Bandwagon

It seems like for years artists have been making parody’s of each others work.  Weird Al seemed to make parody’s popular, and now there has been a slightly different bend on parody music. This trend has been steadily growing with radio play the last couple of years. Parody’s of rap and hip hops songs.

The songs that are usually chosen are pretty rough, talking about drugs, sex and money. The people who sing them, however, are the opposite of the these rap artists: white and somewhat nerdy. There are quite a few examples, including Ben Fold’s version of Bitches An’t Shit:

Here is an example of the original:

And here is an example of the parody by Dr. Dre:

What’s interesting about these parody’s are sometimes the parody gets to be more popular than the original — however, I would say that the play of the parody would increase the play of the original. Yet there are examples of parody’s sued for libel. It’s an another interesting example in our society. We enjoy the parody’s because they’re funny, but are they hurtful? Or at the very least, could someone take offense that we don’t take their artist work seriously?

It seems that most people don’t mind, because Saturday Night Live is still as popular as it always was.

More Parody Examples:

Original: Boyz N Tha Hood by Eazy-E
Parody: Boyz N Tha Hood by Dynamite Hack

You’ve probably all had it with the video posts…but I just recently remembered all of these musically based videos people have shown me in the passed and can’t help but show everyone. Although my inclination in music is not towards musicals or anything of this sort as I previously mentioned, I have to admit this is is pretty cool. If I saw people just start enacting a musical in the middle of anywhere, I would be pretty impressed.

This is a little something I’ve been hearing about word-of-mouth lately. I had to investigate and found this…

Happy holidays everyone. If this doesn’t give you a little bit of holiday cheer, I don’t know what will. There are a couple of holidays songs that go along with Silent Night, so take a peek if you are so inclined.

And wonder if anyone else thinks that these kittens sound a little country too…?

This is the most searched phrase in the category of “music.”

I’m not sure if anyone can be surprised by this…music piracy is so common now that law abiding citizens don’t even consider that they are breaking the law when they download full length albums for free. We don’t know we’re breaking the law anymore, and when someone gets penalized for downloading free music, we all are extremely surprised.

Why do we think that once an artist records a song and puts it in the public atmosphere, that it’s ours and we can own it at the artists cost? No we won’t pay for something we passionately love! No, we won’t allow the artist to make a living! It’s strange that we will steal from the artists that we love and then look confused when artists frown on illegal downloads.

If it were up to me to define, I would suggest that we want to cheat huge corporations, not the artists. We think they make too much money. I also think that we’re a selfish generation, and that we want artists to be our own — by stealing from them we may feel like we’re keeping the artist away from becoming mainstream.

But really, who knows? It’s something everyone seems to be doing, and although it’s not right, we keep doing it.

Here’s a video called Ace Enders & a Million different people, with all profits going to the Save the Music Foundation. Apparently artists do care that we’re stealing the music. Ironically? Someone bought this song, and put it on the video below without the artists permission to “share” with all of us — again, stealing? Who knows, the line is a bit grey.