Five Song Friday: Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
This Week: Killer Fish, Thrifty Rappers and Tasty European Desserts
I’ve got a great idea.
It might sound crazy, but all great ideas sound crazy at first.
Think about what happened when Galileo suggested that the sun was actually the center of the universe. The poor guy was labeled a heretic and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.
Today we know he was right.
Nikola Tesla believed that electricity applied to the brain increased intelligence. He worked on ways to hard-wire classrooms in order to “bathe” students in “infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency” until they stopped being so dumb.
Today our kids are getting smarter by watching TikTok videos.
Or remember when a struggling dancer named Madonna got a job at Dunkin’ Donuts and thought it was a good idea to squirt jelly at the customers? They fired her.
She got the last laugh by becoming massively famous and incredibly wealthy for singing pop songs and dry-humping the stage in a wedding dress.
This idea is just as big as any of those. Maybe (probably) bigger.
But I can’t do anything with it, so I’m giving it to you for FREE.
Before you get excited, this is not one of my famous One Million Dollar Ideas.
This is not even one of my lesser-known, but still impressive, One Hundred Thousand Dollar Ideas.
This idea has the potential to make you as much as zero dollars.
But nothing I’ve come up with in the last ten years has been more worth doing, so your excitement is warranted.
You might want to sit down for this.
Here goes…
The AeroSmiths.
A legendary and all-powerful, two-headed mythical beast of cover bands.
The first set is all Aerosmith songs covered in the style of The Smiths.
It works. It works so hard.
Just close your eyes and imagine a Morrissey clone singing. Add some Johnny Marr guitar and “Dude Looks Like a Lady” sounds ripped from the moody clubs of 1980s Manchester:
So, never judge a book by its cover
Or who you're gonna love by your lover
Sayin' love put me wise to her love in disguise
She had the body of a Venus, Lord imagine my surprise.
That, that dude looks like a lady
I’m not going to ask if I’m right, because I know I’m right.
A make-believe Moz in tight jeans with his Eraserhead pompadour could sing “Sweet Emotion” like he wrote the lyrics himself:
Talk about things that nobody cares
Wearing other things that nobody wears
You're callin' my name, but I gotta make it clear
I can't say, baby, where I'll be in a year
Part one: You bring the heat and blow minds with a solid set of hits that also includes “Walk This Way,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” and “Love In An Elevator.”
After a short break and wardrobe change, the show finishes strong with a bombastic, arena-worthy second-half set of Smiths covers done in the raunchy RAWK style of Steven “Lips” Tyler and Joe “Abs” Perry.
The counterfeit Tyler frontman loads up on bangles and bandanas, maybe dons a set of prosthetic lips and straddles the mic stand like a fire pole to belt out strip-club-ready versions of “This Charming Man,” “How Soon is Now?” and “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby.”
For all the indie rock purists who are shaking their heads at the notion of such blasphemous cultural cross-contamination? Sort yourself out.
Yes, Aerosmith has songs called “Lord of the Thighs,” “Cheese Cake” and “Jailbait.” But Morrissey wrote “Handsome Devil,” with the immortal lines, “Let me get my hands, on your mammary glands.”
I don’t care if it was sarcastic or ironic. He said it. And it made me giggle when I was 15 years old. So let’s not have the high art/low art debate.
You can’t find a flaw in The AeroSmiths. This idea is bulletproof.
Just when people think it’s over, you finish HUGE.
You bring everyone back out for an encore and… what’s that? The entire band is dressed half-Aerosmith/half-The Smiths like Two-Face from the Batman movies?!
That’s so crazy that it just might work!
And it DOES, specifically with a mash-up of “Dream On” and “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” that doesn’t leave a dry eye in the house.
Fade to black. Standing ovation.
Band members get hoisted into the air like Rudy from Rudy.
Roll credits.
You’re welcome.
Thanks for reading. Stay cool out there.
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete
Five Song Friday 024
“Janitor” - Suburban Lawns
Suburban Lawns was a band formed by art school students in 1978 in Long Beach, California. Their music is as arty, punky and weird as you might expect. The band didn’t last long, but managed to get some national exposure thanks to a young filmmaker named Ted Demme.
The future director of Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs turned the band’s first single “Gidget Goes to Hell” into a video that debuted on Saturday Night Live on November 15, 1980.
On “Janitor,” lead singer Su Tissue sounds like an alien Betty Boop speaking in tongues. As legend has it, the chorus comes from a conversation that Su had with a friend at a party. It was loud, so when Su asked what he did for a living, the answer, “I’m a janitor” sounded like “Oh my genitals.”
Because of course it did.
“Barracuda” - John Cale
John Cale was a founding member of The Velvet Underground, but Lou Reed thought he was too weird and kicked him out. Cale took it on the chin and continued making music. He helped produce landmark albums by Iggy Pop and Patti Smith. And he even released a bunch of his own.
“Barracuda” is from his fourth solo effort called Fear, released in 1974. This was a full three years before Heart released their third album, Little Queen, which kicks off with a badass tune called “Barracuda.”
Coincidence? Maybe. But it could have also been a clever effort by Plymouth to reignite consumer desire for their sporty two-door Barracuda, a car that was discontinued in 1974 because of poor sales.
It didn’t work. The car never came back and barracudas (the fish) faded into obscurity thanks to a late seventies obsession with flesh-eating piranhas.
“Deception” - Blackalicious
“Don’t let money change you” is the message of this song from the 1999 debut album by Blackalicious.
I’d say that this message was received loud and clear throughout the hip-hop community at the dawn of the 21st century. All the biggest rap artists took it to heart and remained humble and grounded throughout their success in the new millennium.
Take Kanye West for example. Other than running for President and wearing ghoulish rubber mask disguises, he seems completely unaffected by his kajillion-dollar bank balance. The same goes for Jay-Z who is keeping it real while starring in Tiffany commercials and collecting original Basquiats like they were baseball cards.
Want more examples? Look no further than Vanilla Ice, who shrugged off superstardom like it was a mild cold and went back to his roots as a roofing material spokesperson. Or Ice-T, who eschews fancy cars and forty-pound gold chains for the modestly priced and heart-healthy flavor of Cheerios.
Don’t even get me started on Lil’ Wayne, who still drives the same Honda Civic he’s had since high school.
“Grunge Bond - Unplugged” - Deap Vally
If you were getting tired of two person bands being all guys (The Black Keys) or one guy and one lady (The White Stripes), then Deap Vally feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s TWO ladies!
I know what you’re thinking, but no, I’m NOT kidding. They are both ladies.
“What’s the Time?” - Blancmange
I’m not going to lie. I thought blancmange was the thing dogs get that makes their fur all gross and splotchy. But thanks to the internet I learned that blancmange is actually a sweet, flavored dessert made from gelatin or starchy ingredients and milk.
Martha Stewart has it down as one of her all-time favorite gelatin desserts.
But Blancmange is also the name of a British pop duo from the 1980s that was seriously into synthesizers. Blancmange had a handful of hella-catchy hits alongside contemporaries such as Depeche Mode, Japan and Soft Cell.
This is not a song by the dessert. But this is also not a song by the 1980s Blancmange. This song was recorded and released in 2017, when the band members were all grown up. Which I would never have guessed… until I Googled some videos of the song performed live and it gives off a real “CEO taking over the stage at one of the companies sales rallies” vibe.
I still enjoy the heck out of the song though.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube Music
That’s all for now.
Thanks for reading!
“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” - Kurt Vonnegut