Category: Music

Suw (who used to be “Sue” until a misprint in an academic paper transformed her name forever) Charman, one of the regulars on the #joiito IRC channel, points to this report that one of my musical idols, Ben Folds, is collaborating on an album with The Original Starfleet Captain, William Shatner, on a new album, titled Has Been. A substantial snippet of his cover of Pulp’s late-nineties hit, Common People, is available online [QuickTime link]. It’s awesome: Shatner does the verses in his trademark Shatnerian reading, with Joe Jackson doing the vocal wailing for the chorus, and surprisingly, it works.

I will buy this album the day it comes out.

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Special message to Wil Wheaton: Are
you just gonna sit there? What say you and I collaborate? I’ll play
accordion, you sing or recite, and I thought we’d do an awesome cover
of Army by
Ben Folds (or whatever song you think would work well for us). I’ll bet
we could raise the funds for a recording session via our blogs and
PayPal. Whaddaya think?

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For more stuff from Suw, be sure to check out her Blogware-powered blog, Chocolate and Vodka, at http://chocnvodka.blogware.com.

Will Rigby of the guitar band The dB’s
once remarked that “Giving
synthesizers to the Europeans was like giving whiskey to the Indians”.
In the case of one Zladko “Zlad” Vladcik, he may have been right.

I’ve posted a frame from the video for his song Elektronik Supersonik below, but to experience the full cheese, you’ve got to watch the video (Flash required)

The trying-to-be-sexy-but-failing space-age-sex lyrics are sung in a language that’s trying-to-be-English-but-failing:

• “My blue jeans eez tight, so eento my love rocket climb.”
• “Above us, there eez notheenk above us…but the stars…above.”
• “5…4…3…1…off blast!” (Yes, he skipped “2”.)
• “
  Fly away my space rocket,
  you no need put money in my pocket
  the door is closed I just lock it
  I put my birthplug in your socket”

You’ll get a kick out of the full lyrics, which are here.

This guy sounds just the way I imagine Vlad the robot from Achewood does.

(Here’s a copy located in my blog’s filesystem, just in case they’ve taken down the video.)

For your amusement:

• Morrissey Dance. Because some memes are bigger than others.
• Gothic Dance! Starring Ray from Achewood as “The God father of Souls” and wearing the best codpiece ever! (Requires QuickTime.)

[ via del.icio.us ] While we’re on the topic of synths, here’s a web page that does a side-by-side comparison of Nena’s 99 Luftballons (the German version) and 99 Red Balloons (the English version).

Apparently the translation is more poetic than literal.