Nick Cannon’s White People Party Music will probably forever be better known for its marketing campaign than its actual music.  Nick Cannon’s whiteface photo was a simple but pointed gimmick that outed a lot of online racists (“if he can do this, why can’t white people wear blackface?”) and added a truckload of fuel to Internet discussions on the equality of offense.

But racial politics are only a minor theme on the actual record. Cannon occasionally pokes fun at 21st-century stereotypes of young white Americans–the “bro,” the wasted white girl, the decadent Coachella-goer.  According to Cannon, there’s also an underlying theme of how so much black music has been re-appropriated as “white people party music.”  But the strengths of Cannon’s second album lie almost exclusively in its send-ups of contemporary pop music, specifically the watered-down EDM-pop that’s dominated the charts in the first half of the 2010s.

Though White People Party Music is ostensibly a comedy album, not many of these songs are much more ridiculous than the music they lampoon.  There aren’t many tunes here more absurd than The Chainsmokers’ recent hit “#SELFIE,” let alone LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.”  The most blatant farce here is “America,” in which Cannon and guest Pitbull sing the praises of a girl named America, and it’s by far the least effective song here in that it’s not quite sure what it’s lampooning.

It’s the more subtle parodies that make White People Party Music work so much better than it should.  Opener “Looking For A Dream” doesn’t even seem like a joke at first until you realize how redundant a line “looking for a dream in my head” is.  (Hip-hop fans might note the similarity between Cannon’s Afrojack shout-out and A$AP Rocky’s similar shout-out to Skrillex on “Wild For The Night.”)  “Fuckin’ Awesome” does something of the reverse, with Cannon singing the tune from the perspective of a cartoon “bro” but getting disarmingly emotional during the chorus.

The most effective song on the album is “OJ Simpson.”  The tune starts out as a quasi-emotional pop song but unexpectedly goes into a breakdown featuring someone gruffly shouting the titular celebrity’s name.  Aside from obviously riffing on Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand,” it’s a hilarious parody of some of the more incongruous dubstep-trap-whatever breakdown-drop-things in pop music.

Whether or not Cannon intended such an effect, these moments of cleverness actually manage to elevate the music on White People Party Music above what’s actually classified as “serious” EDM-pop.  The best pop music has wit in addition to catchiness, and though this album isn’t as funny as it might like to be, its self-consciousness is refreshing.

But by nature, this isn’t music that merits a full-album sit-down, at least not for its entire 17-song, hour-plus duration.  At the same time, pruning it would diminish its efforts in actually being a simulacrum of a typical pop album.  Pop albums are overstuffed to give each song an equal chance of being a hit, and in today’s landscape, each of these songs could very easily be if not for the parody baggage.  White People Party Music‘s core flaw is that it’s less of a comedy album than an incongruously clever album in a genre not known for its subtlety.  And while this isn’t a great or even particularly enjoyable album by any means, it inadvertently puts much of the music it set out to make fun of to shame.