I discovered two awesome things today; both are characterised by their lunacy, which is at the same time brilliance, as the two concepts are extremely close together. As Oscar Levant famously said: "There's a fine line between genius and madness."
So, to Awesome Thing #1. Beatles songs done with animal noises.
I love this album for its utter absurdity, and the way that, while most of the lyrics are delivered by dogs, timely-placed sounds from different animals can bring the house down. Also it's ironic that the Beatles themselves used animal noises in Good Morning Good Morning on Sgt Peppers, so I like to think that John is looking down on the Barkers with approval.
Awesome Thing #2.
This has been on the internet for two years, or in online time about four and a half millennia. Nonetheless it's worth sharing. Bonnie Tyler's surreal video for Total Eclipse of the Heart is given the literal treatment. And given it well.
Aside from a noticeable drop in quality in the middle third, this video does what most literals fail to: satirise the content while retaining the spirit of the original. As a result it is really terribly funny.
That is all for today. Join me again tomorrow for another episode of Animals Do The Funniest Things. Or something.
Well. I hope you all enjoyed that very much. Maybe you should follow. I mean really.
I was listening today to my latest iTunes download, La Carotte Bleue by The Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger, which is the project of John and Yoko sprog Sean Lennon and his girlfriend (don't worry, it's actually brilliant), and fulminating on what it was I liked about the band. Was it their slightly ridiculous hipster name, their sometimes French language lyrics (always a necessity for the higher echelons of pretension society), or the fact that at least 98% of the people I know won't have heard of them. In fact, it is option D - I love their sound, which is, it seems, simultaneously marijuana-fuelled aristocratic garden party and disturbing noirish horror flick, while at the same time is drenched in a foam of echoing vocals and soft organ (you'll never read this sentence again, you can be sure of that!), which, at the simplest level, I like.
The above paragraph oscillates tremendously, because I'm really a terrible writer, but I suppose the conclusion I'm trying to steer the semantic ship towards is that while I'm generally a fan of obscure music, it isn't that quality of such bands I like, rather their music - which is, it would seem, not always the case with some people. You must be aware of the guys who always drop the most unknown names into a conversation merely to seem better than you; against whom a brilliant tactic is to simply put together two random words and try to pass off the result as the latest undiscovered Belgian sensation.
What the hell am I talking about? This is what happens when you sit down to write a blog without a plan and just spew. Which is all the time.
Anyway, part two - in which I talk about the opposite to obscure hipster chic, the humble twelve-bar standard. So Hank Green recently made a video showing the waiting world how many different songs have been written around the so-called Ice Cream Changes, I-vi-IV-V, including Reel Big Fish's ska classic She Has A Girlfriend Now, the Police's stalker anthem Every Breath You Take and even Justin Bieber's Baby.
Delightfully, however, he started at the dawn of musical time with the Penguins and Dion & the Belmonts, and, a magnificent singer of whom I had never heard called Gene Chandler, whose lovely Duke of Earl is a beguiling satire on the interbreeding of the British aristocracy. (Late April fools... or something. It isn't, anyway; that was a poor joke, which is what you get when you write blogs after 11 in the evening. Soz.) So afterwards I had that song's refrain in my head ALL FREAKING DAY, after which it slightly started to lose its sparkle, I'll be honest.
There was a point to this blog, but it has temporarily escaped the author's mind. Something to do with the difference between obscure and well-known music and how it ultimately comes down not to the label you give a song, but to the musical quality it has of itself.
Yeah. Kinda got away from me.
Follow me please, or a thousand thousand slimy things will crawl upon the slimy sea. (Coleridge, now. Anyway now I'm off to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Who the hell do I think I am?)
