![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seedarklyxeroWelcome to SeeDarkly Sunday DisCOVERies:
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Let's wrap up Octoberween's 2018 Shlock Edition! The final entry in our month long series of stranger Halloween-themed covers is a little on the punk side of schlock!
Quick, somewhat relevant aside: Honestly this season has been hard for me to be enthusiastic about, so I really just tried to have some fun with this month's features to avoid anything weighty or political. Hopefully these have been pleasantly diverting for you as well. But there is a darker context to this choice of cover... not one I'll openly explore but certainly something you might recognize as a "statement between the lines." I'll leave any specific interpretations to you.
With that off my chest, here's a song about a scary creature from down below that begins as 80's novelty new wave and finds itself even more "demented" in the hands of a grungy punk rabid rabbit!:
NoBunny - Monster (Fred Schneider)
Between the releases of the B-52s Whammy! and Bouncing Off The Satellites albums, Fred Schneider embarked on a brief solo outing with his 1984 album, Fred Schneider & The Shake Society. Monster was the first track on the LP and its only single. B-52's bandmate Kate Pierson offers backing vocals on the track. The song achieved practically no success even on its re-release in the 90's though it did get a fair amount of airplay on contemporary dance radio. The video, which featured Pierson, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, graffiti pop artist Keith Haring, and 80's drag icon Ethyl Eichelberger, was actively banned from MTV at the time, though it's not entirely clear why. The clip was later included on a B52's video compilation. While Schneider has suggested the album and its single failed due to lack of label promotion, he has nonetheless found another more commercial means to profit from it. In 2016, partnering with Breyting Community Roaster, he lent the song's name to his own variety of coffee: Fred Schneider's Monster! Blend. Its description claims he "enlisted his monsters to roam the cosmos in search of the perfect beans to roast to a frighteningly intense flavor."
The song itself is a quirky blend of its own, elementally similar to Ministry and Oingo Boingo of the mid eighties, combined with Schneider's distinctively unconventional vocal quality. The lyrics are potentially problematic by today's standards because of their obvious innuendos, but apparently Schneider has said the song is primarily about a dinosaur dancing about in his polka-dot pajamas.
One of the radio shows first to play Monster in 1984 was The Dr. Demento Show, where it has continued to get occasional airtime throughout the years. Dr. Demento, specializing in presenting many forms of musical oddities and comedy, released a various artists double-disc covers compilation titled, Dr. Demento Covered In Punk in January of this year. It included many of the artists previously featured on his radio show, some doing brand new covers of originals found in the show's past. NoBunny, aka Justin Champlin, an independent garage punk artist, provides two covers for the collection: 1963's Surfin' Bird originally by The Trashmen and Monster by Fred Schneider (who also appears on this album covering Gloria Balsam's 1979 Fluffy.)
NoBunny brings what could be described as the rage of a rabbit smashing pumpkins in a cage to the song, one part rockabilly punk, one part sarcastically angry Billy Corgan. The song states that "they don't wear pants on the other side of France" but NoBunny apparently never wears pants, but always wears a dilapidated rabbit mask... just as if everyday is Halloween... imagine that...
The Cover:
The Original:
Want to check out or revisit the previous 3 years of SeeDarkly's Octoberween DisCoveries? Click here and scroll down the tag!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Next week:
I'm thinking I might spend next month doing what I'll call "Anotha' Cova' Novemba'" where we'll explore another exceptional cover of a track previously featured on the blog or by an artist previously featured on the blog. Check the link to previous entries below and if you have a suggestion for "anotha' cova'" you think worthy, let me know!
Feel free to tell me what you think about today's cover! Comments, suggestions, discussions, etc... welcome!
(You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.)
Explore the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Oct 21 - Pouppée Fabrikk - I Want Candy (The Strangeloves)
Oct 14 - Darken The Doorstep - The Hearse Song (Carl Sandburg)
Oct 07 - Zombina And The Skeletones - Dracula's Tango [Sucker For Your Love] (Toto Coelo)
Sep 30 - Nerd Revolt - Photographic (Depeche Mode)
Sep 23 - Riviera F - Echo Beach - (Martha and the Muffins)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Let's wrap up Octoberween's 2018 Shlock Edition! The final entry in our month long series of stranger Halloween-themed covers is a little on the punk side of schlock!
Quick, somewhat relevant aside: Honestly this season has been hard for me to be enthusiastic about, so I really just tried to have some fun with this month's features to avoid anything weighty or political. Hopefully these have been pleasantly diverting for you as well. But there is a darker context to this choice of cover... not one I'll openly explore but certainly something you might recognize as a "statement between the lines." I'll leave any specific interpretations to you.
With that off my chest, here's a song about a scary creature from down below that begins as 80's novelty new wave and finds itself even more "demented" in the hands of a grungy punk rabid rabbit!:
NoBunny - Monster (Fred Schneider)
Between the releases of the B-52s Whammy! and Bouncing Off The Satellites albums, Fred Schneider embarked on a brief solo outing with his 1984 album, Fred Schneider & The Shake Society. Monster was the first track on the LP and its only single. B-52's bandmate Kate Pierson offers backing vocals on the track. The song achieved practically no success even on its re-release in the 90's though it did get a fair amount of airplay on contemporary dance radio. The video, which featured Pierson, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, graffiti pop artist Keith Haring, and 80's drag icon Ethyl Eichelberger, was actively banned from MTV at the time, though it's not entirely clear why. The clip was later included on a B52's video compilation. While Schneider has suggested the album and its single failed due to lack of label promotion, he has nonetheless found another more commercial means to profit from it. In 2016, partnering with Breyting Community Roaster, he lent the song's name to his own variety of coffee: Fred Schneider's Monster! Blend. Its description claims he "enlisted his monsters to roam the cosmos in search of the perfect beans to roast to a frighteningly intense flavor."
The song itself is a quirky blend of its own, elementally similar to Ministry and Oingo Boingo of the mid eighties, combined with Schneider's distinctively unconventional vocal quality. The lyrics are potentially problematic by today's standards because of their obvious innuendos, but apparently Schneider has said the song is primarily about a dinosaur dancing about in his polka-dot pajamas.
One of the radio shows first to play Monster in 1984 was The Dr. Demento Show, where it has continued to get occasional airtime throughout the years. Dr. Demento, specializing in presenting many forms of musical oddities and comedy, released a various artists double-disc covers compilation titled, Dr. Demento Covered In Punk in January of this year. It included many of the artists previously featured on his radio show, some doing brand new covers of originals found in the show's past. NoBunny, aka Justin Champlin, an independent garage punk artist, provides two covers for the collection: 1963's Surfin' Bird originally by The Trashmen and Monster by Fred Schneider (who also appears on this album covering Gloria Balsam's 1979 Fluffy.)
NoBunny brings what could be described as the rage of a rabbit smashing pumpkins in a cage to the song, one part rockabilly punk, one part sarcastically angry Billy Corgan. The song states that "they don't wear pants on the other side of France" but NoBunny apparently never wears pants, but always wears a dilapidated rabbit mask... just as if everyday is Halloween... imagine that...
The Cover:
The Original:
Want to check out or revisit the previous 3 years of SeeDarkly's Octoberween DisCoveries? Click here and scroll down the tag!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Next week:
I'm thinking I might spend next month doing what I'll call "Anotha' Cova' Novemba'" where we'll explore another exceptional cover of a track previously featured on the blog or by an artist previously featured on the blog. Check the link to previous entries below and if you have a suggestion for "anotha' cova'" you think worthy, let me know!
Feel free to tell me what you think about today's cover! Comments, suggestions, discussions, etc... welcome!
(You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.)
Explore the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Oct 21 - Pouppée Fabrikk - I Want Candy (The Strangeloves)
Oct 14 - Darken The Doorstep - The Hearse Song (Carl Sandburg)
Oct 07 - Zombina And The Skeletones - Dracula's Tango [Sucker For Your Love] (Toto Coelo)
Sep 30 - Nerd Revolt - Photographic (Depeche Mode)
Sep 23 - Riviera F - Echo Beach - (Martha and the Muffins)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-29 01:47 am (UTC)Also needs to mostly fit in the goth/industrial/dark alt format... not just any genre.
Sorry if that was a confusion.