Talking or not talking about Bad Lip Reading

This year, Bad Lip Reading is ten years old.

The spoof YouTube channel overdubs pop promos and current affairs broadcasts, getting Rebecca Black into a Gang Fight, having the Black Eyed Peas sing about poop, and giving Michael Bublé a scatological hit song about a Russian Unicorn.

This is the point where my jaw drops to the floor. Where did that ten years go? I can't be bothered to cut and paste emojis into Blogger, but if I did, you would be seeing a little yellow face with an exploding head. Ten years. Ten years!

I really liked Russian Unicorn. It turned something as bland as Bublé, who posted a good natured video reply because that somehow is ultimate Bublé, into something full of unhinged energy. Even better was Morning Dew, which mashed together Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga and Jay-Z to make a peon to furry pet monkeys and broccoli pizza.

Part of me insists I shouldn't like Bad Lip Reading. It revels in the worst pop music (Bieber, BTS, James flipping Blunt) and legitimises it through affectionate parody. It's decidedly off-key in places, referring to women as "chicks" and using a slang word for cerebral palsy that is pretty much verboten in the UK. 

And it's fallen hard for Star Wars fandom, that most tiresome of fandoms, producing songs about seagulls in space, death by chicken-duck, and Yoda's stick ("it's just a stick"). That last one is pretty poor, but then again they did come out with the smooth electro banger Hostiles On The Hill in which the Skywalker guy fights the long leggy things in the Antarctic or somewhere. You can tell I'm a fan.

What's strange about the success of BLR, and channels like it, is its wonky place in popular culture. Take traditional TV as a comparison. 30 million people watched the Eastenders episode in which a vengeful Dirty Den give Angie divorce papers for Christmas. For years, that scene appeared in compilation shows and newspaper lists. It turned Christmas dark, and soaps have never looked back since.

The most successful BLR video has four times the views: their top five videos have racked up a third of a billion watches. Yet in the past ten years, I don't think I've experienced a single 'watercooler' moment about Bad Lip Reading. The same goes for other YouTube big hitters at the geekier end of culture: Tom Scott, Drew Gooden, those never-ending Vox factual videos.

This is all to do with the fractal nature of modern entertainment, where the metaphorical family sofa has been replaced by a wide scattering of deck chairs: the watercooler is now a zillion single water bottles. This more personal method of video consumption means we can spend an entire evening wasted on Fail Army clips without ever mentioning it to anyone ever. Maybe one day you'll mention it on a blog. Maybe.

And yet, I don't fully buy that. It's not fractal, is it. What we've done, in the UK at least, is swap four or five terrestrial television channels (and a wall of DVDs) with fewer providers of televisual entertainment. YouTube and Netflix dominate the market as BBC1 and ITV did in the olden days. I don't have Freeview or anything, but don't tell me that endless menu of things you don't want to watch adds up qualitatively to anything more than a single day of programming on Channel Five.

Anyway. Go and watch Bad Lip Reading videos so we can talk about it one day. A lot of it sounds like Uptown Funk but there are roses among the thorns. One of their BTS videos is childish cack, but the more recent BTS one seems to take ballad writing seriously.

What did we do without YouTube? Actually, we watched Flash videos. Badger, badger, that sort of thing. That is, oh goggle-eyed viewer, a whole different blog post.

Further Fats: Insanity Prawn Boy (2005)

Do we really want Vengaboys in our room (boom boom boom boom)?

According to Twitter, which is place where all the news is kept these days, today is the anniversary of Vengaboys topping the UK chart with - and let me get the punctuation right - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!!

On this day in 1999, the VengaBoys hit the #1 spot on the UK singles chart with 'Boom Boom Boom Boom’. #90s pic.twitter.com/LzJ1OAtopg

— The 90s (@The90sDiary) June 20, 2016

Which rasies an obvious question. Of all the "Boom" number one singles, how successful is that Vengaboys hit?

Let's do some point scoring.

There are five number one singles with "boom" in the title. In alphabetical order of artist, they are:

Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (2009)
DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince - Boom! Shake The Room (1993)
Outhere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom (1995)
Shaggy - Boombastic (1995)
Vengaboys - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! (1999)

So these are our contenders. All quality tracks, I'm sure you'll agree.

And now the maths. There are three ways to rate these singles by success: the charts, streaming and popular opinion. In each of these three categories, I will score each single five, four, three, two or one Boom Points, or an average of points if they are tied. The one with the most Boom Points (BPs) wins.

Let's go.

1. Chart success

Firstly, I will look at their original chart run: how long they were at number one, and in the case of a tie, how many weeks they spent in the top 100.

Outhere Brothers get a slam dunk here. They spent four weeks at UK number one. Yeah, amazing, I know. Black Eyed Peas and Jazzy Jeff both spent two weeks at number one for their Boom singles, but the Peas had two more weeks on chart, so the Peas nudge into second place. Joint last are Shaggy and Vengaboys, who spent a single week at the top spot with 17 weeks each on chart.

Chart success results:
Outhere Brothers 5 BPs
Black Eyed Peas 4 BPs
Jazzy Breath And The Fresh Mint 3 BPs
Shaggy 1.5 BPs

Vengaboys 1.5 BPs

2. Streaming

Secondly, I will check the number of current day streams: for this, I will simply note the number of total plays each track has on Spotify.

Poor Outhere Brothers. Only 1.6 million listens. Not many people want to listen to a shaking room either: Jeff and his Fresh Prince pal only get 4.6 million listens. Vengaboys and Shaggy are very close: the vengabussers have 25.5 million streams at the time of writing, while Boombastic has 29.8 million streams. Bossing this category, however, is the much more contemporary Black Eyed Peas. They have 55.9 million streams and score top position in this category for Boom Boom Pow.

Streaming results:
Black Eyed Peas 5 BPs
Shaggy 4 BPs
Vengaboys 3 BPs
Jazzy Thingy And The Will Smith Bloke 2 BPs

Outhere Brothers 1 BP

3. Popular opinion

Thirdly and finally, I will turn to popular opinion: here, I will delve into the last ten (top) comments on YouTube and rate those comments for positivity. I'll include nostalgia as a positive thing because that's basically why YouTube exists.

A lot of comments on the Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow video are spammers or attention grabbers. Someone is excited about seeing them again ("aguardando ansiosamente o retorno desse grupo incrível<3") and there are two nice nostaglia comments: "my my nostalgia" and "velhos tempos, castanhari fez eu me lembra shsuahu". Three positive comments, then.

The comments on Shaggy's Boombastic are mainly people that have clicked on the track due to commercials. All of those comments seem neutral, apart from one which says "The Chase Bank commercial made me remember this fun song and that cute little pig". They said the song was "fun". Therefore, that's one positive comment. Just. I have no idea who the pig is. Maybe it's Shaggy's DJ, blowing the house down with its cracklin' tunes.

For the Vengaboys, it's all a little vague. One comment just says "nostalgia" while another one gives a little story about hearing this abroad then saying a nice thing about Dutch people: "Ik houd van jullie, dutchies :P". I'll give this two positive comments.

There are no positive comments on Boom Boom Boom by the Outhere Brothers. Someone's a little bit racist, another one's calling for it to be censored, while someone else says "I tweeted 4 days ago that reggie and bollie should sing this on the x factor and they did tonight. Cheryl gave me no credit. Cry for me". Okay, maybe that is positive. Sort of. I'll put this joint last with Shaggy.

People love DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince's Boom! Shake The Room. Hark ye the love of the YouTubers: "this song never gets old woooo" / "Haha it is 1993 again and I am nine years old again at the school disco." / "Just one of those people that is good at everything. Well done Will Smith." / "I love Will Smith" / "The stutter rap at 2:34 is genious". They're right - this track may well be genious. Er. Genius. Clearly, Jazzy Jeff and his alien-fighting buddy are the winners of this category.

Popular opinion results:
Jazzy Jeffrey And The Get-Fresh Prancer 5 BPs
Black Eyed Peas 4 BPs
Vengaboys 3 BPs

Outhere Brothers 1.5 BPs

Shaggy 1.5 BPs

Final results

At the start of this blog post (do you remember that?), I wanted to see how successful the awkwardly-punctuationed Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! by Vengaboys was in comparision to other tracks that have topped the charts with the word "boom" in the title.

Here are the final scores:

Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (2009) 13 Boom Points - winner!
DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince - Boom! Shake The Room (1993) 10 Boom Points
Outhere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom (1995) 7.5 Boom Points
Vengaboys - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! (1999) 7.5 Boom Points
Shaggy - Boombastic (1995) 7 Boom Points

Oh. In short, Vengaboys are almost half as bad as the Black Eyed Peas and only as good as the Outhere Brothers.

Well that was a waste of an hour.

Further Fats: Crimes against crimes against keyboards - Black Eyed Peas

Guest post: Crimes against crimes against keyboards

I asked you for your nominations for the worst crimes committed against dance music, from which I picked a random winner. Jon Mann gets a bunch of mp3s and this guest post on Fat Roland On Electronica...

I would like to nominate The Black Eyed Peas –….I don’t actually know the name of the track although I should probably find out what it’s called before I start. You probably know the one I’m on about already, something about a good day. It’s probably called ‘a good day’.

It’s called ‘I got a feeling’ and it’s good night not day.

O.K so I can’t say that I’ve ever sat down to listen to it but I don’t need to, it was so popular when it was released that it became part of the wallpaper that belonged to time and place. That time and place, that thankfully is now behind us.

The production is actually not that offensive, it’s a poppy, upbeat, forgettable dance track. The most compelling evidence against it is in its lyrics. I might as well have not written anything here other than the lyrics.

Here is a sample which I will now cut and paste from somewhere on interwebs.

“go out and smash it
let go o' my guard
Jump off that sofa
Let’s get get up”

I’m suddenly impressed at just how throwaway and thoughtless these lyrics really are.

“I feel stressed out
I wanna let it go
Lets go way out spaced out
and losing all control”

That’s enough of that. To counteract any harmful side effects here are a few lines from Etchogon-S by Autechre

“…//.-*

/,.’];--

/’;[;[;

===*”

Better?

My point, if there is one, is that despite the song’s protagonist repeatedly claiming to have ‘the feeling’ the song itself is devoid of ‘the feeling’. Its only purpose is to fill a bit of space somewhere for a few minutes. Actually listening to this sort of stuff is a bit like going on a diet where you eat nothing but tile grout. 

Will.i.am is very keen on his band having the right image, I read an interview with him in the Metro and he said so himself. This, I imagine is what prompted him to stop making vaguely listenable hip hop and get a sexy female singer that can piss herself at will while on stage. [Citation needed]

Dance music, electronic music are famously places where the anonymous artist can thrive, knocking out bass odysseys from a sweaty bedsit in Hackney, only emerging at night for skins and cigs from the all night garage. This is where the real shit is at. I’m not against artists having big personalities at all but for everyone’s sake please try to keep the music real and please keep the drums raw.

I suppose ‘I got a feeling’ wasn’t really designed for me. You could say ‘but it’s ok for the feeble minded to shake their limbs at’. Well yes, but we all have to suffer though don’t we? Something really needs to be done about this.

Basically we just need to play more Aphex.

Everyone, now.

This guest post was written by Jon Mann.

Student's guide to new music

You're settling in to your halls or your crumbling shared house, but you haven't quite burned all your music from dad's computer yet. What music do you listen to if you want to be cool at university?

Obviously, you'll be bombarded with chances to hear thrilling bands if you're in a decent city. Manchester Academy, for example, is due to host amazing shows from Bowling For Soup, Peter Frampton and Napalm Death.

But this is an electronic music blog, so no doubt you've come to me for a few special recommendations to set you a few paces ahead from your clone mosher friends.

The first and only rule of Fat Roland's guide to new music for students is: if you listen to any music at all, I'll smash your face off with that gatepost.

Seriously. If you go within a thousand miles of anything resembling a rhythm or some kind of assemblance of melody, I'll kick you in the liver.

Biology lesson. A remarkable thing happens to the human body between the ages of 18 and 20. Before then, your synapses are made from phlegm and tears; they lack the connectivity to enable you to appreciate anything good. So you'll foxtrot to Keane, fandango to Kesha, fast-step to Kanye.

From about 19 or 20, you become a complete human being for the first time in your life. Your ears start talking to your feet and your heart, and what develops is a perfectly passable music taste that lives on for a decade or two. Your mp3s become file names like Cripple Bastards, Shitmat and Burt Bacharach (but only ironically).

The danger is, though, and I want you to read this as though it's one of those ominous adverts for AIDS in the 1980s, a residual echo from your pre-18 days lingers in your brain, terminally damaging many of your cells and then hiding until it chooses to ambush you later. Imagine Simply Red hiding in your fridge all night, waiting to pounce when you get milk in the morning.

And so, when you hit 32, all those old musical numbers you jived to in your teens pop back into your memory, and you utter the incantation that has destroyed many a cool person: "D'you know, that stuff wasn't so bad after all. At least it had a melody..."

There is only one way to stop this happening. Your musical taste must be sliced off the moment you hit university. For at least one year, you must be sonically castrated and taught that all music is evil. You have to go through a reverse-Clockwork Orange, and watch Akira Kurosawa or Jean-Luc Goddard films while subjecting your pinned-open earholes to Will I Am, Tiao Cruz or The Saturdays.

You should probably be locked in your room and bubblewrap be glued to every surface, including yourself. Your computer shall have an auto-tune filter, so anything melodic will sound like kittens being slowly diced with an apple corer.

Save yourself from yourself, new students. Listen to nothing. Not even your lectures, for fear of catching accidental intonations or a dull recitation of a textbook unintentionally forming a pleasing pentameter that could easily be set to music.

And all you will be left with is the cleansing wash of a lonely silence except in the dark of the night when the only noise is the dull thud of your heartbeat. Except, of course, a heartbeat is a recognised rhythm, so unless you've surgically wrapped that in jiffybags, that'll have to go too.

I'll ween you when you're ready. We'll start with Boards Of Canada, then go deeper. Meanwhile, let the silence begi--

Chosen Words: V is for Väth

Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Without Sven Väth, we may not have an amazingly rich history of European trance and techno.

Väth arrived on the scene with the seminal Accident In Paradise in the early 1990s, an album which combined ambience, hard trance and the harpsichord. No, really.

He also brought us techno label Harthouse and trance specialist Eye Q. These imprints included artists Freddy Fresh, Hardfloor and Energy 52. Eye Q has a television spin-off, a quiz show about hardcore trance called Q Eye.

It is important be able to to pronounce and type Sven Väth's surname. Väth rhymes with 'fate'. If you press Alt then 1 3 2 on your keypad, you not only produce an 'ä', Sven also appears like a magical genie and will perform an a capella of any techno track for you.

Sven Väth has been imortalised in pop hits such as Sven Will I Be Famous, That Was Sven But This Is Now and the memorable I Knew You Were Väthing For Me.

Top five puns that didn't make this post:

- Goodness gracious, Väth balls of fire
- My Harthouse will go on
- Eye Q you were waiting for me
- Trance For The Memory (Wham Bam Thank You Mam)
- no, no, no, no, don't phunk with my harpsichord

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Mixin' ma tunesies: Flying Lotus, Rustie and The Black Dog

I've had a strange mixture of two songs stabbing my eardrums all day. The first is Getting Away With It, the melancholic Pet Shop Boys-sprinkled pop song from Electronic. The second is My Humps, the paean to road calming measures by the Black Eyed Peas.

The result is an insistent and disturbing image of Johnny Marr rubbing me all over with his strangely misshapen mammaries. Like being tickled with rubber bags full of gerbils, only in a bad way.

All of which is distracting me from some important record releases about which you, my newly disturbed reader, should know. Each of these feature remixes and are 47% more successful than anything offered by an Electronic / Peas combo.

Last year, Flying Lotus was basking in the glory of his album Los Angeles when he offered us a 12" of strange remixes. If you're quick, you can still pick up copies of Shhhh! It includes, among others, a dirty snare-smacking version of Mr Oizo's Stunts ($tunt$ is the most immediate track here), a drastic scratch mix of J Dilla's Lightwork and a seriously widescreen bass-wobbling Promiscuous Girl by queenzilla of the perfect pout Nelly Furtado.

Rustie's Bad Science EP (Rustie pictured above) is further evidence this young whipperbleeper should be a lot more famous than he is. Bad Science offers up bubbly 8-bit hip hop mentalism, including a reconfiguration of one of the best tracks of 2008, Zig Zag, while still being breathy and prowling like a robot stalker. The whole thing pretty much sounds like Zig Zag, so if you've got that, get this.

And finally, there's an EP from The Black Dog called We Are Sheffield which pours remixes over your speakers until you'll be mopping up massive basslines, glitch techno and warm mellowness from your newly shampooed carpet. It's worth it alone (sadly alone, if I'm honest) for the epic yet moody Autechre remix.

Boom boom shit: the Black Eyed Peas get jacked by poultry

Although I have Underworld's (pictured) comical house masterpiece Mmm Skyscraper I Love You blasting from my JVC boombox, I can't shake the lyrics of the new Black Eyed Peas single from my mind.

For a bit of electro pop puff, the Peas have thrown in a lot of lyrics. They talk of poultry jacking Fergie's style. They tell of Will.i.am carelessly stepping on leprechauns. And for a song that will be exclusively bought by one-year-olds, there's an awful lot of "shitting".

Sing these lyrics along to any track you wish. It works.

Gotta get that, gotta get that, gotta get that,
Gotta get, that that that, that that
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom
Boom boom boom

Yo, I got the hit that beat the block
You can get that bass overload
I got the that rock and roll
That future flow
That digital spit
Next level visual shit
I got that (Boom boom boom)
How the beat bang (Boom boom boom)

I like that boom boom pow
Them chickens jackin’ my style
They try copy my swagger
I’m on that next shit now
I’m so 3008
You so 2000 and late
I got that boom boom boom
That future boom boom boom
Let me get it now

Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom
Boom boom boom

I’m on the supersonic boom
Y’all hear the space ship zoom
When when I step inside the room them girls go apeshit, uh
Y'all stuck on super A-shit
They're no fast stupid a bit
I’m on that HD flat
This beat go boom boom bat

I’m a beast when you turn me on
Into the future cybertron
Harder, faster, better, stronger
Sexy ladies extra longer, cuz
We got the beat that bounce
We got the beat that pound
We got the beat that 808
That the boom boom in your town

People in the place
If you wanna get down
Put your hands in the air
Will.i.am drop the beat now

Yep yep, I be rockin’ them beats (Yep, yep)
I be rockin’ them beats (Yep yep yep, yep)

Here we go, here we go
Satellite radio
Y’all getting hit with (Boom boom)
Beats so big I’m steppin on leprechauns
Shittin’ on y’all you with the (Boom boom)
Shittin’ on y’all you with the (Boom boom)
Shittin’ on y’all you with the..
This beat be bumpin’ bumpin’
This beat go boom boom

Let the beat rock
Let the beat rock
Let the beat r...

This beat be bumpin’ pumpin’
This beat go boom boom

I like that boom boom pow
Them chickens jackin’ my style
They try copy my swagger
I’m on that next shit now
I’m so 3008
You so 2000 and late
I got that boom boom boom
That future boom boom boom
Let me get it now

Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (Gotta get that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom (that)
Boom boom boom
Boom boom boom