My boyfriend has become the unwilling recipient of a weekly UK poo bulletin. Every few days, I’ll send him a new creation of mine. Sometimes it’s a voice note I’ve recorded in ten minutes. Other times, I’m embarrassed to admit, it’s a fully produced track I’ve spent an hour making with my nephew. The rabbit hole of making UK poo at 1am has well and truly got me.

My growing discography includes ‘Smelly London Tubes’, ‘Pee Pee Poo Poo’, and, most recently, a song to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme tune about getting five wings and chips from bossman. I have absolutely no intention of releasing an album, but I’m having a wonderful time.

For anyone fortunate enough to have avoided this corner of the internet, UK poo is the name given to a growing collection of wonderfully questionable British rap tracks circulating on TikTok and Instagram. The beats are often surprisingly good, the lyrics considerably less so, and there’s usually something about the delivery that makes the whole thing even funnier.

Some of it is deliberately ridiculous. Other tracks are sincere attempts at making music that audiences have turned into a joke. There’s an important distinction between laughing with somebody and laughing at them, particularly when somebody has put genuine effort into something. I’ve developed a real affection for the music.

And I don’t just mean ironically. Sometimes a stupid lyric delivered with complete conviction is enough to make me want to listen again. Sometimes the beat is genuinely good. Sometimes the whole thing is so insane that I can’t quite believe somebody thought of it, recorded it and decided the world needed to hear it.

The UK has always loved a bit of nonsense

The UK has always loved a bit of musical nonsense. Long before anybody was calling it UK poo, we had Millie B’s ‘M to the B’. If anyone remembers that absolute classic, a teenage girl from Blackpool delivering a diss track with unwavering confidence, you’ll know this sort of thing is hardly new. And I can’t talk about silly music without giving The Lonely Island their flowers. I still remember blasting  after losing my virginity.

Growing up, I was also a huge fan of and , talented musicians who weren’t afraid to have a laugh with their music. Take  ‘Crashed the Wedding’, an elaborate tale of ruining somebody’s big day, delivered with all the conviction of a much more serious affair. Different genres, different generations, but I’ve always loved musicians who can commit wholeheartedly to something completely daft.

I’m hardly comparing UK poo to British pop-rock, but I do miss when talented musicians could just have a laugh and make something daft.

I say this as somebody who takes music seriously. I passed my keyboard grades, studied music at school, have taken singing lessons and have recently been learning music production. I understand how much work goes into making something sound good, and why musicians might be precious about what they release.

But knowing a little about how music is made hasn’t stopped me from enjoying music that’s a bit shit. If anything, it’s made me more enthusiastic about making some myself.

Not everything needs to be a masterpiece

And I think this extends beyond music.

I have friends who make lovely songs but won’t send them to anybody until they’ve fixed one more thing. Others take photographs they genuinely like but won’t post because the lighting isn’t quite right. I understand wanting to do your craft justice, but I also wonder when we became so concerned with every creative decision being a reflection of our ability.

I work a nine-to-five, and I can assure you that not every email I write is a masterpiece. Not every slide deck is a ten out of ten. Sometimes you produce something perfectly adequate, send it off and get on with your day. Nobody expects every single thing you do at work to be the finest example of your professional capabilities.

Of course, musicians are different. Their work is personal, public and often tied to their livelihood. I’m not suggesting everybody should abandon quality control and start releasing the contents of their voice notes. But surely being talented at something also gives you permission to mess about with it? To make something that doesn’t necessarily show off how talented you are?

The art of looking like you don’t care

There’s also something about the internet that makes all of this feel particularly relevant. I miss seeing bands filming themselves in garages, getting the chords wrong and uploading the video anyway. Or somebody making an album cover out of a photograph of their cat. That sort of scrappiness hasn’t disappeared. You can still find it across underground music scenes, particularly in the DIY aesthetics of hyperpop and experimental music, where rough edges and deliberately chaotic visuals are often part of the appeal.

But even there, I sometimes wonder how much care goes into looking like you haven’t put much care into something. The blurry photographs, the badly cropped artwork, the deliberately amateur music videos. None of that necessarily makes the work less genuine, but it’s funny how much effort can go into appearing effortless.

People care about looking like they don’t care, which is still caring.

When being a bit shit feels more human

And now AI has made this whole conversation even stranger.

I’m a writer, and I find it fascinating how quickly our relationship with mistakes has changed. There was a time when sending one too many badly written emails might have had you hauled into your manager’s office. Now we’re reaching a point where an awkward sentence or a typo can actually make something feel more trustworthy. We’re becoming so accustomed to recognising the polished, slightly soulless language of AI that a mistake can feel almost reassuring. At least there’s a chance an actual person wrote it.

We’ve spent years being told to perfect our work, only for AI to make perfection so readily available that it’s become almost suspicious. The flawlessly written email, the immaculate photograph, the LinkedIn post that sounds like every other LinkedIn post. We’re getting better at spotting it, and I think we’re starting to crave the opposite. A bit of mess, a questionable creative decision, something that looks and sounds like an actual person made it. Funny how quickly we’ve gone from correcting every little mistake to finding them quite endearing.

A mistake, an awkward delivery or a terrible lyric can offer something that a perfectly generated piece of content often struggles to replicate: a sense of somebody’s actual personality.

And perhaps that’s partly why UK poo has found such an enthusiastic audience. Here we are, surrounded by increasingly sophisticated tools designed to make us sound and look better, and we’re choosing to listen to somebody rap about their toilet seat.

Not that UK poo is some conscious rebellion against AI, but I do think its popularity reflects a growing appetite for things that feel a little less managed.

Music has always reflected the culture around it, and I think our love for UK poo says something about how tired we are of taking ourselves so seriously. I love that people are sharing these songs, debating which ones are secretly good and treating lyrics that have absolutely no business being taken seriously like the latest chart release. Sometimes it’s nice to enjoy something simply because it’s funny.

Maybe I’m particularly fond of it because I’ve never been especially precious about what I share online.

Friends have asked why I’ve uploaded photographs of food that looks frankly unappetising, or videos of myself dancing strangely with absolutely no context. Sometimes the food looked horrible. Sometimes the dancing was weird. I liked them anyway, so I posted them.

I’ve never really understood why everything we share has to present us in the most flattering light. Your dinner doesn’t have to look desirable. Your dancing doesn’t have to be sexy. And your song doesn’t have to convince everybody that you’re the next great British musical talent.

I like seeing people do people shit. Their strange little ideas, their questionable creative decisions, the things they make because they thought it would be funny or because they simply felt like it.

And if that means spending an hour at 1am producing a song about five wings and chips, I think that’s an entirely reasonable use of my time.

My boyfriend might disagree.