Well, this is just weird.
UMass Marching Band covers Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”
I’m kind of digging it, as much as I respect and love the original. (Here’s what I said about seeing it and other songs live by them last summer.) I enjoy it much more than the a cappella version of “High and Dry” in college.
See, my alma mater is known for having many things in plentitude. Endowment, world-famous professors, ivy-laden brick…but what people mercifully don’t know is that we’re chock full o’ a cappella, a fact we students and alumni know all to well. You can’t throw a rock and not hit someone on campus in an a cappella group. Believe me, I’ve tried, mostly because it’s fun to throw rocks at people in a cappella groups, I find.
Unfortunately, there was a huge theatre/a cappella overlap back in the day, and as such, I got invited to a lot of jams. “Jams”. Now, I’m a fan of the Grateful Dead and Phish, so I know from jams. What these groups held were in fact the opposite of jams. Scripted and rehearsals down to the note, these concerts were sonically solid, just not jams. More like the “anti-jam” to the notion of “jam”, and in some ways, I should thank the genre of a cappella for allowing a counterpoint that keeps the universe fundamentally intact, but occasionally, I’ll hear one of their ditties and pray for the obliteration of the universe. So it’s a constant struggle.
Now, this is the point where I say that these groups were by and large talented folks and can sing and gave it their all and did it much better than I ever could. I recognize the talent even if I hate the particular genre of artistic expression. There’s just something about people in a semi-circle snapping their fingers and smiling at each other that makes me want to tip a bus, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Like I said, I had a lot of friends who were in a cappella groups, all 462 that Harvard had. But it’s a bit like when Shelton Benjamin and Charlie Haas had to face off in a tournament to compete for a shot at Eddie Guerrero’s title on “Smackdown”: friends suddenly become enemies.
So like I mentioned earlier: I’m here at one of these sonic assaults (sorry, “jam”), and in general, the songs chosen were tolerable. I don’t have any particular emotional relationship with songs like “One Week” or “Time After Time”, so hearing them in the new, music-less context didn’t instill any more pain than already existed once the semi-circle of doom formed onstage. But then…this one group started their “do eee ooo ah” chant, starting the pagan ritual anon, and this tune sounded somewhat familiar. I knew what it meant, I just didn’t want to believe it. And then, in that weird trend that most a cappella bands have, the singer broke ranks from the Arc of Terror, signaling he would be my Damien, my Antichrist, my Harbinger of Doom.
And then he started to sing, “Two jumps in a week, I bet you think that's pretty clever don't you boy….”
No, this isn’t clever, it’s a freakin’ sacrilege. "High and Dry" by Radiohead. Ooooh, no you don't. Break down Cyndi Lauper. Break down Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam for all I care. Just leave Thom Yorke and Company alone. I started feeling like Madeline Kahn in “Clue”:
I hated them so... much...it...it...the...it...the...flames...flames...flames...on the side of my face... breathing... breathless... heaving breaths...
So, um, yea. Don’t like a cappella. All I wanted to say. If I hear any in the near future, I might go to the Netherlands and get my eyeball pierced.
(Thanks to Julie and Tara for the heads up on the links...)
Posted by Ryan McGee at April 07, 2004 02:52 PM