meant.)

    I like ending with this track because, like track 2 (I am not typing that name out again), it's a hodgepodge of samples smushed together and edited into nonsense, rather than being anchored on one main sample. Shitpost music truly is art, huh. We've got Bob's Burgers, we've got Snapcube's Sonic '06 Real Time Fandub (honestly everyone needs to watch this), we've got Natalie Tran; the works! There's a bit of Nicole Richie from Great News singing "Whatcha gonna cheat with now, you genius? Now that I've gone and destroyed your pe-" and it gets stuck in my head every time I listen to this.

That's all there is! I hope you enjoyed the album, if you listened to it! I'm pretty proud of it, and I think it was worth spending all of that time working on it. Writing out this whole post has made me realize how much my shitpost style has evolved since the earlier albums. Anyway, thanks for reading my unnecessarily long commentary post about it! It really is difficult for me to be brief. :)