Anyway, how to describe this list... Gee... I guess I'd describe it as: "Songs whose parodies have wormed their way into my skull to the point of statistical correlation between thinking of the song and thinking of its parody to the point where I start to feel like the song/artist and its pitch-perfect parody were conceived simultaneously, or may as well have been conceived simultaneously, such is the strength of the connection between them."
Yeah, that works. Without further ado:
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"Ignition"
"Remix To Ignition" by R. Kelly
I think of Dave Chappelle's memorable, scatological parodies whenever I think of these songs of R. Kelly.
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"Every Simon And Garfunkel Song" - Simon and GarfunkelLook, I love vocal harmonies, and it's hard to find a truer, tighter, or more efficient blend in the last century than Simon and Garfunkel, and they're right up there with the Everly Brothers. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that a significant portion of my enjoyment comes from twisting every one of their lyrics into monstrously easy (and sometimes monstrously difficult) parodies.
I have mentally parodied every notable Simon and Garfunkel song (and several Paul Simon solo songs) and made it about at least one of the following: The Charlotte Bobcats, Richard Jefferson, Art Garfunkel (almost inevitably from the perspective of Paul Simon). Since I rarely write any of these parodies down (and some exist only within chats with friend Aaron, who also did some of these), they're a bit hard to track down. Why so many parodies? Well, as Aaron once put it, the music of Simon and Garfunkel is rather "like a bridge made for that purpose". Get it? But here's my parody of "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright".
So long, Gar Funk El
I can't believe your song is gone, so soon
I amply wrote our tunes, so soon
I remember Gar Funk El
All of the nights we harmonized til dawn/
Collaborated long/ So long/ So long
Garfunkel and Simon
Garfunkel sang my songs
Garfunkel, Art - that's you
I'm Paul Si-
Mon and mainly associated with you
Simon, Garfunkel
That is the group of harmonies
We formed
No longer is it here
It's gone
It's gone...
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"She Loves You" by the Beatles
The Residents have a lot of problems as a band one can simply sit down and appreciate. But on the rare occasion when they're called to make a simple satirical point and not beat it into the ground, the outsider music group's clarity can be hilarious and unsurpassed. "Beyond The Valley Of A Day in the Life" by the Residents is a wonderful little track whose outro riffs on "A Day in the Life" and the infamous "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" section of "She Loves You", repeated to the point of inanity.
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Later "Steely Dan"Okay, I actually like Steely Dan, but Ween's "Pandy Fackler" is such an immaculate parody of Aja/Pretzel Logic-period style and the vulgar opening couplets (combined with the pitch-perfect mu-chord-cum-instrumentation parody) absolutely slaughter me every time. Check it out; however, Pearls of Mystery is meant as a family blog so I won't reprint the lyrics here.
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Prog Rock With Any Element of FantasyOnce again Ween comes through with "Buckingham Green", "The Mollusk", and "The Golden Eel". Really it's the entire album of "The Mollusk" but those are the only outright parodies that taint my enjoyment of the genre. Taint in a positive way, of course, because prog is intentionally overwrought and ridiculous, and only when you've given in to its absurdity can "Solsbury Hill" work its full magic on you.
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"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"God rest ye Richard Jefferson
Your tenure here is done
Remember when you were brought here
Were brought to San Antone
To save us all from getting old
Your limits were unknown
Outside of Spurs team you've been thrown (you have been thrown)
Yeah, even Annie Lennox's version of this fine Christmas standard can't get this ethering parody of Richard Jefferson I myself wrote out of my head.
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All hip-hop that lists types of things instead of telling a story, like more than 5 per verse
Sorry, but Kool Keith has this on lockdown with one of his dozens of outrageously funny list songs.
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The entire I-iii-vi chord progression
Sorry, but Ben Folds absolutely ruined this chord progression for everyone with his cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr. Dre. The song is hilarious and hopefully satirical of its misogynistic roots in the context of a catchy, anthemic cover. But you can never, ever sing this out loud, even though about 5% of commercials use this chord progression. If you're a musician you'll recognize this chord progression in countless songs, but I can never get Ben Folds' version of this song out of my head. Ironically, the one thing the cover didn't ruin was Dre's original song, which actually doesn't hold up especially well.
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Musical numbers that serve a plot purposeMusical numbers that combine previous numbers in a medley
Musical numbers that make a commentary on a social issue
I love musicals. Richard Rodgers has a conceivable case as my favorite musical mind of all time, and Cole Porter and George Gershwin and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and Jerome Kern have written so much brilliant music. I'm less familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sondheim, but I've enjoyed a lot of what I've heard.
And yet, when I hear songs that do one of the three things mentioned above, I almost always at least flash for a moment to Trey Parker and Matt Stone's wonderful parodies of musicals in the "South Park" movie-musical and "Team America: World Police".
Alternately, Charlie Day's "Will You Marry Me?" coda on the famous musical on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" comes up in my head pretty frequently. When I'm singing a complicated melody in falsetto, there's a 10% chance I'll think of that.
Even more obscurely, "You Can't Fight City Hall" from an old Rocko's Modern Life episode works really effectively - the chorus of townspeople are essentially (and jubilantly) noting their own political futility against a faceless conglomerate while Rocko tries to convince them that they have a voice, which they only go along with because they have nothing better to do. It's a wonderful little moment of irony and parody.
The South Park folks' "Montage" deserves special mention here, though that's as much a filmic parody as a musical parody.
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Beach Boys, Phil Spector"The Great Unwanted" by Lucky Soul, "Mouth Full of Sores" by Bob Odenkirk's Willups Brighton (from the legendary Teardrop Awards sketch of Mr. Show) and "The Other Side of Summer" by Elvis Costello are pitch-perfect deconstructions of the Southern California myth propagated by bands like The Beach Boys, doo wop, and Phil Spector's luxuriating productions.
These parodies, while completely superfluous (it's not like the Beach Boys themselves never deconstructed their own surfer mythology in their later career), are so catchy and often funny that they are impossible to ignore when listening to doo wop, Spector productions, or Brian Wilson's "Surfin' U.S.A." type numbers.
Bob Odenkirk's 20-30 second parody sequence deserves special mention, because it completely captures the darkly comic tragedy of the Beach Boys in one single frowning glance after "Losing you is like a mouthful of sores/A mouthful of sores ain't no fun..." about Brighton's son's death.
Granted these are absolutely brilliant musicians - only a small part of my enjoyment is corrupted by my enjoyment of these parodies.
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"Tears in Heaven" by Eric ClaptonThis makes me and David Cross terrible people. I'm sorry. But in his "Teardrop Awards" sketch from Mr. Show, Cross inhabited a Clapton parody that sings songs like "Heaven Better Save Some Tears" about his dead son and gives speeches about how winning an award for that song is like "a nonstop orgasm" and only wishes that his son were still alive to see the award, but then relents, realizing that if his son had died, he wouldn't have written the song, and wouldn't have won the award, so "scratch that" before throwing the glass teardrop-shaped award wildly and accidentally killing Willups Brighton's son.
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That's about all I have right now. Now, to dispense with the obvious, this list is obviously endless and my choices are based on what I've remembered in a burst of excited writing. Probably not perfectly representative, and the order is perfectly arbitrary. A few lessons, however:
Catchiness is king - Songs become popular on the basis of catching your ear. Satires and parodies work on much the same frequency. Most of these songs exceed the catchiness factor of their already-brilliant objects of parody. When you have that much of a memorable melody, your parody becomes hard to ignore.
Use what works in the original to your advantage - Pretty much self-explanatory. A parody hitches a wagon on musical forms that work - at their finest, the parodies take what is good about the form and improve upon it with economy or depth or breadth of thought. Elvis Costello's "The Other Side of Summer" is thematically and lyrically impressive and, simply put, gets the best of both worlds in terms of catchiness and social messages. Granted, it's freaking Elvis Costello, that guy is probably still bitter about being cut off in traffic six weeks ago, I wouldn't take it as gospel exactly, but hey, it's effectively delivered. Heh.
Never set out to be dead-on if you want a full song - I don't care how brilliant your message is, a full song pounds it into your head, and you had better have something independently to work about your song, not just musically but lyrically and thematically.
But you should be somewhat focused - The above notwithstanding, if the lines of parody aren't clearly drawn, you'll merely have written a masterful song in its own right that evokes the prior song. You have failed to ether your opponent, in the parlance of hip-hop. What fun is that?
Musical irony is powerful - Clashing the words with the song is great fun, because singing a wicked parody with a straight face is about as good as life gets.
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