Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Imaginary Ipod list

In the comments to my previous post, St. Eph says that Monkey Mind is her newest imaginary band name. I like it, except for the part about it having monkeys. Do you think they'd dress like the guerrilla girls? They'd be the only exception to my anti-monkey philosophy. If it could be called a philosophy. Antipathy? Knee-jerk reaction?

So as if in connection to this upswing in imaginary bands, Dr. Zombieswan did a meme where you randomly generate an imaginary band and album. I quite like it, both the idea of the randomness, and the fun of being creative. I tried it, and it reminded me that I still want to learn (well, re-learn) Photoshop.

Here are the meme rules:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result in your own journal.

Here is an imaginary album off my imaginary shuffle:

Ok, so I tend to lengthen album titles. Other than that I didn't cheat. Who would this band sound like? A bit jangly? Sort of Wilco-ish but not quite? As long as they weren't indie in a precious kind of way, I would probably like this band --- they seem like they might be Norcal versions of The Cold War Kids, who I'm quite smitten by. But why, I wonder, wouldn't they use a picture from their namesake? Maybe this is their second album. (btw, if this is the part of San Jose I think it's from, there's a great little microwbrew, or was, right near the old historic buildings. Delicious as snooty yuppie California food can only be.)

Now when I first heard this imaginary band, I thought I hated their stompy, honky-tonk, bluegrass-meets-Led Zepplin kind of sound:

But they kinda grew on me, raspy lead vocals, cowbells and all. They have such a nasty sense of humor, and some wonderful stompy drinking songs. They make me wish I had the guts to crash a dive bar and pick a fight with a bouncer.

And finally, after getting two non-imaginary album titles and some boring disambiguations on the random click, I was almost ready to give up, but the potential of this album title inspired me to cheat and actively search for a picture, as well as creatively re-spell the name of some Enlightenment philosopher dude:

You may remember the short-lived Situationalist art band Knees von Esenbeck from when they were put on trial for attempting to replace the insides of a nuclear warhead with silly putty during one of the nuclear disarmament protests of the early 80s. This is their exceptionally hard to find second album, released with Djiane Koos on vocals (run through a synthesizer) because Bram Hvardson was still in jail on trafficking charges. Some people have compared them to Devo but I find Devo to be far more cheerful by comparison. Track 14 is always cited as an example of their extreme minimalism because most people did not even notice that it was on the album. Musicologists subsequently discovered that this track is an elegantly balanced tune in baroque fugue style, recorded at pitches that only dogs can hear.


Thank you all for indulging me in my fun. And thanks to Medieval Woman and Dr. Sharna for passing on a link to me in LOLcat form.

3 comments:

zombieswan said...

I lurve the LOL cat. Watermelons are funnier than monkeys. :)

I really love that album cover meme, and I like what you've done playing with it, too.

Adobe Photoshop is pretty easy, really. But I didn't have it on my work computer so I used Powerpoint, so you can get all kinds of graphic-y things all kinds of ways.

I'm very tempted to put that LOL cat on Facebook's "mood" thingy.

Dr. Brainiac said...

That's the best fucking meme I've seen in fo' evah! I'm so totally doing it tomorrow!

wow - why are my pnhuegzl's burning right now?

Renaissance Girl said...

Yes, yes, yes. There's no way I'm going to have time to do this meme, but good golly I'm going to look forward to reading more of them.