[Note: This article appeared in Eleven issue 2.1, released circa September 2007]
So you’ve theoretically got your band “Ultimate Electric Dungaroos” or “Dilated Pupils of Theocratic Stablemen” or whatever. And you all look real badass with your too-cool-for-school pants. That should be enough to at least get you a review in some half-wit university-subsidized student-run mostly-full-of-themselves music magazine. But how do you go about achieving the fabled 11 out of 11 score? With a song.
Songs are pretty important. They’re on the radio and on the internet. I’d put them in the top 5 most important parts of music. Where would music be today without songs? Probably on the radio and the internet, but I mean, still.
Let’s recap. We learned last year about three of the other important parts of music: your attitude (hipster), your look (hair), and your identity (band name). One of these days I’ll figure out what that 5th element is. Not that stupid Bruce Willis movie though.
…I guess all you freshman out there don’t really know the deal. You can all blame yourselves for not kicking and falcon punching your ways out of your parents wombs a year earlier. Now, on with the awesomeness.
The Industry at Large
Some may say it’d be difficult to summarize the entire song industry in a few paragraphs or so. I say, not true if you’re as blatantly ignorant as I am. So here’s the jist of it:
Everybody steals music: Nobody buys music anymore. Some elitists purchase an occasional album, and then try to justify it by making vague references to “doing the right thing,” but they’re really just trying to cover for not having souls. You can really only bank on one sale per album from the one schmuck who needs it so badly that he can’t wait a few days for it to show up on the internet after some other jackass inevitably gets suckered into a purchase.
How does this affect you? Well, good luck buying that private jet stocked with Dunkaroos and Fun Dip and Gushers for your kid now that you’ve only got concert sales and endorsement deals to live off of. Yeah, the artists really got fucked by the internet on this one.
I mean, freaking EVERYBODY steals music: Like any great sexual innuendo joke, this bullet title has a sweet double entendre. Tired of consumers who see it as their right to not pay for music, artists these days came up with an ingenious ploy to strike back – by stealing music themselves. Oh, except they call it “sampling,” which is about as justifiable as a Barry Bonds-type saying he took “performance enhancers” instead of steroids, or the guy you met at an IHOP calling himself “horizontally challenged” — he’s still fat, you still cheated, and you’re still plagiarizing. This applies to background music, beat, lyrics, whatever.
Do you need a few more lines of filler but you’re too burnt out from staying out and partying and putting this off ’til days before the deadline? Just steal someone else’s work and slap it right in the middle of your own. So, I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said “fresh” and it had a dice in the mirror. If anything I can say that this cab was rare, but I thought “nah, forget it – Yo homes, to Bel-Air!”
One of the biggest crooks on the sampling front is none other than every scenester’s heartthrob, Daft Punk. And if Daft Punk does it, it’s a good bet that anyone worth their weight in recyclable soda cans does it. If you can’t take my word for it (which at this point I find to be obscene folly), search the internet for “Daft Punk Sampling.” Try a Yahoo! search, I figure Google could use a break every now and again.
On a related note, fuck that Kanye West song.
Anyway, it’s probably safe to say that any set of beats that can be turned into music probably already has been turned into music, so why not skip the whole dance and parade and just be blatant about it?
Lyrics, rhyming, whatever: What your song actually says means about nothing. I wouldn’t bother worrying too much about content, just the parts of the chorus that people are going to sing along to. I mean, Snoop made his entire living out of making words up. So, fizzle that shizzle.
Bullcocky That (the illogical song name is the champion): Here’s another deceptive means for artists to hack away at those tomfoolerish music crooks. Rather than simply naming your song the first four words of the chorus, pick a completely random word or two from anywhere in the song (or I suppose anywhere in the entire album, for that matter), and use that as the title. The result? “I want to download the song that goes ‘Hey oh, listen what I say, oh’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers…what the hell is this ‘Snow’ bullcocky that keeps coming up?? Must be some kind of ‘increase your sexual performance pill’ spyware…screw it time to get Spam Busters. If your song is really up to snuff, people will buy it and you win. That’s why the illogical song name is the champion.
The vocoder is everywhere: Can’t hold a tune? Why rely on your actual song writing ability like, I dunno, Bob Dylan, when you can use technology as a crutch? That’s a vocoder.
Once upon a time, the vocoder was awesome (in fact, I vaguely remember some other Eleven staffie writing a whole article about it last year). It pretty much still is, but now that you can hear it in just about any remotely popular rap song today, it’s pretty safe for the music elite to pretend that it sucks now. There may be a number of perfectly logical reasons for the vocoder’s newfound exposure, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just blame Akon. That’s the same guy who threw some dude off a stage. As fun as those 15 seconds on YouTube were, I feel morally obligated to not fully stand behind an artist partaking in such shenanigans. I don’t really know where I’m going with this.
I guess just use the vocoder thing in your song, but be a gentleman about settling artistic disputes.
A Couple of Ideas for Your Epic Song
Here’s the groundwork for a great song. Use these tips for yourselves, my treat. But you’d better hop on that scene quickly, before one of the other like six people who read this crap get there ahead of you.
Go with the Guitar: I don’t care if your band caters more to the smooth opera jazz niche, or even if you guys are trying to etch a living out of putting a beat to books on tape. You want a guitar in your feature song.
The reasoning should be painfully obvious at this point: More than ever, people look not to people who really know stuff about music, but to the most gloriously popularized video game ever, Guitar Hero. Somehow, while many consider it lame to master the industry’s finest in wireless joystick and button technology, it’s totally cool to wield a giant phallic rainbow-colored plastic guitar. I mean, bro out, dude, bro, popped collar, bro, bro, dude, bro, pink shirt, natty ice, bro dude, bro. So fine tune your guitar licks, and for all of our sakes, go easy on the damn solo.
Sample Vanilla Ice: I really can’t believe nobody’s done this yet. If sampling is the new “Copy whatever the Beatles did” as far as popular music writing technique, then why not sample the single greatest example of music plagiarism ever? You’d be the band that accomplished what “Ice, Ice Baby” could not after so many years. Don’t even try to argue that the feat wouldn’t land you some good luck with the opposite sex. I guess, if you don’t want to do it for the delightful irony, do it because it sounds like something delicious that you’d do at a Ben & Jerry’s. Nothing bad ever happens when there’s so much ice cream around. True.
Make part of the song readily applicable to everyday conversation: Where’s the merit in a song if I can’t proclaim my love for it to my friends? This section would be profoundly lacking without an example. So I’ll make one up for you:
Father: How was school today, Generic Son?
Son: It was horrible. I threw up in the teacher’s pocketbook, and she gave me detention for trying to blame it on the cheerleaders.
Father: Throw some D’s on that bitch.
Son: You’re the best, Typical Dad.
Father: I just bought a Cadillac.
What else could Typical Dad say there? That’s why functional song choruses are crucial in society.
On a related note, make sure that your song is riddled with references to Cadillacs, Grills, and Spinnaz. I guess because those are the three greatest things to happen to Man since the invention of the Internet.
Make part of the song fun to sing along to, and another part freaking impossible: Here’s a situation I enjoy: I’m at a party, on the dance floor, and everyone’s new favorite Sean Kingston Wonderdump excuse of a song “Me Love” comes on. So we sing “Oh, oh oh oh oh ohhh, Why’d you pluck a jooedve, aware from oh, me love.”
I don’t really know why, but for some reason party constituents are incredibly drawn to songs they can partially sing easily and partially have to awkwardly mumble. Call it a fact of life, call it drunk people being drunk people, call it completely made up, call it whatever you want. Maybe don’t call it completely made up. Maybe call it a test so those who are true enough to know the actual words can separate themselves from those who are just ad libbing. But those self-important pricks probably just looked the lyrics up on the internet. So, maybe call it a means to I.D. obnoxious guys with egos, and an opportunity to punch them in their collective face. Who wouldn’t love that at a party?
Whatever you end up thinking, it’ll definitely get you a few extra hits on iTunes.
The Fail-Safe: If you’ve got no other tricks up your sleeve, this one is bulletproof: just add a ton of “naa naa naa’s” sporadically throughout. Where would “Hey Jude” be today? You’d have like six and a half minutes of mostly blank track, but every so often Paul & John would pop in and out for a matter of seconds. What about Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” (you know, the one that goes “na na na naah, na na na naah, hey hey, goodbye,” that everybody knows how to sing but no one in their right mind knows the real track or artist name)? Likely everybody would still not give a damn, and the band would pick up a few pennies every time a 1990’s sports music compilation 38-disc set sold. Hey, you can’t win ’em all.
Hey look, here’s an actual song!
Still too busy fussing over General Chemistry or Intro to Counting Integers to make yourself useful? Don’t worry, Eleven’s got your back. Using several of the techniques we learned today, I threw together this little ditty that I like to call “Reading Books (let me show you them).”
Verse 1:
So stop, take a look around at some things.
Stop again, and think about stuff.
My good man, what do you like to play?
There are sports, you’ll be good at them.
Reading books, you’ll hurt your eyes on them.
I got them all, let me show you them.
Chorus:
I threw some spinnaz on my car, let me show you them.
You’ve seen my ashn rfcv from afar, let me show you them.
With Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I go for a ride to the zoo to see animals.
I brought some back…let me show you them.
Verse II:
It’s at a party, that’s where we go in these songs
Everybody disco, good time for all
They play the jams, it goes a little something like this:
Doo dah doo doo. Naa naa naa naa naaaaaahhh. (repeat 4x)
At the snack bar, they have all kinds of sandwiches
With all kinds of meat, some fresh and some clean
And some rotten meat.
You want to see all the kinds? Let me show you them.
Chorus
Verse III:
We’re driving home now, that’s what happens now
We left the club hand in hand you and me now
I said we’d watch a movie, something cool, a lean night
And I’d make the popcorn, and try not to burn it in the microwave
Which is tough ’cause there’s auto settings on the microwave
But first the officer pulled us over, he said:
“What are you doing, you’re on the highway in a shopping cart
And you’ve got a vacuum cleaner with all its makeup on
And it’s rush hour, some people have to get to work.
Give me your license and registration.”
So I said: “Let me show you them.”
Chorus
Chorus (with vocoder)
Yeah…Let me show you them.
The Prestige
Looking back, I think the most wonderful thing about writing songs, like most of the stuff I do here, is that it actually requires no talent whatsoever – just some ingenuity and a moderate sense of humor. So get out of your chair and get those vocal chords a-churnin’. Because I heard there’s a Rock Band article floating around somewhere, and you’ll want to be ready for that.