Various Artists - The Bob’s Burgers Music Album

Pitchfork 69

Music, we are told, is important. Our cultural heritage of classic symphonies, soaring pop singles, and inscrutable jazz albums can grasp the human soul and move us to experience emotions we didn’t think were even possible. Music was born alongside the human race, it is woven into our evolution, and, we are led to understand, is one of the most crucial most widely revered art forms in the world. But if music is so great, why did it take this long for someone to make an album where Cyndi Lauper sings a song called “Taffy Butt”?

Thankfully, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is here to save us. “Taffy Butt” is one of 112 tracks that make up the two-hour soundtrack album, collecting music from the FOX animated sitcom about the Belcher family (parents Bob and Linda; kids Tina, Gene, and Louise) and their struggling burger joint. The full extent of the Bob’s music collection is kind of a lot. It’s pitched almost entirely at “Bob’s” die-hards and listening to this album without being a fan of “Bob’s Burgers” is a fool’s errand. Even for fanatics, the two hours still feels like an ill-advised trek. Almost every song is under two minutes long, there’s lots of dialogue, and the singing is mostly endearingly awkward. Listening to The Bob’s Burgers Music Album condenses six seasons and over 100 episodes of the show into two hours—but where else are you supposed to turn if you want to hear Kevin Kline sing about wanting to fuck an elephant?

However, let's first talk about butts. Even a cursory glance at the tracklist will confirm that 10% of the songs on The Bob’s Burgers Music Album reference butts in some fashion in their titles alone. (Including lyrical content, it’s probably well over a third.) Over the span of the show, “Bob’s Burgers”’ characters have experienced every possible emotional reaction to butts, from fear (“Butts, Butts, Butts”) to a fascination with what comes out of them (“The Diarrhea Song,” “Mad Pooper,” “The Fart Song,” “BM in the PM”) to mystification at different things they could form or be formed by (“Taffy Butt,” “Butt Phone”). More than anything, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with its own ass.

It’s only natural the soundtrack album is focused on butts: collecting all of “Bob’s Burgers’” music only highlights how much that music is fueled by the show’s blithely positive, delightfully weird attitude toward sex. There’s a vibrator jingle (“Sneaky Pete”), the show’s so-drippy-it’s-wet ’70s porn parody (included as a 20-second song called “Sex Music”), and of course, the show’s best-known song, aspirational bestiality anthem “Electric Love.” But even ignoring Megan Mullally crooning about Thomas Edison’s “electric junk,” most of these songs are doting love letters to various styles and genres.

TV shows are produced with a tight enough turnaround that it’s hard for any series to consistently do original songs without pastiching pre-existing genres, something “Bob’s Burgers” has done with relish. The songs of fictional boy band Boyz 4 Now are note-perfect riffs on the kind of metaphors boy bands have been using for decades, with Max Greenfield playing young heartthrob Boo Boo asking girls to let him “whisper in [her] eyes.” John Roberts’ ode to grimy bathrooms “Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night” practically oozes with love for Michael McDonald. The ease with which the soundtrack switches between novelty ditties and riot grrrl homage—a genre the show is most cozy with—is part of its draw.

As the show and the album go on, the music team becomes more and more ambitious, culminating with songs like “Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl,” which simultaneously adapts and parodies Die Hard and Working Girl while also fitting them into the odd genre of musical theater. These are the “Bob’s” gems refined and extracted by the album, even without the show’s visual component. As a collection of funny, sweet homages to the music the “Bob’s Burgers” team loves, the soundtrack album is a pretty clear triumph.

The comedy of forcing lyrics about butts and farts and diarrhea into popular song formats comes all the way around at the end, where the Bob’s team stashes the “Bob’s Buskers” series. Here, professional musicians cover songs from the show, which is mostly an excuse for St. Vincent or the National to do hilariously grim covers of songs like holiday jams “Sailors in Your Mouth” and “Christmas Magic.” “Bob’s Burgers” is a successful sitcom precisely because it grounds these contrasts in a deep well of horny earnestness, which is why The Bob’s Burgers Music Album could only end with the National and Låpsley covering the show’s pooping anthem, “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom.” Bad stuff only happens in the bathroom if you’ve eaten too many burgers. For the rest of us, it’s a place of musical glory.