We live in a world that’s becoming more and more full of remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings. What if some songs we know and maybe love are in reality re-imaginings of older songs?
What if DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s You Saw My Blinker (Bitch)…
…was really re-imagined as Ludacris’ Move Bitch?
What if Huey Lewis and The News’ I Want a New Drug…
…was really re-imagined as Nine Inch Nails’ The Perfect Drug?
What if Christopher Cross’ Sailing…
…was really re-imagined as AWOLNATION’s Sail?
What if The Whispers’ Rock Steady…
…was really re-imagined as LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem?
What if Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back…
was really re-imagined as Big Sean and Nicki Minaj’s Ass?
She even licenses it out allegedly (although it just looks like she just made a list of places she’s seen it used and retroactively authorized it).
(SIDENOTE: Did she donate the gesture to Show Your Hearts? It could be a tax write-off.)
My hope is that it actually is trademarked, and that she’s making bank on its pervasiveness.
I mean, what she claims is not impossible. She could figured it out during a round of This is the church and this is the steeple gone bad. I haven’t seen it in use until recent years, and it seems like a simple gesture to devise.
This post comes from a time pre-blogging… way back in 2006. Times were simpler then. I didn’t have to think of new blog posts every day…
You might have seen a lot of this commercial lately:
Well, in case you’re wondering who that new group is, I’m here to help you. Hailing from Scotland, they’re The Fratellis, and this song is called Flathead off their album Costello Music.
If the band name sounds familiar (and they don’t), that’s because their name was inspired by this lady and her brood:
"You better not even think about throwing me from a train."
That’s Mama Fratelli from The Goonies. That’s where they got their name! Awesome right?! So I figured I’d let you know about a few other bands that followed the same idea.
He's from "Barbarella"... and your dreams
This one isn’t the same spelling, but Brit rockers Duran Duran were inspired by a guy from Roger Vadim’s Barbarella… a fellow named Dr. Durand Durand. (Okay, that’s not really him up above, but it’s funnier than this guy.)
A Vulcan priestess by any other name is kind of like a Romulan priestess.
Another British pop group was inspired by American pop culture. This time it was in the form of a cheesy 60’s sci-fi show… a little something called Star Trek. The character is T’Pau, and coincidentally, so is the band. What’s funny is the band sang Heart and Soul with a lot of heart and soul… which are two things the emotionless Vulcans can express.
What a nut (or in this case, a golden chocolate egg).
John Hughes saw this real water tower and based the entire film around it. True story.
The California ska band eschewed the typical ska puns common for band names and opted for Save Ferris, which is of course from Home Alone. Except for a few missteps (Curly Sue, Dutch, Career Opportunities), John Hughes was a fairly clever writer, I’d say. He’ll always be missed, like Kevin McCallister by his family. I never understood why the water tower didn’t say Save Kevin.
Not to be confused with Goldmember
California and England seem to be all about naming their bands after characters. Closing up this list is Goldfinger, named after the James Bond baddie from the same named film. It’s weird, but most of these happened to be named after bad characters or bad situations. Why hasn’t anybody named themselves after a good guy? Someone like Luke Sky(y)walker, for instance?
I seem to get into more drunken arguments about semantics more than anything else.
Essentially, this particular debate began in regard to the Bloodhound Gang. I mentioned that I’d be extremely content in life if I could happen to be a one-hit wonder like them.
The song I was referencing:
My friend slammed back that they had two hits because of this song:
If you go by YouTube views, The Bad Touch beats Fire Water Burn hands down (28.5+ million vs. 2.5+ million). But I also know the song Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ On Me? (which has 1+ million views), and that still doesn’t mean it achieved the same level of apparent one-hit wonderness…
It’s not like I haven’t wished for my own solo hit in regard to a particular single before. I would be ecstatic to have a song stand the test of time like Rick Springfield’s Jessie’s Girl (true story) when I know he’s had other songs (Don’t Talk to Strangers and I’ve Done Everything for You), and I always considered him a one-hit wonder.
So is that the key to my interpretation of one-hit wonder? It’s the song that the artist is primarily known for that will stand the test of time.
Now I know that there are novelty acts that are “pure” one-hit wonders. But as for most artists, it’s not like a record company wants their product to produce only one hit… they’ll always try to release more songs off the same album, or at least one of the following album.
It looked like Sara Bareillis‘ Love Song would have been her only offering to the world until her second album had hits, so…
In conclusion to this Drunken Recollection rambling, what makes a one-hit wonder a one-hit wonder? Take it away, Wikipedia:
In the U.S., a “pure” one-hit wonder is an artist that manages only one song on the Billboard Hot 100, regardless of the song’s peak position. However, most American music industry insiders consider a song in the top forty positions of the Billboard Hot 100 to be a hit. Thus, any performer who recorded only one song that reached the Top 40 is, technically, a one-hit wonder, regardless whether another song peaks in the “bottom 60.” However, the term is more generally applied to musicians best known for only one song.
Or as I said sort of:
It’s the biggest hit that artist is known for that will stand the test of time.
Ambiguity has its place in music. It has its place in many places (how’s that for ambiguous).
Songs like (sorry for these weird examples) Michelle Branch’s Everywhere and Matchbox Twenty’s 3AM seem like they could be about relationships with significant others, when in reality hers is about her grandmother and Rob Thomas’ song is about his mom.
But then you’ve got obvious ambiguity. And by that, I mean songs that use that. Here are some songs that go out of their way to make it clear that they don’t want to be clear.
I just finished watching Gnomeo & Juliet (it’s a new release on Netflix streaming and I was just testing out my new Blu-Ray player and I picked this and I ended up sticking to it no excuses… it was highly entertaining and pun-derful), but something about the ending bothered me.
It ended with a stupid dance scene.
I don’t know where the idea for this cop out ending began, but the last time I noticed it was during the end of Despicable Me (I watched this one on a long flight to Prague no excuses). This was the first dance scene that really bothered me because it seemed to be an answer to the question posted above – how should we end this movie?
(SIDENOTE: This is how…)
When the live action version of Alice in Wonderland came out, there was a lot of brouhaha over this ending (amongst other things). For the record, I’ve not yet never seen this movie:
So did this start the trend? Let’s see if there were any others before these (I will not count dancing during the credits):
Shrek
Robots
Shrek 2
Megamind
Rio
But hey! Those are all Dreamworks films! That’s like picking on them for their Dreamworks faces!
Okay, well to be fair, here are some live-action, non-musical, non-credit dance number endings:
Beetlejuice
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Hitch
Even though this walk down memory lane hasn’t really produced an answer, I have a theory. Beetlejuice is the oldest one on here, and the scene fits in with the rest of the movie’s universe, so I could probably discount it for the film I truly lay the blame on… There’s Something About Mary and the infectious (in every sense of the word), Build Me Up Buttercup:
(SIDENOTE: I’ve always found this Farrelly Brothers’ flick to be overrated. Also, I had never heard The Foundations ode to Legos-shaped flowers (build… buttercup… ha!) before, and people picked on me for that. Plus, I worked at Circuit Shitty at the time of DIVX, and it was claimed at the time that TSAM was partly to blame for its demise. Apparently, 20th Century Fox released it on DIVX earlier than DVD, and DVD owners were pissed you had to have a “special format” to watch the movie a week or two earlier, and wrote angry letters to Fox. Not that I was on the DIVX gravy train or anything, but there’s something to TSAM’s ruining everything!)
Hi, I’m Sean. This is my blog. This post is about other people named Sean (spelled the right way) that have done more than write a stupid little blog. Some of them I consider The Shit; some of them are Just Shitty; most fall somewhere in between. Here’s how they fall in my rankings:
Sean Penn has had a hell of an interesting career and life… He’s been fantastic as an Actor! (Mystic River, Milk) and as a director (The Crossing Guard, Into the Wild); he was married to Madonna back at the height of her career and Robin Wright back when I had a crush on her back in Toys and Forrest Gump. So why isn’t he considered The Shit? He also got to bang Scarlett Johansson. Screw him. He gets #2 on my list of #2’s.
As for Sean Astin?
Pros: The Goonies, Toy Soldiers, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Cons: Encino Man and Rudy. Fuck Rudy.
NEITHER THE SHIT NOR SHITTY
Seans Hayes and Patrick Flanery
Sean Hayes played the zany comic foil to the straight (gay) man in Will and Grace well, and he started a reality TV show to find a new scripted show (which flopped); now he co-produces NBC’s Grimm and TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland, so there’s that.
Sean Patrick Flanery was one of The Boondock Saints (which is a little overrated in my opinion), and he also played Indiana Jones, so there’s that. Neither is either.
CRAPPY
Sean Young and Big Sean
I used to really want to see Sean Young naked; now I really want to see Paget Brewster naked (she looks like the upgraded version of her… plus, I fear I’ve said too much).
And now the drumroll please… what, there’s no drumroll?!
JUST SHITTY
Sean Hannity: a man of so many emotions, shirts
This smug bastard doesn’t even know how to smile like a human being! Go ahead and do an image search! He always looks like the turd that he is! Why couldn’t he have spelled his name like Seann William Scott so he would have never made it on here! I’d much rather have ranked Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) or Shaun White if their parents knew what all the parents of the people above knew–
I planned on posting the actual noises produced during the course of Gates of Hades, but it was removed from YouTube and now sells on their actual website for $199.95… just like an actual pusher – at first it was free, but now you gotta pay.
In reality, it’s caused by playing binaural beats. You can read about it here. But if I know you – and I think I do – you’d rather watch a video about it hear here:
monkeyBLOG monkeyDO 