The issues with trying to recommend material to a parodist

Only the parodist has the right attention.

At times when I was unsure what to parody, I have turned to friends to try to help me narrow it down. But in the end, I found that I served myself best.

Overview

Parodying songs is more complicated than meets the eye, as much of the site is dedicated to making clear. To anyone who is not parodying, the factors that go into it can be difficult to understand, let alone have all of in mind. (This is also apparent from what happened when my readers tried to predict me.) My audience has learned a lot, but it is still easy for them to forget something important, or overestimate something that turns out to be unimportant.

Examples

Once I had done the Pat Benatar parodies, I had used all the most obviously suitable albums I was already familiar with. Thus, I needed some guidance, as my future appeared to lie in songs I did not yet know.

A friend of mine discussed three bands whom we had greatest hits compilations by: The Motels, Blondie, and The Cars. I got to know The Motels better first, as I had already been tipped off to things I might be able to do with it by noticing some hooks in the songs I already knew, as well as remembering that friend quoting the line Take the L out of lover and it’s over from one of the other songs.

But, as already detailed by one of my no trying to predict stories, this friend was forgetting some things when seeing the title of Shame as having potential - one word does not a parody make, and the title of the song should change anyway. That song did make the fodder rating, but for none of the reasons my friend expected.

Furthermore, I soon discovered that it was a good thing I settled for The Motels first. The Cars showed some definite hooks in Just What I Needed and You Might Think and possibilities in Since You’re Gone and Heartbeat City, but the rest of the songs were either too slow or not much help.

Even while we had been checking out Blondie together, it was apparent that there were a lot of slow songs and low fodder ratings there. My friend did call particular attention to Tide is High, for mentioning the tide, and for musically having a Caribbean vibe. But she did not pay enough attention to notice a major problem: The song basically just says the same three things over and over. There is no way to tell a story with it.

I finished working with The Motels, spent some time not knowing what to do next, and then saw the help Phil Collins could be all by myself. (Of particular note out of this was the Collins song Dance Into the Light also having a bit of a Caribbean sound. Subtler than that of Tide is High, but this song, with multiple verses’ worth of lyrics and stuff about freedom, served me much better. Add this to a parody title of Dance Into the Tide and it all seems to add up to even more arguments that I do not need Tide is High.)

After these experiences, it started to seem like: Who are we trying to kid? Only I truly know what I need.

Reasons it went like this

The obvious first thing I need is songs that I like - which is usually to say rocky ones. Phil Collins is not as rocky as The Cars, which could explain why nobody had suggested I use him. But, as I have learned, I should always take my fodder where I can get it, and sometimes I have to push my limits to achieve that.

I went through a phase with a newbie school of thought, which manifested itself as a quintet of characters I called the Comic Five. Not having any conscience of their own, the Five relied on me to get any kind of idea, so I taught them that when it came to songs, fast equals good in my book. What the primitive characters did not understand was that the actual suitability for parodies was completely separate from how much I liked to casually listen to the songs. Consequently, they paid too much attention to what the music was like and not enough attention to the actual content of the lyrics.

To this day, the Five are associated with - and serve as an example of - mistakes that are easily made by anyone who has a significant amount still to learn. Long before my readers ever seriously tried to recommend songs for me to parody, they lagged behind me while I had a new cast of characters, the Black Pearl crew, take over the parodies, which resulted in a number of stories about why your readers should not try to predict you (as you can see from the link in the overview).

Now that I find myself advising audiences not to recommend songs to be parodied, I realize that doing so seems to require some amount of predictions about what the parodist will do, which might explain why the two activities are similarly fraught with peril.

Anyway, back to the Five and their generally picking the most obvious choices, given that how much I liked the music is easier to see than what I could do with it, they almost certainly would have chosen The Cars over Phil Collins. The Crew, however, have a mind of their own. They said:

Perhaps some of these songs are a bit slow for you. But that has to be different from being way too slow for you. At least the instruments in I Wish It Would Rain Down are rock, right? Keep things in perspective. Do not miss I know I never meant to cause you no pain and I realize I let you down for She’s my best friend’s girl, and she used to be mine*.

Their point is well taken. Why would I pick something that does not sound like any relationship in Pirates of the Caribbean when songs with lyrics that could have been spoken verbatim by Davy Jones to his former love exist? Perkier music is no excuse. As difficult as the thought was for my readers after so many years of me dissing ballads.

*That is a Cars lyric, in case you were wondering.

The particulars

After these events had played out, my friends and I determined that the main problem with The Cars - not just for me, but for any parodist - is that they liked contemporary topics. As a result, their lyrics contain a number of words and phrases that did not exist until modern times. Let’s Go was especially bad in this department, saying clock machine, frozen fire, and night life, none of which I am pretty sure anyone would have said hundreds of years ago. But other examples include their mentioning rock and roll in Good Times Roll and using the expression shake it up as a song title.

There is none of that with Mr. Collins. The stories his songs tell are generally pretty time-neutral, which should make the songs easier for anyone to work with as much as anything. I attest that songs that could take place just about anywhere, in just about any century, are the best kind to parody, and that is why I not only picked Collins over Cars for myself but would sooner recommend him than them to any other song parodist, in general. (One never knows about individual songs, however).