Mindless Self Indulgence is grooming content.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mindless Self Indulgence — mostly because their content keeps resurfacing on my TikTok’s fyp (unlike Twitter, where I’ve long had every MSI-related keyword muted). And what surprised me wasn’t just the algorithm’s persistence, but the audience’s innocence: a new wave of young fans who seem genuinely unaware of how deeply predatory and dangerous this band’s work is.
Revisiting their music, interviews, and imagery has been a disorienting experience — equal parts sadness, anger, and disbelief. Because what’s at stake here isn’t simply “edgy art” or “dark humor.” It’s not just moral rot dressed as punk irreverence. It’s grooming content — material deliberately designed to blur boundaries, to sexualize youth culture, and to normalize violence, desensitize racism, sexual abuse and degradation.
And the resurgence of MSI on TikTok and Twitter — with teens discovering this “weird little band from the 2000s” or “Mcr adjacent/ cousin band” — is terrifying. Because what these kids are consuming is not rebellion. It’s predatory content packaged as “camp”.
This is gonna be a long ass ride so please bear 🐻 with me .
We have to start from the beginning, and to do that we have to discuss the first cd by MSI titled “Mindless Self-Indulgence” released in 1997.
The cover art of the album was made by Jennifer Dunn, who would go on to join Mindless Self Indulgence as a drummer. And it features a woman with a mechanical arm molesting a young girl holding a teddy bear by lifting her skirt up, atop a red background.
the album is no longer available on Spotify. But the physical copies are being sold on eBay for ridiculous prices, since this material is considered “extremely rare”.
The idea of peeking on little girls' panties continues to be a motif for a big part of the album “Tight” (1999), which ended up being re-released as “Tighter” in 2011.
I also want to mention a track they used to promote Tight, bluntly titled “N****r” — yes, uncensored. It’s not even a song, but a Lenny Bruce monologue repurposed as shock bait. It’s no longer on Spotify, but still circulates on YouTube, often defended by fans who insist, “See? This is the only proof Jimmy is racist — he didn’t even say the word himself!”
That logic is deeply flawed. First, he did repeatedly use racial slurs in other songs and even live. And second — you don’t need to say the word to perpetuate racism. You can reproduce racist ideology through aestheticization, through irony, through performance. As with predatory behavior, you don’t have to commit the act itself to normalize it. You can romanticize it, joke about it, or build your art around its image — and the effect is the same: desensitization and consent manufacturing.
Back to Tight, all the tracks were written by Jimmy urine and contain pedophilic type of lyrics.
Starting from the first track which mentions to be dreaming of “kiddie p0rn”.
This is the blueprint of grooming content: aestheticize the child, eroticize the taboo, and disguise it as art.
During this time the band put an ad on the newspaper looking for a drummer that had to be young and willing to play with a band “full of pedophiles”, during that time the band included Jimmy, his brother Markus, Steve righ and then drummer Jennifer Dunn.
The current drummer, Kitty, allegedly joined the band because of this ad.
We’re followed by two songs “Bring the Pain” (a terrible method man cover), and “Tight” both including the nword.
Moreover “Molly” is a very subtle song about a girl, who’s rewarded for lying.
Then we have “Tornado,” “Daddy,” “Pussy All Night,” “Dickface,” and “Bite Your Rhymes,” (a horrible cover) where Jimmy uses the n-word again — repeatedly, almost ritualistically.
The audience isn’t being invited to think critically about censorship, language, or irony. They’re simply being told to shout the lyrics, slurs, back.
When white artists weaponize racial slurs onstage and call it performance art, they’re teaching their audience — often young white kids desperate to look edgy — that racism itself can be a form of performance. That it’s safe, cool, and detached from consequence.
And the entire record reads like a self-congratulatory tantrum — a hateful statement both inward and outward, a celebration of pedophilic provocation and the normalization of racism as entertainment. The lyrics are deliberately repetitive, almost chant-like, making it easy for fans to echo and internalize. There’s no critique, no meta-commentary, no justification from the band beyond the usual: “We just want to piss people off.”
Which is childish — but that childishness isn’t innocent. It’s the weaponization of immaturity, and that’s a bigger problem I’ll unpack later.
This is when it gets even worse, because buried in Tight (and later Tighter) is a hidden track called “JX-47.”
The track’s existence wasn’t immediately visible; it was something you’d discover by buying a physical copy (although now it’s available on Spotify and YouTube). However if you found it back then, well, you became part of the “cool few” who dug deep enough. That’s already a problem — secrecy and special discovery are basic grooming mechanics. They create an “insider club” around transgression.
The track itself is written in mock-“baby talk,” with lines that parody people with developmental disabilities and use racialized imagery.
It’s a “parody” that flattens disability and race into grotesque noise, and the audience — mostly teenagers — is taught to laugh.
MSI trains its listeners to mistake cruelty for intelligence, bigotry for rebellion.
And this is proven by his audience’s reaction because in every comment section or forum discussing the lyrics, people are laughing or praising either the meaning or lack of it.
There’s some debate about the meaning of the song — and, not coincidentally, it’s mostly young fans who insist that it “means nothing” or that it’s somehow “about Jimmy Urine’s childhood” (even though it’s performed by Steve, not Jimmy). However, according to the Russian Wikipedia entry, the track was actually intended as a parody of a person with Down syndrome.
(I will post the translated screenshot in the comments).
Regardless of that, there’s also a double layer of age confusion. The adult performer adopts a childlike voice to say obscene things — a pattern we’ll see across the band’s work. That’s not just offensive; it’s pedagogical.
It teaches that the line between adult and child behavior, between innocence and depravity, is funny to erase.
That’s how grooming works.
The track uses infantilising grammar (“me like to go”, “me live me life free like a birdie”) and includes explicit references to disability and sexualised bathroom activity (“When I’m shitting it’s a totally different story …”).
Use of the phrase “special olympics one” in a mocking, derisive way — i.e., referencing a disability sporting event/label as punchline.
References to lines like “monkeys,” “my friend’s the seat on my toilet,” and “him so dark me cannot see” clearly evoke mockery of developmental disabilities while also blending in racist undertones. Considering the band’s previous lyrical patterns, it’s impossible to deny that these lines are directed at — and dehumanize — people of color.
See? We don’t need to say the nword to be racist, and he doesn’t need to be making out with teens to be a total creep. Although he has done both. And they, the band of course, celebrates it.
Another track worth mentioning — one that also mysteriously vanished from both their official Spotify and YouTube accounts— is “Panty Shot.” A song that is explicitly about looking and wanting to look at the underwear of a five year old kid.
And before anyone rushes to defend Lynd-Z… the very first live video of this song I found shows her on stage “performing it”. Her debut with MSI was on 2002 with the compilation album “Alienating Our Audience.”
She may not play on the studio recordings, but she was right there on stage, participating, benefiting and helping perform their most outwardly predatory content. She’s not an innocent bystander; she’s part this shitshow just like Kitty and Steve Righ?
What’s even more disturbing is how “Panty Shot” was one of MSI’s biggest songs released in the EP “Crappy Little Demo” in 1997— so famous within the fandom that the band and labels turned it into a cult object by selling it “ultra rare” which means the labels and the band leaned into that exclusivity.
They marketed the track’s grossness as a secret treasure instead of acknowledging what it really was: textbook predatory content.
It’s not just that “Panty Shot” disappeared. It’s that only that song and the entire record it comes from were scrubbed off Spotify… while other equally disturbing, racist, or predatory songs remain absolutely available.
“We’re taking down the one song that could get us in legal or PR trouble, not because we care about the content, but because someone might finally cancel us too.”
Moving onto Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy (2000), I want to start with the cover art is a cartoonish illustration by animator and comic artist Jaime Hawlett, best known for designing the characters in Gorillaz.
The visuals are crucial, because it disguises the record’s content under the guise of fun and familiarity. It’s no surprise that the “Frankenstein girl” aesthetic has become a recurring cosplay trend among teens— it’s cartoonish enough to feel safe, familiar enough to evoke childhood nostalgia, and playful enough to hide how predatory the underlying imagery actually is.
The opening track casually references self-harm, followed by “Bitches” — a song that’s nothing more than misogynistic shock value.
And then comes “Boomin’.” The lyrics hinge on a disturbing dichotomy that appears again and again in Jimmy Urine’s writing: the difference between “little girls” and “women.” He boasts about “boomin’ at your woman,” but quickly adds that we must “respect the little girls.”
This distinction isn’t protection — it’s fixation.
A fixation he’d been having for 5 years, if we take into account that their debut album was released in 1995 and Frankenstein girls was released in the year 2000, making Jimmy 26 and 31 years old.
Once again, his world-building explicitly invites children, particularly young girls, into his lyrical orbit. The message isn’t just “I’m edgy,” it’s “you, little girl, belong in my story.”
By the following track, the mask slips entirely. Because we already know that women are “bitches,” but now, so are teenage girls.
He literally declares, “I’m in love with a teenage bitch.” There’s no irony, no critical distance, no commentary — just normalization of desire directed at underage girls, hidden beneath irony and camp.
We then have “I hate Jimmy Page” in which he says and I quote:
“My old shit will never last. I hold the microphone with my butt now. Who like that song five-year-old pantyshot now? Yeah, yeah, that could be a real big record. 'Cause it's got the bump with the molestation.
So he is self aware that what he does is both disturbing and harmful, and he was being called out for it even back in the 2000s. And of course I say “he” but it’s they. They all agree to promote and support and profit out of this behavior.
In “Keeping up with the kids” he admits to be “too old to be, keeping up with the kids”.
“Kill the rock” is a particularly disturbing song because here he states that “he’s stealing the beats from the blacks”, and I quote “and from all the young girls is where I steal my act”.
I also want to point out how Jimmy Urine constantly manages to cast himself as the victim— or at least as the misunderstood fool — in nearly every song.
It’s not coincidence. It’s a tactic.
By framing himself as innocent, naïve, or childlike, he’s once again inviting little girls to see him as a peer, not an adult man performing predatory fantasies. He’s stealing their language, their perspective, their vulnerability.
Even when he’s explicitly sexual, he disguises it in childish phrasing — like in the lyric, “It’s the little things in my pants that we’re all waiting for, I never knew what that thing down there was used for.” That’s not clever irony; it’s a man infantilizing himself to make sexual content seem harmless, relatable to teens, or worse, amusing to adults who fetishize youth.
After that, the record drifts through a lineup of forgettable, equally “shocking” songs, masquerading as rebellion.
What’s interesting is that by the time they released “You’ll Rebel to Anything” (2005), the slurs have toned down slightly — but only cosmetically. The second track still uses the r-word, and “2 Hookers and an 8 Ball” drops the n-word yet again.
Like I said before, there’s no artistic purpose here, no critique of language or culture — just shock value, and the same white entitlement that assumes a slur gains “depth” or “commentary” simply because they are the ones saying it.
And, of course, if you don’t “get it,” you’re the problem.
You’re the humorless one. You’re the snowflake who doesn’t understand satire. It’s a manipulation cycle as old as the art itself — gaslight your audience into complicity by mocking anyone who refuses to laugh.
The song “Bullshit” is particularly concerning because the lyrics leave little to interpretation:
“The mission fishin' for the missin' prissy little kids. We shoot 'em in a barrel. It's so easy when they're pissed. Under educated” […]
“I'm bumping like a pimp on the stage to save face. I overcompensate with very bad taste. No offense, no romance, sick of your parents. I'm about to take a stance. And drop off my underpants. It's no accident. You will pay my rent (and I am free to download all the porno on the internet).”
“Prom” is an especially cruel and misogynistic track, set, unsurprisingly, in a teenage environment — prom night. It sexualizes youth under the guise of satire, while mocking the very vulnerability it exploits. It’s worth noting that Jimmy Urine was 35 years old when he released this record.
Why is he still singing about high school in such sexual way?
I also want to highlight that the band put out a so-called “clean version” of the album in 2005, and — just like Frankenstein Girls — it uses cartoon caricatures of the band members as cover art. That repetition isn’t accidental.
The animated visuals soften the grotesque content and make it look playful, familiar, even cute— and that’s precisely the point, they release “clean versions”, so they can legally sell it to their real target audience. It’s packaging adult sexual violence and predatory language in a format that appeals to teens and kids, making it obvious who their intended audience really is.
By the time we get to “If” (2008), they open with “never wanted to dance”, once again speaking about a school setting, using phrases as:
“I'm amazed, I'm afraid. I am too cool for the second grade. There is nothing you can do. That I have not already done to myself (hey!)” […] “Never wanted to dance with nobody. But you wouldn't take no for an answer, you fuckin' bitch”.
In the second track “evening wear”, they state:
“Everybody wants to join the club. Once you join the club, the innocence is gone.”
Making this club-like mentality I’ve mentioned before, official.
bell hooks wrote that patriarchy and white supremacy reproduce themselves “not only through domination but through seduction” — through making belonging feel cool, desirable, smart. MSI’s whole project is that seduction: “you get it because you’re twisted like us.”
We have another run-through of forgettable and cruel repetitive chants with nothing to say other than sex, until “Mastermind”.
Mastermind is a song that uses the Columbine massacre as imagery.
“I am the mastermind. It's just a problem of mine. Just like Columbine. Columbine! Your time has come, kiss it all goodbye. Your time has come, kiss it all goodbye”
The song shows no mercy, there’s also a line that goes:
“This shit gonna turn your mamma white”
They by no mean show remorse, sadness or critique about this situation.
And the more you dig in forums, you’ll notice that people received this songs as “extremely funny” or projection of faith assuming he said something deeper.
As well as when you see older comments, you find out that people were concerned that MSI had “gone mainstream” and that was due to the lack of explicit slurs in “if” and their growing popularity which was actually, directly linked to Gerard Way promotion of the band (yes, I am so sorry, but he really helped during the Projekt Revolution era and the tour that followed) and the fact he married “the bassist”, LynZ.
(I’m going to add in the comments more magazine articles about this association.)
In “Bomb this track” he does mention once again a difference between “little girls” and “ladies”, once again establishing his fixation or welcome of teens.
In “Mark David Chapman” they sing:
“I cannot tell, is it just me. Or do we all look just like. Adolph fuckin' Hitler with this swoopy emo boy dreamy haircut dangling in our faces. Making us all indescribably indistinguishable from each other. Or maybe I'm just another megalomaniac, ooh-hoo-hoo!”
And once more: it’s grooming. Not just sexual grooming — ideological grooming. The audience is being trained to desensitize, to self-police empathy, to believe that offense is a weakness. That’s how fascism, misogyny, and predatory masculinity thrive: they hide behind laughter.
And according to their own words and footage found online: these kids entangle in violence at their shows, behave sexually at their shows, bring nazi memorabilia as offerings to get their attention, get into costumes to be noticed by them, engage in online activity expecting them to respond (and they do).
And it’s amazing to witness how cult mentality, more likely how this grooming mentality works because: Jimmy is a hero and a genius, just because he has “the balls” to say slurs and encourage people, or rather his young listeners, to do the same.
Sara Ahmed calls this the “affective economy” of power — how feelings like disgust and thrill circulate socially, making people want to be near violence because it feels like freedom.
MSI turned cruelty and predatory behavior into a bonding ritual.
I’d like to add that It’s disgusting to create an environment for white people to feel comfortable yelling slurs towards minorities, it’s disgusting that their behavior is not questioned but reduced to “rockstars”.
The band has bragged more than once about literally harming fans — kids —framing it like a badge of honor.
There are other examples you can find on YouTube interviews.
The band constantly refers to their audience as “kids,” and that’s not an accident. It’s a power move.
It’s a reminder that they know exactly who’s watching — and they’re proud of it.
MSI’s concerts were often “all ages,” meaning the people in front of them weren’t consenting adults in on the joke, but teenagers learning that abuse can look like affection, that humiliation can be worship.
And of course, if you question it, you’re the problem. You’re supposed to laugh. It’s “satire.” It’s “punk.” The worst kids in the room — and you’re supposed to want to be one of them.
The message is so clear: They are the only punk, they’re the exclusive club, if you don’t like MSI, “maybe you’re not punk enough”.
bell hooks (guys please go read some bell hooks) warned that “the cool pose” of rebellion often masks the same patriarchal violence it claims to resist.
And cultural critic Henry Giroux described this as the pedagogy of the spectacle — when entertainment teaches us to confuse harm with empowerment. That’s what’s happening here. When you laugh at getting hurt by adults, or at the idea of children being sexualized, you’re not being liberated — you’re being conditioned. MSI disguises domination as participation.
In the book “Excitable Speech”, philosopher and gender studies scholar, Judith Butler states that “language is not an instrument or tool that the speaker controls at will. It is a medium that sustains the speaker.”
So when Jimmy Urine claims that the band can no longer “get away with” explicit racism or pedophilia because of “political correctness,” he’s inadvertently admitting that the band depended on a world where those harms were socially tolerated.
Like I said before, by 2008 has MSI stopped using the n-word, overt slurs, and explicit references to minors—but not be fooled, because the underlying content remains the same. This shift perfectly embodies Butler’s point that censorship doesn’t magically reform the speaker; it simply forces the harmful message to mutate. Butler warns that “prohibitions do not control the kind of effects speech can have; they sometimes enhance those very effects.” Thats exactly what happened: the band drops the explicit language, but keeps the same power fantasies, misogyny, racial stereotypes, and child-oriented framing—only now wrapped in euphemism, irony, and plausible deniability.
It’s 2013 now, and Gerard Way (yeah I’m so sorry that I’m bringing it up, but trust me it’s important) is doing a live tweeting session listening party to the record: “How I learned to Stop Giving a shit and Love Mindless Self Indulgence”.
There’s a song on this album that genuinely stunned me with how overtly racist it is: “I Want to Be Black.”
“I wanna be black”. “I'm so white, you're so black. Once I go black now I'm never going back”, “My skin color is a minor setback, I'm so white, and you're so black. I wanna trade”
“I wanna be black like Malcolm X, I wanna be black I really mean it, I wanna be black like MLK, I wanna be black like Morgan Freeman. Set me free”
“I will practice every day. Won't be an embarrassment, I'll get those subtleties down, All the way please let me in, To your club because I want to change. From the palest gray to the darkest day. From the whitest light to the blackest night.”
On paper, this might look like commentary — like an attempt to parody white guilt or cultural appropriation — but in practice, it’s nothing more than minstrel logic repackaged as irony. The song treats Black identity as something that can be studied, practiced, and earned by a white man who’s “trying his best.” It collapses centuries of racial trauma into a fashion accessory.
And in the broader context of MSI’s discography — where they’ve repeatedly used the n-word, called people “monkeys”, praised Hitler, and bragged about stealing from Black artists — this song doesn’t suddenly become “social commentary.” It’s a continuation of the same racist through-line.
And their young audience will think that this—still deeply offensive and immature narrative— is progressive. Do you wanna know why?
Because his fans have been groomed into thinking they’re too smart to be racist, so they can keep consuming racist media guilt-free. And that’s how grooming works: through flattery, through the illusion of shared understanding.
And yet, Gerard Way — who was 36 years old at the time, had nearly 1M followers— chose to share AND PRAISE this song publicly on Twitter during his listening session.
That decision carries weight. It shows how easily white artists with platforms can normalize racist art under the guise of nostalgia, irony, or edgy appreciation— and how little accountability follows when it’s wrapped in humor or “punk aesthetics.”
That’s just one of many tweets in support of the band’s record. It’s important to note that Gerard Way had already involved all the members of MSI in the music video for My Chemical Romance’s last studio album Danger Days— so this wasn’t casual promotion. He went on to spend years promoting, platforming, and celebrating this band, all while never once addressing the politics of their work.
I wanna add as well, that he was very present during the band’s performances and tour dates after he married Lynz, which caused a hoard of teenage girls who were willing to go see MSI, just to get a glimpse of him.
Gerard Way has helped— and continues to help, through his silence— to amplify their audience. He’s already given them his stamp of approval. He’s spoken about them glowingly, collaborated with them, married one of their members, and that person continues to be paraded and celebrated by him during the 2025 tour.
And of course I’m not saying he should divorce his wife, but it is incredible to me how he has never ever made an statement explaining that he doesn’t align with the band’s values, not even after Jimmy’s lawsuit. On the contrary whenever he mentions MSI (which he used to do a lot in the past) is very positive and validating.
The song “Kill You All in a Hip Hop Rage” is especially ugly and offensive— personally, as a huge Tupac fan, it’s genuinely upsetting to hear Jimmy Urine invoke his name as a prop for shock value.
Even without using racial slurs, the song drips with racism and stereotype. It fetishizes Black anger and violence while mocking hip-hop as a genre, collapsing decades of artistry, resistance, and cultural history into a cheap punchline. The lyrics play into the oldest and most harmful stereotypes about Black people— as aggressive, hyperviolent, or “authentically real” only through suffering and rage.
And Gerard sat his ass down and listened to this shit and thought… GREAT ALBUM! (his words, I’m going to post it in the comments).
I personally got to listen to this album at 13 years old because he was promoting it back in the days.
I could continue dissecting more lyrics but the ethos of their work can be summarized in the core belief that they really think they’re doing something radical, innovative, even empowering, rather than deeply harmful.
And it’s incredible to me the way these predators craft the narrative in such a way that they end up being victims as well somehow, I didn’t include lyrics alluding to self harm (which are very frequent in their lyrics, and dare I say: quite instructive), or Lyndz’s interaction on twitter with her fans or victim mentality agenda, because then this essay would be even longer.
By the time MSI releases Pink (2015), the lyrics have collapsed into a nothingness noise or self-hatred mantra— not because the band has evolved, but because the cultural landscape has. By 2015, openly shouting slurs would tank sales, so MSI shifts to incoherence instead of changing their worldview. The band quietly rebrands, and Gerard Way’s public support plays a major role in maintaining their legitimacy; he even collaborates with Jimmy Urine on his 2019 solo project.
In a way that echoes Judith Butler’s (I’m sorry to not provide proper quotation, but please find books and read them!!!) argument, MSI had already exhausted every taboo they could exploit. After weaponizing every slur and every sensitive topic, there was nothing left to “shock” with — only the hollow residue of their former provocations, and of course the legitimacy and promotion of a huge figure like Gerard.
I want to add that Jimmy Urine utilized his twitter page to engage with fans through artwork, very similarly to what Lyndz did.
But Jimmy Urine has had a way of infantilizing and sexualizing himself through lyrics, performance, statements and imagery. Because why is he, the front man of a band with very adult themes, engaging with minors or very young adults on the internet and having them make fanarts of him as Sailor Moon? (this was happening up until 2020 and it’s still up on his twitter page) why is there a YouTube video of him reacting to teens doing cosplay and TikTok’s with his explicitly sexual music and praising it? (also available on their official YouTube page). Why is he presenting himself as an approachable figure to children? And why is it always children? Why is it always teens?
By reacting to teenagers’ TikToks on YouTube, he creates a feedback loop of validation.
Kids produce content hoping he will notice them; he reacts, which encourages more content; this dynamic blurs parasocial lines in a way that is especially harmful when the adult at the center is known for pedophilic, sexist, and racist provocations. It sets up an expectation that the more outrageous or devoted a young fan behaves, the more likely they are to be rewarded with visibility from him.
And according to the members’s words: they all identify as children. (I’ll post the interview in the comments).
The last song from “Pink” is not at a song but a statement made by Jimmy Urine, named “Angry Boy” in which he defends his art by saying he has “complainable sense of humor” that “he knows he’s different” and “he knows what he’s doing”.
Jimmy Urine was accused on 2021 in New York Supreme Court with the charge of sexual battery of a minor.
The suit alleged that Euringer "groomed and manipulated [her] into believing that his sexually assaultive behavior was not criminal and that by engaging in sexual activity with him [she] was actually helping to protect younger girls from sexual assaults."
This lawsuit case really broke my heart because IN MY OPINION, plaintiff lost the case due to the fact she also sued the labels (Warner Music Group and Elektra) alongside with the then manager Joseph Galus to be complicit or negligent.
Jimmy Urine’s lawsuit didn’t end because he was innocent, because settling doesn’t mean exoneration or absolves guilt. It just closes the file. Jimmy Urine was dismissed from the court on March 2024.
Two months after Jimmy’s dismissal from court, MSI released a new record titled “MSI B-SIDES Vol. 1”, this content is available in all streaming platforms.
So whenever someone states that MSI is over, “MSI is over after that lawsuit”, “why do we need to talk about this?” I want to remind you that it’s not. It’s alive.
And as long as those songs continue to be celebrated in online spaces, encouraging teens to listen, to cosplay, to support it, to believe they’re part of some sort of community, it’s a problem.
And of course we have to adress the huge elephant in the room and that is Gerard way’s approval of this band, because we have to include Gerard parading his wife in the new Long Live The Black parade tour, which is causing another uproar of fans who due to their young age:
get to know her through him. > get to know the band > the band because of Gerard support.
And when we talk about MSI having a resurgence, we’re talking about the re-circulation of grooming content— about re-normalizing the idea that minors can be audience, spectacle, and participant all at once.
And when artists like Gerard Way continue to quietly endorse or refuse to condemn them, that complicity becomes an act of harm, too. Because silence gives credibility.
The danger of MSI isn’t just in what they did, but in what they taught and their legacy continues to do which is creating a safe space for predators who feel comfortable sexualizing children, in parallel with a space where children can be manipulated into creating, engaging, promoting, accepting sexual, racist and other types of dangerous behavior.
They really influenced a generation of kids who believed that to be smart, you had to be cruel; that empathy was censorship; that laughing at slurs, sexual violence, and disability made you part of an intellectual elite.
This is the same energy that let Nickelodeon slip foot fetish jokes into children’s shows under the excuse of comedy. The same “boundary-pushing” logic as South Park, where cruelty masquerades as critique. The same manipulation tactics as any abuser: If you get angry, it’s because you don’t understand. If you’re uncomfortable, it’s your fault for not having a sense of humor.
Grooming is about building trust, creating dependency, fandom, worship, and blurring boundaries. MSI does all of that through music.
And you don’t need Jimmy personally assaulting you to be harmed or manipulated by his ideals.
MSI’s content creates a self-reinforcing community where children and teens— often the only demographic truly engaging with the band— are groomed into believing that cruelty, bigotry, and sexualized shock humor are signs of intelligence, rebellion, or belonging.
When a 30- or 40-year-old man (now 50😬) constructs a persona like “little Jimmy Urine,” he’s deliberately collapsing the boundary between adult and peer.
He positions himself as someone on their level — the misunderstood, bullied kid, the outcast class clown, the edgy friend who “gets it.” That performance of immaturity becomes a grooming mechanism: it invites young audiences to relate to him, to trust him, and to see him as one of them.
This is also where the “club mentality” takes hold. MSI’s whole branding teaches fans that they’re part of a special in-group because they can “handle” the offensive jokes. Kids internalize that participating in cruelty is a requirement for membership— and that critics are outsiders who “don’t get it.”
So the harm doesn’t require direct contact. It happens in the social architecture THEY BUILD:
– by luring youth into identifying with an adult who pretends to be their peer,
– by rewarding boundary-crossing behavior,
– by glamorizing bigotry as rebellion,
– and by creating a community where children perform harmful ideas for an adult’s approval.
That is precisely how a predatory ecosystem works. It doesn’t need physical proximity— only influence, validation, and access to impressionable audiences.
And I want to make something absolutely clear: all members of MSI are complicit. This isn’t a “bad apple” situation. Every single person in that band has been, for years, a promoter, participant, and apologist for predatory, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, cruel, and pedophilic themes. They all stood onstage for it. They all profit from it. They all publicly defend it. They all frame it as “punk”.
There is no separating the art from the artist here because the entire group celebrated this material as their identity, their brand, their political stance. They weren’t reluctantly playing along — they built their careers on it, so the responsibility is collective too.
Punk punches against the state, against capitalism, against institutions of power. MSI punches at children, at women, at Black people, at disabled people, at queer people.
That’s not rebellion. It’s not countercultural. It’s not satire. It’s a coordinated, collaborative celebration of harm.
Of course after revisiting this bullcrap I can no longer support Gerard Way because I don’t think he’s a good person at all.
Last words, and tysm for sticking till the end:
I want to encourage people to protect and educate the kids and teenagers who were pulled into this mess, not alienate them further. The danger here was never that MSI members would personally attack them— the real harm comes from being absorbed into communities and online spaces that isolate, indoctrinate, and reward vulnerability.
These young fans weren’t “stupid” or “asking for it.” They were and are targeted.
They were groomed into believing cruelty was empowerment, that bigotry was humor, and that belonging required self-betrayal. The priority now should be helping them untangle that conditioning, not shaming them for having been manipulated.
What protects kids isn’t mockery or exile— it’s giving them the tools to recognize exploitation, build healthier communities, and understand that they never owed loyalty to people who treated their harm like entertainment.
Thank you so much for reading if you did and I hope you all stay safe🖤.
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