Perhaps you have had occasion to view a YouTube song video created by a group of healthy-looking white people named "The Holderness Family." Perhaps it was the one in which they perform a version of Snoop Dogg's classic "Gin and Juice" song, fitted to Halloween, titled "Kin and Moose."

Perhaps you have thought to yourself, This is a charming bit of silliness! I like these healthy, well-adjusted-seeming whites.


Nah. Fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck the Holderness family. Right to hell.

I gather that the Holdernesses have been kicking around the internet for a while now; they have videos going back at least 11 months, and are beloved by the White Mom Internet. Look at how they transform the vulgar black music into cheeky domestic wholesomeness! I had better put this on the Face-Book! Odds are, if you encountered them before I did (I only became aware of their existence this morning, and it has been one fucked-up day because of it), it's because some clueless Mom or another in your orbit parked them amid your flow of e-stimuli. Aren't they cuuuute? Look at how they involve their kids in their routines! They must love their kids oh so much.


Which, nah, fuck that. Penn Holderness, patriarch of these Stepford rejects, doesn't get a fucking Dad of the Year mug for roping his innocent kids into this sad routine. Picture, if you will, what the following "All About That Baste" video—their new one, timed conveniently to the changing of the holiday seasons so that it can be shared, like herpes—would look like without the Holderness children.

You know what it would be? It would be some sad flopsweaty douchebag clown's painfully embarrassing grab for viral attention and YouTube ad dollars. It is some sad flopsweaty douchebag clown's painfully embarrassing grab for viral attention and YouTube ad dollars. But he socks his hapless offspring and increasingly suicidal-looking wife on the periphery and suddenly it's wholesome family entertainment! Oh wouldja lookit those cute Holdernesses celebrating the domestic bliss held in such contempt in our fallen, depraved modern times!

This is to say, the Holderness children are are a wall behind which the elder Holdernesseses are cowering. They are human flak jackets. Their purpose is to transform their dad's grindingly atrocious viral fame-seeking into something palatable to Americans who've been conditioned by AFV to associate, reflexively, any multimedia appearance of blond-headed moppets with good Christian fun for the whole family. They are their parents' cynicism and cravenness. They are Sad Kids.

Look at that nimrod. I mean get a nice big load of that hammy, shameless, Moose-Johnston's-mob-indebted-little-brother-lookin'-ass nimrod. Does it even matter whether this is just the clueless desperation of a mortgage-choked suburban Dad Type, or passive-aggressive crypto-racist culture-warrior self-congratulation? No. It does not matter. Because Weird Al Yankovic wipes his ass with better song rewrites than these. "Kin and Moose"? Fuck you. That is terrible. A rhyming dictionary with a Jack Chick pamphlet stashed between the pages could come up with better goof lyrics than those.


The Holdernesses call their bullshit YouTubes "parody," which is blinkered self-congratulation. Apart from the literal sense in which "parody" refers to the comedic exaggeration of an artist's style, and "hungry-eyed cracker dipshit who wagered his kids' college savings against the internet's appetite for funny videos of white people acting like those dang crazy rappers" is not any part of, say, Sir Mix-A-Lot's style, there's also the simpler matter of the Holderness family's videos not being funny—not at all, not even a little bit, not even as funny as just saying the word "poop" aloud to yourself on the elevator—on their own terms. They're not funny. They're not parody.

What are they, then? They are bad. Bad videos. Stop watching them. Thank you.