Originally published at: This swing version of Get Low works a little too well | Boing Boing
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Ruined it? That was glorious! I can almost feel history shifting. If, in 24 hours time, this will be the way it has always been, and this post will disappear, or I will write in revoking it after finding a shellac 78 of it in my attic. And the Time Police will find you, and high-five you for fixing it.
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A fine mashup.
My all time favorite is here. Britney works so well as an alt-metal singer, it even sounds like a missed opportunity.
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I agree!
Oh, if the Time Police drops by, could you ask them if I could get an autograph from Mathew?
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Thanks for sharing this! It makes me want to dig out my old Garbage albums.
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Oops, wrong Low. Well, I like this one anyway.
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It is indeed, fabulous.
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Agreed that “ruined” may not be so fitting for some of these genius mashups. The king of the genre in a more loving, musical sense is Scott Bradlee of Postmodern Jukebox. He and his band(s) do covers of recent popular music in older popular styles. Some hilarious, some breathtaking. Britney, Harry, Taylor, and more treated like it’s 1924, 1955, 1962.
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Big fan of PMJ, but it almost feels like a formula. Scott (the piano) and good session musicians give a period look and feel to modern tunes. It is a bit like AI turning your piccies into Vermeer, Renoir, or Picasso. In fact, I have a nasty (?) thought that AI could learn to do this very soon. This is not a new problem…
There was a dice and cards system in Mozart’s day that let you ‘compose’ in the style of Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus himself bought a set, and loved it. It was not creative, of course, but Mozart loved the idea that random chance could look like composition, and you could keep the good ones. Familiar? You betcha. Maybe my gripe (?) against PMJ is Scot Bradlee has done too much, and I can begin to see the patterns, while I only have one Get Low to date.
Wow, those historic precursors to DALL-E and Midjourney are something to ponder. And yes, the whole idea is that once you’ve identified a formula, you can simply execute it on any property, like a country version of Cher song (pick one), or an image of a cathedral made of fruit on the moon. PMJ probably wouldn’t have done so much so successfully without their formulae. I have a simple formula that works as a party game, especially among singers, actors and musical friends. It’s not at all original; it’s just: Sing X song in the style of Y. Make a nice list of popular songs, or songs the present crowd would know, and another separate list of people with distinctive voices, singers or not. Match one from each list. Jimmy Durante and Bette Davis weren’t known as singers, but when you sing “Fernando” or “You Spin Me Round” in either of their voices, it gets pretty silly. Spice things up if the Karaoke library gets dull.
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“I’m Sorry I haven’t A Clue” introduced me to ‘The Words of One Tune to the Music of Another’, and the pair ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. I remember Barry Cryer singing the words of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ in broad Cockney to ‘My Old Man’. But it also works the other way.
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