Adventures in Questionable Music
A couple of days ago Timothy McNulty on the Post-Gazette's Steelers blog passed along an old video that an AdWeek blogger called, aptly enough, "the most awful Super Bowl video in history". In it, the employees of one Southern Food Brokerage Corporation pay homage to the 1985 Bears' already pretty grim Super Bowl Shuffle, with squirm-inducing results:
Stray blog and YouTube comments suggest that a lot of viewers didn't make it much past the one minute mark, which is fair. But I like the broker-rappers' somewhat MF DOOM-like disassociation from the underlying beat, their commitment to moving their favored grocery products, and (for whatever reason) the missing quotation mark at the bottom of the title screen. I also like to imagine this being recorded a decade or so later, after the ascension of gangsta rap, as the product pitches would involve a lot more sexual boasting and the guy with the Planters peanuts would have been shot to death outside a nightclub by a Sysco sales rep shortly before the video's release.
The AdFreak post above also knocks a recent commercial spot for Microsoft Songsmith, which apparently can automatically compose music around a solo vocal or instrumental line that you can sing or play into your computer's microphone. It's a really neat concept and in my mind the level of sophistication required to do that at all shouldn't be taken for granted but, based on the evidence I've heard, John Henry can still beat this particular steam hammer. As in the music isn't very good at all.
"The evidence I've heard" refers to a few amusing projects here (via Amanda Marcotte, who embeds a couple of additional selections) where folks have extracted the vocal tracks from well-known songs, fed them through Songsmith, and re-synced the results to the original music video. The first thirty seconds of any of these are mesmerizing and/or hilarious but my indisputable favorite is this rendition of Crazy Train (the genre selected by, I think, the program's user becomes pretty clear eight seconds in):
To me this sounds as though somebody uploaded a low-fidelity copy of "Weird Al" Yankovic's brain onto their old Dell Inspiron, fed it some peyote through the CD drive, and let it loose; your listener-response criticism mileage may vary. On some meta level the funniest part to me -- and the most telling indicator of the gap that remains between human creativity and our increasingly sophisticated artistic tools -- is the big swath of autogenerated nothing-in-particular starting at about 2:45 where Randy Rhoads' towering guitar solo used to be.
(Given that my actual music listening today consisted solely of various tracks from the abortive, David Byrne-produced B-52's album "Mesopotamia" and Styx's "Renegade", perhaps I'm not entrenched deeply enough on the musical high ground to make too much fun of all of this.)
Stray blog and YouTube comments suggest that a lot of viewers didn't make it much past the one minute mark, which is fair. But I like the broker-rappers' somewhat MF DOOM-like disassociation from the underlying beat, their commitment to moving their favored grocery products, and (for whatever reason) the missing quotation mark at the bottom of the title screen. I also like to imagine this being recorded a decade or so later, after the ascension of gangsta rap, as the product pitches would involve a lot more sexual boasting and the guy with the Planters peanuts would have been shot to death outside a nightclub by a Sysco sales rep shortly before the video's release.
The AdFreak post above also knocks a recent commercial spot for Microsoft Songsmith, which apparently can automatically compose music around a solo vocal or instrumental line that you can sing or play into your computer's microphone. It's a really neat concept and in my mind the level of sophistication required to do that at all shouldn't be taken for granted but, based on the evidence I've heard, John Henry can still beat this particular steam hammer. As in the music isn't very good at all.
"The evidence I've heard" refers to a few amusing projects here (via Amanda Marcotte, who embeds a couple of additional selections) where folks have extracted the vocal tracks from well-known songs, fed them through Songsmith, and re-synced the results to the original music video. The first thirty seconds of any of these are mesmerizing and/or hilarious but my indisputable favorite is this rendition of Crazy Train (the genre selected by, I think, the program's user becomes pretty clear eight seconds in):
To me this sounds as though somebody uploaded a low-fidelity copy of "Weird Al" Yankovic's brain onto their old Dell Inspiron, fed it some peyote through the CD drive, and let it loose; your listener-response criticism mileage may vary. On some meta level the funniest part to me -- and the most telling indicator of the gap that remains between human creativity and our increasingly sophisticated artistic tools -- is the big swath of autogenerated nothing-in-particular starting at about 2:45 where Randy Rhoads' towering guitar solo used to be.
(Given that my actual music listening today consisted solely of various tracks from the abortive, David Byrne-produced B-52's album "Mesopotamia" and Styx's "Renegade", perhaps I'm not entrenched deeply enough on the musical high ground to make too much fun of all of this.)
6 Comments:
Glad you liked my Songsmith version of Crazy Train -- thanks for the link.
In the end, are the Super Brokers really that much more cringe-worthy than the Bears themselves (who in theory had professional advice and assistance in their creation)?
azz100c, you're welcome and props for the video.
Don, I think the cringe factor multiplies each time you make a non-ironic imitation of an already cringey original source. Plus the '85 Bears did go on to win the Super Bowl, while I can't find any evidence that the SFB clan ever did "win the Super Broker Shuffle", whatever that means.
I like the polka version of Crazy Train. I think.
Also, I had a very "can't look away" experience with the grocery store video. I wanted to stop it 3 or 4 times, but it kept getting better and better.
Oh, and these Songsmith videos remind me of this, which I heard playing at a mall in Richmond:
http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Swings-Paul-Anka/dp/B0009A1BXG/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1233336531&sr=8-2
(Disclaimer: I used Shazam to actually identify the butchered version of It's My Life.)
Yeah, Paul Anka... I haven't checked but I hope that the trend of singing retro arrangements of rock songs went out of style around the time that people stopped watching the opening credit sequence from "The Osbournes".
I guess that between Songsmith and Shazam it should now be possible for a song to be composed, recorded, played at the mall, identified, and purchased without a human intervening at any point in the process. Purists will no doubt complain but for the majority of songs you're actually going to hear at the Gap Outlet or wherever I don't think this would be a bad thing.
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