Musical Spoofing |
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"Why do I love Milli Vanilli's Girl, You Know It's True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it's great because the people involved were 'talented'? Who the hell cares? It's not like I'm inviting them to dinner." - Ted Friedman I've got a mishmash of interesting notes about musicians who have played around with this sort of thing (and peripherally relevant items like, say, the Soy Bomb Nation). Fritz Kreisler, a fine violinist, had a hard time finding an appreciative audience for his own compositions, so he started writing them in the style of famous composers and passing them off as obscure or recently-uncovered works of the great masters. How hard it seems for people to forgive Milli Vanilli. As if anyone who tapped their toes to the catchy tunes or rocked out at one of their concerts was doing so out of enthusiasm for the artistic integrity of the musicians. The BBC broadcast what it claimed to be the avant-garde composition of a Polish visionary but what was in fact the work of BBC employees making random noise. "We dragged together all the instruments we could find and went around the studio banging them." The composition, Mobile for Tape and Percussion by Piotr Zak was a twelve-minute cacophony that merited serious reviews in the Daily Telegraph and the London Times before the hoax was revealed. And in a sort of harmony with Mr. Zak, there is the famous diva Florence Foster Jenkins, whose singing was so awful that she sold out Carnegie Hall in her final performance. Hip irony, circa 1944. A techno deejay by the name of Scanner sent lookalikes to play a 16-concert tour of Europe and America while he kicked back in the recording studio. "It's being avant garde with a sense of humour. It was meant to be amusing and a play on the idea of techno being faceless, that sort of thing. The fact that no-one's acknowledged it wasn't me makes it even funnier." Jello Biafra has been known to get creatively confrontational. And the "artists of appropriation" known as NegativLand have become audio outlaws for flying in the face of copyright laws in their relentless parody. The punk rock anarchists known as Crass pulled a few pranks in their day. They arranged to include a flexidisk of a song called "Our Wedding" in the teenybopper magazine Loving. Nobody at the magazine had gotten around to actually listening to the song first, though, and they had to apologize later for including this "sneering attack on love and marriage" with a title "too obscene to print" in their magazine. Check out our News Trolls section for info about another great Crass hack. Gotta put in a plug at this point for The Free Radio Network, a good source of information for pirate radio broadcasters and fans. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to get on the air. The station in my town has been on the air for years now, and a town down the road has a pirate station that has become such an institution that it has arranged with the city to broadcast the city council meetings. Some hoaxes in the same spirit as these can be found at our Art Forgery and Literary Forgery pages. |
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