Tumblr users did something unhinged again

Tumblr Users Broke Global Music Charts With A Dance Track Full Of Homophobic Slurs

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, one of the biggest songs on iTunes was an (Australian-accented) robot voice reading a list of homophobic slurs and slang. Given, well, everything, you might be worried, but the song is not some far-right stunt. So how did this bizzare, but authentically queer song full of homophobic hate speech climb the charts? Well, this shouldn’t surprise you. It’s all thanks to Tumblr.

“The Slur Song,” credited to Tumblr user bigfoots-biggest-fan, rules. It’s also completely not safe for work. Any discussion has to start there — it’s a well-produced, catchy track that would also be illegal to play on the radio, which obviously makes it go harder. The song peaked at #4 on iTunes’ US dance charts last Tuesday, according to iTunesCharts.net. The day before, it was also the 83rd most-popular single in the US on iTunes. We’ll get to what that actually means numerically in a sec, but first let’s cover how we got here.

The song started with a Tumblr post from last year, where multiple users shared stories about human resources training courses that used homophobic slurs in the context of “what not to say.” A user named bigfoots-biggest-fan saw the post last month and completed the dance remix on January 20th. 

Speaking to Garbage Day, they said they created the song in DaVinci Resolve and FL Studio, starting with a backing track and a text-to-speech program reading a real HR training presentation. “When I did the text-to-speech it worked super well with the backing track, so much that I decided it needed to be done properly,” they said. “So I went back and copied in two more lists of slurs.”

The result blew up on Tumblr immediately, and bigfoots-biggest-fan quickly submitted the song to iTunes and Spotify. The song did get on both platforms, but it ran into the roadblocks you might expect for something called “The Slur Song”. Tumblr itself blocked the post from being promoted on its “Blaze” sponsored post system. And on January 30th, the Australian Recording Industry Association rejected it from a spot on their digital charts. 

None of that stopped the song from charting on iTunes last week, however, or doing impressive-looking numbers on Spotify and YouTube. In a month, it’s been streamed over 100,000 times on both platforms. But what does that figure mean in terms of actual sales or unique listeners? That’s a little murkier.

According to Digital Sales Data, it takes less than 300 paid downloads in 24 hours to make it to the song’s spot on the iTunes charts. And data from Kworb shows that it wouldn’t crack the top 500 biggest songs on Spotify and YouTube. The specialized dance charts are more forgiving, since cross-referencing with ARIA’s ranking shows the song had a definite shot to make it. Which suggests, as multiple Tumblr users have speculated, that part of why different trackers blocked “The Slur Song” was because it would have charted immediately otherwise.

Make no mistake, these are still impressive numbers for what’s essentially a Tumblr shitpost. Talking about its popularity also means we should mention how it’s made the rounds on Reddit, X, and anywhere else you’re allowed to play the audio. But that doesn’t include major platforms like TikTok, where users have spent years developing increasingly elaborate code for any ideas or words the platform hides, especially ones pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community.

Part of the song’s popularity is due to the fact that bigfoots-biggest-fan does have a degree in music production. So it is actually a banger. “Never used the degree because it didn’t seem like a sensible job,” they said. But another important piece here is that the sheer ironic offensiveness of the song — especially with lyrics coming from HR training — is a statement on its own.

It flies directly in the face of the censored corporate social networks that spent years shoving soulless rainbow capitalism down our throats only to immediately bend the knee to the Trump administration last month. The song is queer in the most fundamental sense of the word — defying convention, reveling in transgression. And on the internet in 2025, true transgression means making something algorithms can’t promote.

So far, bigfoots-biggest-fan hasn’t received any money from the song’s success, but they plan to donate any earnings to support LGBTQ+ charities. Making the song was “really cathartic,” they said. “Really harsh and offensive terms that I had heard growing up suddenly just lost their bite when given a silly backing track.”

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Why is it so difficult to get a new article on Wikipedia?

The online encyclopedia has grown to more than 6.7 million articles and continues to expand — even as the number of active editors overseeing that content continues to decline. It seems hard to believe, but there is only one Wikipedia editor for every 166 Wikipedia articles. For comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica has one editor for every 29 articles, along with 100+ staffers who continually update articles. 

Because of this limited oversight capacity, new submissions are overwhelmingly declined as the site's eligibility standards have become increasingly rigid. Existing brand articles, meanwhile, are often ghost towns of outdated information and limited editor engagement. 

Lumino's new white paper explains how Wikipedia stumbled into this predicament and why it has pivoted toward a "deletionist mode" to address it. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, Wikify, to stay updated on the latest Wikipedia developments.

Reddit’s Really Into Luigi Mangione’s Shackled Ankles

Now that Garbage Day has Getty Images access, thanks to the Beehiiv’s Media Collective, we can publish the Luigi Mangione ankle photo that has sent multiple subreddits into a frenzy this week. Google searches for the loafers are spiking right now, as well. The best comment I’ve seen so far: “I gasped and thought ‘even his feet are beautiful!’”

And, yes, Mangione does have a WikiFeet page. And, no, I’m not linking to it. But his rating is 5.98 stars out of five, which I didn’t even know was possible.

DOGE’s Big Dumb Email Thing Is Already Being Walked Back

Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency recently decided that all federal workers would have to start logging weekly reports via email about what they did at work that week. And if they don’t it’ll count as a resignation. The first round of these reports were due tonight at midnight.

And this was backed up by a post from Musk, himself, on X, who wrote, “Consistent with President Donald Trump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Except many departments have already told staff not to participate, including the State Department and the Department of Defense. And Garbage Day received a tip this afternoon from a federal worker who requested to remain anonymous that the Social Security Administration is now also being told that the emails are voluntary and that non-compliance does not count as a resignation. In case you needed more proof that DOGE has no real authority to do anything. Which, thankfully, parts of the federal government are slowly starting to realize.

If you have a tip for Garbage Day, you can reach me on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record.

HUD Hacked

Monitors at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development were hacked this morning and made to display an AI-generated video of President Donald Trump licking Elon Musk’s feet. (Damn, lotta feet stuff in today’s issue, apparently.) Here’s a higher-res image of what was on the monitors.

The big question a lot of Trump watchers are asking right now is why Trump is letting Musk take up so much oxygen. Something that absolutely wouldn’t have happened during his first term. And there are a lot of theories, but one that I do think is worth considering is that Musk, by buying Trump’s once-favorite website, has actually successfully convinced Trump that X’s propaganda blitz last year successfully won him the election. And Trump isn’t the only leader beginning to buy into that idea…

The AfD Just Did Real Well In The German Elections

Let’s get this out of the way real quick. No, X, the everything app, did not help the far-right Alternative For Germany party in this weekend’s German elections. They did end up coming in second, best they’ve ever done. But I know, for a fact, that the most racist content on X is actually still blocked in Germany. I opened the app on a trip to Berlin in December.

But, more generally, X’s user base is cratering and even though its been converted into the Trump administration’s state media stream, it’s still not really driving culture like it once did. This is doubly true for a country like Germany, which has a media ecosystem that has, obviously, been impacted by the internet, but is still healthier than the US.

But I’ve become more and more convinced that Musk’s proximity to Trump is entirely dependent on Trump believing that Musk won him the election, a claim Trump has repeated at multiple rallies. And one of the best ways to keep that lie going is to find other elections where you can claim the same thing. And Trump, on Truth Social yesterday, even wrote that the AfD’s big surge at the polls was directly linked to his own.

So, yes, the AfD coming in second this weekend was bad. But it was an equally big showing for Germany’s Left Party. Which, weirdly enough, Musk and Trump don’t seem to be talking much about. So did X help them too? (It was actually TikTok.)

The Darkest Crypto Story Yet

A crypto trader that went by the username @MistaFuccYou killed himself on a X livestream over the weekend, telling viewers, “If I die, make me a memecoin.” The livestream was deleted from X shortly after it aired. But before it was pulled down, the chat was full of users trading memecoins based on the MistaFuccYou username.

According to The Mirror, the man’s real name is Arnold Haro, which lines up with a GoFundMe currently being shared on Facebook.

There is a lot of misinformation within the crypto community, in general, so it should be noted that some of the bigger and more reputable cryptocurrency news outlets haven’t covered this story yet. Cryptopolitan is the only one so far. And according to Cryptopolitan, there’s some confusion about whether this was a marketing stunt that went wrong or not.

The Hasan Piker/Ethan Klein Feud Escalates

As we wrote on Friday, YouTube long-hauler Ethan Klein is crashing out big time at the moment. He’s threatened the moderators of multiple subreddits, taken to his livestream to threaten completely different redditors, and tried to use it all as ammunition in a, up until now, fairly one-sided fight against streamer Hasan Piker.

Piker finally responded to Klein, someone who, at the beginning of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, he was still making content with. “I’m not a drama content creator,” Piker wrote on X this morning. “I’ve stayed silent on Ethan since I said I’d rather talk in person. He can’t handle a back and forth. That’s why he only cries on [Instagram Stories] where you cant see replies. That’s why he deletes comments and bans subs and tries to dox redditors. Coward.”

If you’re looking for a concise ticking clock covering all of the parts of this story, a user on Reddit put a timeline together, which you can find here.

The 500 Cigarette Smoking Machine

This was dropped in the Garbage Day Discord by lesspopmorefizz. The YouTuber that made this cursed device, who goes by Stanky Kong, said that they rolled all 500 cigarettes themselves. Though they don’t really explain why. Was it a cost thing? Was it because they’re easier to mass-smoke like this?

Anyways, the whole thing caught fire and then broke. As one commenter wrote, “Not even joking here. I was feeling kinda down and bored, but once I watched the turbo start to die from so many cigarettes, It got a real laugh out of me and enough energy that I got up to play something.”

A Good Post About British People

Some Stray Links

• “The Anonymous YouTubers Street-Racing Through New York”

• “The inside story of how President Trump came to name the ‘Gulf of America’”

• “My Family Had a Stalker”

P.S. here’s Baja Blast on toast.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***