Upsetting Day: Charmin's Toilet Tunes

Advertising is hard, but no one has a harder job than the people who need to make toilet paper cool. It's the least cool paper product. Brawny can make you want to fuck their mascot, but toilet paper can't just slap a hot lumberjack on their package and hope for the best.

The marketing team at Charmin looked at "how do we make toilet paper fuck" from every possible angle and came up with one answer. music. "Surely music will make people horny for our toilet paper," they said. If it made teen girls horny for Ed Sheeran, it can do anything! So, in 2014 they turned the Hard Rock Cafe into the soft rock cafe and had Kenny G play a free smooth jazz concert for anyone interested in toilet paper, which is hopefully everyone.

This taste of fame went to their heads. We don't need to hire Kenny G; we need to become Kenny G. Charmin toilet paper said. In 2021 Charmin dropped their premier EP, Toilet Tunes. Right now, it's digital only, but they might press some vinyl LP's to sell at concerts and stuff.

This initial album drop included only five songs: "Rollin Rolls," "Sweet Cheeks," "Derriere Affair," "Move Your Bon Bon," and "Big Family." My immediate question is, of course, what is the song "Big Family" about? All of these songs are in some way about butts or toilet paper, and one is about a big family. What is that family doing exactly?

Unfortunately, "Big Family" and "Move Your Bon Bon" are both in Spanish, and I wasn't able to locate lyrics I could translate anywhere. However, with my limited knowledge of Spanish, I was able to translate "Charmin super mega rolls, my family, more!" So it's probably the tender ballad of a large family on the journey to acquire enough toilet paper to sustain their lifestyle.

"Sweet Cheeks" appears to be about pressing your Charmin clean butt to another person's also clean butt. Aw, do they think people have sex by gently touching their butt cheeks together? It's almost adorable in its innocence.

These songs are fabulous at employing a thick thesaurus to discover every word that means butt but isn't. They never say poop, only allude to its absence. It's an absolute master class on writing a pop song about toilet paper while disgusting as few potential customers as possible. What I'm saying is I'm starting to appreciate the craft of toilet paper songs.

When I put the lyrics in parenthesis, I want you to know that it means someone is coming in and whispering them in a sultry voice. There's a backup dancer somewhere in Brooklyn who got paid to whisper "derriere." I hope they told her she was working on Sir Mix A Lot's comeback album and that she never learns the truth.

You also have to respect the cringy use of slang. Goals, feels, shookuth, hype... all phrases I didn't realize were so firmly uncool. Once a bear famous for having toilet paper stuck to its butt raps those words, they're over. Wait, did I not mention yet that the credited lyricist for these fine songs are the Charmin bears?

No, they don't sing the song. That would be ridiculous. Bears can't sing, but my God, can they compose! No one wanted to take the credit for writing this work? They were willing to give all the credit to the fictional bears? And why did Charmin bother to say that the bears wrote it, but not that they performed or produced it? It's wild to claim the bears wrote it but somehow wilder to say “yeah they wrote it, but they didn't have the vocal range we were looking for to do the actual recording, unfortunately.”

The Charmin website has a listed roster of the bear family, and I think they could believably cover all of the parts. There's a mother, father, daughter Amy, and two sons, Dylan and Bill, so assuming just one of those sons can rap, they're all set to be the Partridge Family of toilet paper. That's a huge missed opportunity on Charmin's part. Why would a non-toilet bear artist not want to take credit for lyrics like this? The VH1 Behind the Music of Toilet Tunes is going to be fascinating.

I can only imagine that Toilet Tunes was a massive success because in the cutthroat modern music industry, you don't get to make a second EP if your first one flops. That's right, Toilet Tunes, Vol. 2 dropped in 2022. This time Charmin has a clear goal in mind. They needed to get the teens interested in their toilet tunes. You know how teenagers famously make the decisions for what toilet paper households use. They'll go to their parents and be like, "Mom, please, I'm begging you, the Charmin bears get me like no one else. That ultra strong hype is all for reals!"

In order to successfully launch Charmin's music career this time, they went straight to TikTok with their hopeful new hit, "Charmin Slide." Olivia Rodrigo wishes she got the kind of promotional budget Charmin put into the Charmin Slide. They paid tons of prominent TikTokers to dance to it, but even JoJo Siwa doing the Charmin Slide and revealing that she owns a toilet covered in her own face in the process could not make the song cool. Only 697 of TikTok's one billion users have ever used the sound.

It's kind of a shame that TikTok couldn't get Toilet Tunes Volume 2 to the top of the charts because I think it's Charmin's most creatively fulfilling work. You can see the growth from Toilet Tunes Volume 1. There's a lot of innovation in the song "Drop It."

For one thing, running to the bathroom to "drop a beat" is cool new slang that makes up for all the words they took away from us. "Drop It" is also one of the longer toilet songs, although all of the songs on Toilet Tunes Volume 2 are at least a full minute. Toilet Tunes Volume 1 only contained thirty second songs looped to be a full minute. If Charmin kept doubling their song length for subsequent albums, they could have a "Freebird" length toilet tune by roughly Volume 5. By Volume 9, each song would be as long as Conan The Barbarian, the standard hotdog unit of measuring time, and by volume 25, it would take a full year to listen to a single song about smooshing clean butts with your lover.

Two EPs of music devoted to toilet paper, and of course their TikTok remixes, was more toilet paper based music than I ever thought I needed to hear, but somehow I knew there was a missing piece of this puzzle. I did some music journalism and found the lost Toilet Tune. Back in 2019, Charmin produced a song called "Charmin Booty Smile," which was not good enough for Toilet Tunes.

People hated "Charmin Booty Smile" so much there's a forum full of people trying to decipher some sort of way to contact Charmin directly and ask them to please make it stop. They were so desperate to speak to a manager about this it sounds like they were worried "Charmin Booty Smile" was the siren song that would lure them to their deaths. Charmin heard the desperate cries of their customers and responded, "this pleases me."

For some reason, the Charmin bears aren't proud of their early work, but I feel like it provides context for their growth as artists. Going from something so literal like "Charmin Booty" to something more classically metaphorical like "Drop It" is a vast evolution of style. They learned that people find too many direct references to the butt upsetting. They upped their production value. Most importantly, they learned to ignore the cries of everyone begging them not to do this.

You have to admire Charmin's tenacity. They asked in 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 if people wanted to hear songs about toilet paper, and the answers were maybe, god no, no, and absolutely not, but they just kept doing it. There's no way we won't get at least a single Toilet Tune in 2023. It's what they make now. It's their product. They clearly don't care about the toilet paper anymore.

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