I am always amazed at how truly banal most pop music is. Perhaps amazed isn't the right word to use here. Perhaps I should say dismayed. Or perplexed. Or disappointed. In any event, as evidence I point to Daft Punk's extraordinarily popular and yet extraordinarily dull hit Get Lucky, which is approximately the 10,457,832nd song about someone trying to get laid. For the most part, pop music is dominated by songs about getting drunk, getting laid, partying (which is almost always defined as getting drunk and getting laid), falling in love, and breaking up. Once in a while there is a song about something else, but there are so many songs on these limited number of topics that pop music is more or less an idea wasteland.
And I think that is at least partially why so many nerdy people have flocked to artists like Jonathan Coulton, Paul & Storm, and The Doubleclicks. I think that is at least partially why outlets for user generated media like YouTube have exploded in popularity. Because while the mainstream entertainment industry wallows in rehashing the same tired and mediocre paeans of ennui and tedium, the parallel world of nerdy and off-beat media is creating music, film, and stories that cover all kind of much more interesting topics like a girlfriend who turns into a werewolf, a Christmas song sent from a prisoner on an asteroid run by robots, or an ode to a velociraptor. As Molly Lewis has said, she writes songs that are not love songs because the ratio of love songs to songs about other things is simply way too high.
So when someone takes a horribly dull song like Get Lucky and transforms it into a song about how the Avengers nabbed the Asgardian mischief maker Loki, the world is made a into better place. Granted, the Avengers movie was itself mass media, but writing a song about a comic book movie is not. As I mentioned when Broken Record Films transformed pop-culture pablum into Roll a d6 and Halo, there is a magic in taking the bland products of fashionable culture and turning them into something so much better than the original, and in the case of Get Loki, the tediously repetitive original is made into something almost infinitely greater than the instantly forgettable efforts of Daft Punk.
Previous Musical Monday: Desert Bus Theme Song by The Doubleclicks
Subsequent Musical Monday: Merry Christmas from the Family by Robert Earl Keen
P.L. Boucher Musical Monday Home
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