Category Archives: Tuneage

Tuneage

Cheap Jokes! Get Your Cheap Jokes Here!

Human Giant-er Paul Scheer alerted me (and the rest of the world, via his Twitter page) to the existence of the Michael Jackson Auction Catalog. Yes, the King of Pop is auctioning off some of his most priceless memorabilia–although he seems to have had no problem pricing them anyway.

Yes, poking fun at Michael Jackson is as easy as shooting monkeys in a barrel while taking candy from a baby. And yes, making fun of him is a totally hack go-to move for bad comedians everywhere. But take a look at the catalog. Go ahead, just take a look. Then tell me this is not something screaming to be ridiculed.

And it starts before you even see any items, because MJ (or his tech peeps) have insisted on putting the catalog into an unnecessarily complicated Flash interface, where you “turn” the pages on screen with a double click–and it’s accompanied by an audio file of a page turning. I feel like I’m really reading a book!

Then come the auction items. Pages 1 through 70 are pretty much all video games. Then, the fun starts. I recommend page 73, which features Item #805: a lifesize statue of Michael Jackson as Batman. I wish I was kidding about that.

The rest of the catalog features many, many mind-blowing artifacts, too many to single out in this space. Surely most of them have spent some time known as “People’s Exhibit X”. So flip through it when you have a chance. But make sure there’s a shower nearby; you’ll wanna take one when you’re done.

Tuneage

REMINDER: Give ‘Til it Hurts So Good!

goodguys.jpgAs I alerted this readership last week, the WFMU Pledge Marathon is afoot. So pledge today!

Or pledge tonight, during The Best Show on WFMU. Ted Leo and Aimee Mann will be in studio, playing songs for pledges. Paul F. Tompkins and John Hodgman will be there to provide hilarity. And a pledge of $75 gets you a brand-new pledge-exclusive Scharpling & Wurster CD. Wow! A bargain at twice the price!

But not only that! That same $75 pledge earns you another pledge exclusive: an all-star tribute to the Paul & Linda McCartney album RAM, with songs covered by such esteemed artists as the two titans mentioned above, plus Death Cab for Cutie, Times New Viking, Portastatic, and many more.

What else do you get? Much much much much more! Actually, just a totebag, near as I can tell. But that can be much much much much more, depending on what you intend to use it for.

Actually, you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped one of the funniest radio programs of all time and one of the few radio stations in the NYC area worth listening to. So if you give no other monies to charity this year–and you know you won’t!–give to this!

Tuneage, Videocracy

The Soundtrack for the Impending Idiocracy

Over the weekend, I saw (most of) Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s last doomed film. It has yet to achieve the cable/DVD cult status afforded to Office Space, mostly because it’s not nearly as funny. But the movie does a good job of fleshing out the universe contained in its premise: what happens when all the smart people in the world stop breeding, and the planet becomes overrun with morons?

The little cultural touches of the universe work better than the actual plot and characters. In the world of Idiocracy, the most popular TV show is called “Ow! My Balls!”, the president is a machine gun-weilding “smackdown champion”, and a film called Ass won 8 Academy Awards

Conspicuously absent from the film is what music would be like in this world. Dumb is much harder to achieve on purpose in music than in other media. In fact, I can’t think of too many people who have tried to capture the essence of Dumb in music and succeeded, other than Spinal Tap. Apart from “Big Bottom” and other Tap tunes, actual Dumb music made by actual Dumb people beats out manufactured Dumb Music by a mile.

But I think I found the soundtrack to a world filled with people with IQs of 60 (found = saw it posted to several message boards I frequent). This song is perfect for the world of Idiocracy–it’s violent, emotionally stunted, sexually
ignorant, aggressively misogynistic, and idiotic. I mean, truly, deeply idiotic.

I wanted to say “unapologetically idiotic”, but the people who made this song/video would be unable to apologize for their idiocy because they haven’t the slightest clue how idiotic they are. When I first saw this video, I thought it might be a put-on. But after a minute or so, as I fought the urge to vomit, I realized that only truly shallow morons could make music this moronic.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you the absolutely worst song I’ve ever heard in my life, by the worst group in the universe: brokeNCYDE. And don’t think too hard about how these mind-corpses are already on tour and playing IRVING PLAZA TONIGHT and probably making huge bank, because if you dwell on that horrifying factoid too long, you’ll wanna kill yourself. I know I do!