Posts Tagged The FuMP
Logan Awards Finalists (with links)
Posted by Angela Brett in News on May 8, 2015
Recently I had the honour of being a fan juror for the Logan Whitehurst Memorial Awards for Excellence in Comedy Music (Logan Awards for short.) It was great to finally have an important reason to listen to comedy music for several full days, and a response to the eye-rolling of my friends when I mentioned yet another funny song, although deciding which songs to vote for was pretty tough. As a juror I had to listen to or watch all the songs and music videos nominated by the general public, and choose my favourite five nominees in each category. I can’t tell you which ones I voted for, but the finalists (chosen based on the votes of all the jurors, with ties broken by Dr. Demento) have been announced. Since the page on the Logan Awards site doesn’t link to the songs in question, I thought I’d link to them here. In alphabetical order:
Outstanding Parody Song
- The Boobles — Have Natural Es (a parody of The Beatles’ ‘Act Naturally‘)
- Carrie Dahlby feat. Wyngarde — Almost Parent Time (a parody of Mike Reno and Ann Wilson’s ‘Almost Paradise‘)
- Devo Spice (feat. Power Salad) — Snack Bar (a parody of Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop‘)
- Kyle Kallgren & Tony Goldmark — Kill the Mouse (a parody of ‘The Mob Song‘ from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. You might also like to see the video in which it appeared, though that was irrelevant to the judging in this category)
- ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Word Crimes (a parody of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines‘)
Outstanding Original Comedy Song
- the great Luke Ski — Fake Adult
- Mikey Mason — Last Day at Work
- Mikey Mason — Settle
- Power Salad — Amazon Drone
- Worm Quartet — Fueled by Angst
Outstanding Comedy Music Video
- CBS Follies — Bitch in Business
- Epic Rap Battles of History — Sir Isaac Newton vs. Bill Nye
- Rhett and Link — I’m on Vacation
- ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Tacky
- ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Word Crimes
Here’s a YouTube playlist of the music video finalists:
The winners will be announced at FuMPFest on 5—7 June in Wheeling, Illinois. If you like funny music and are anywhere near there, I recommend going; it sounds like great fun. Many comedy musicians will be there, including guests of honour The Arrogant Worms. I saw some of the same performers and fans at the MarsCon 2014 dementia track, and it was a blast.
I’d like to give the other nominees a bit of publicity, but it’s difficult to do that without people making inferences about my votes, so here is a YouTube playlist of all the videos nominated in open nominations for the ‘Outstanding Comedy Music Video’ category, sorted in ascending order of views because the ones with the fewest views need the publicity more.
If you’re a Paul and Storm fan, you might be wondering why no songs from their 2014 album Ball Pit are in the finals. Some of their songs were nominated in the open nominations, but they became ineligible for the award when Paul Sabourin joined the jury. In honour of Paul’s noble sacrifice, I present to you a nominated video of this song of theirs which would have made the judging harder for me, if only because of all the freeze-framing to see the details:
If you’d like to hear more comedy music, consider subscribing to The FuMP podcasts, where you can get several comedy songs a week for free. You can find even more funny music on the Mad Music Archive, the Dr. Demento Show, or Songs About Science & Math. Also, check out the Logan Whitehurst website to find out about the awards’ namesake and buy his music.
A Song For Angelastic to Sing With Worm Quartet
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo, Things To Listen To on May 23, 2014
When you’ve let what is left of your pride go,
let your own song beset the FuMP sideshow! — Brush Up On Parody
Remember that parody I wrote of ‘A Song for Worm Quartet to Sing With TV’s Kyle’? Well, I recorded myself singing it. Sorry! It’s coming up to my birthday, so it’s time for me to embarrass myself publicly again.
You can thank ShoEboX of Worm Quartet for providing probably the only part of this that sounds good (the backing track) and also blame him for encouraging me. When I first emailed to ask about it, he played his part perfectly by not responding, and I recorded said lack of response for use in the song. When I actually met him at MarsCon 2014 and reminded him about it, he kindly and foolishly sent me the backing track. Some blame also falls on DJ Particle for singing (also at MarsCon) a song encouraging people to submit to the FuMP sideshow. This should appear on the sideshow around May 31, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be my best sideshow ever; it has twice the worms of my only other attempt, and one fewer html-parser-destroying character in the title.
I also met TV’s Kyle at MarsCon, and I understand why ShoEboX found his sideburns so compelling. In a world of musicians controlled by sentient beards of dubious alignment, TV’s Kyle is leading the resistance; he will not allow his binate bristly battalions to collude, not by the hair on his chinny chin chin. I forgot to ask him if he consented to [not] appearing in this track, though. Sorry, Kyle!
The lyrics I wrote originally had noticeably fewer nipples than the average Worm Quartet song, so I replaced ‘nebulae’ with ‘nipple gas’. It has similar consonants and constituents, so I don’t think this change affects either the form or function significantly. I also attempted to actually make my voice audible rather than covering it up as much as possible with the backing track, since after all, if people are going to endure my singing, they may as well at least hear what the words are. It’s difficult to record all of those words clearly, and to the right tune, and then overdose on testosterone and expect it to still be comprehensible. Here are the current lyrics: Read the rest of this entry »
AppleScript: Fixing tags of free music podcasts in iTunes
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on October 23, 2011
I’m a bit of a free music junkie. Free as in beer (or doughnuts, since I don’t like beer) is good, free as in speech is better, but this post is about the free as in doughnuts kind, which costs nothing until you get a taste for doughnuts and then end up buying out the whole Krispy Kreme, travelling around the world to have different doughnuts with different people, and getting too fat for your iPod. Download free music responsibly, kids (okay, I guess the beer metaphor would have made more sense.) Anyway, back to free music. One way I discover a lot of music is through podcasts which regularly publish individual songs. However, I use iTunes, and iTunes gives podcast tracks the name and artist given in the podcast feed (often taken from the title of a blog post) over whatever was set in the ID3 tags of the mp3 file itself. This might be a good idea for non-music podcasts, and maybe some music podcasts, where the details aren’t necessarily filled out, but for some of the music podcasts I subscribe to it doesn’t really work out. Particularly if there’s a blog post associated with each podcast episode, the title tends to include the artist name and sometimes some other information.
I can’t be bothered fixing all of the tracks manually, so a few years ago I wrote a few AppleScripts to fix up the metadata of the music podcasts I was subscribed to, and also add the tracks to my Songs playlist (which I use as the basis of most of my smart playlists) and turn off the ‘Remember position’ and ‘Skip while shuffling’ options that are turned on by default for podcast tracks. I’ve since subscribed to and made scripts to fix a few more music podcasts, and it occurred to me that other people might find the scripts useful, so I’ve just tidied up the code and added a way to choose which playlist to add the tracks to. There are links to the scripts and related podcasts below.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 