Well, no-one here will have heard of the Dutch Drs P., ("Professor P.)"as he sings in Dutch, but he absolutely rocks. This song, Troika, is a Dutch classic. The music is mock Russian tune, getting faster and faster, with inappropriate cheerful and horror sound effects.
The lyrics are about a family in a sled, rushing through a Russian landscape. The sled is hunted by wolves, and the famiy tries to escape by throwing their kids to the wolves one by one, to lighten the load.
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. I rather like the Galaxy Song, too (a different version of ALOTBSOL, of course), Every Sperm is Sacred and the Lumberjack Song.
It’s probably a really terrible song, but boy do I love “Gimme Dat Ding”! I had the single as a kid and used to love to dance around to it. The ragtime piano in the middle got me interested in ragtime piano. That’s a fun fan video too! They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha (the song is played normally first, but after that you can stop it, because then it’s played backwards)
Maybe it hasn’t been mentioned because no one thinks it’s an actually pretty good song, but I love it. I think it’s probably inspired a lot of musicians. Kate Bush cited it as her favorite song while growing up. HTR loved it, and wrote a song of her own called “To The Funnyfarm.”
The song’s about a dog, but here’s a decent cover, using footage of Heath Ledger’s The Joker. It’s not bad.
I owned two Royal Guardsmen albums!
Off topic, but even though Rolf Harris is best known (at least in the US) for “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” (which is actually a very sad song, about a dying man’s last wishes) he’s got an enormous catalog of very good and intelligent music. This is my favorite, “Sun Arise.”
More off-topic trivia for oldsters, which I have to share because I’ve been sidetracked from a project I’m working on by watching videos and something good has to come from it. The lead singer of Gimme Dat Ding’s The Pipkins was Tony Burrows, who sang lead on several different hits. Besides “Gimme Dat Ding” he was the voice of…
It’s an earworm, that’s for sure. Really liked the video.
Hard to think of some of the songs mentioned as “actually pretty good”. But here’s one by Todd Rundgren that is a really beautiful ballad…that is tossed away on a partisan joke, with an obscenity in the chorus to insure that it could never be played on the radio or released on an album without a “Parental Advisory” sticker. (NSFW)
Jack Black and Kyle (that other dude) make seriously good music, in my opinion. They harmonize amazingly well, and the instrumentals are always ALWAYS creative and different. I don’t like most of their humor, thought.
Some other examples of Tenacious D’s fantastic musical talent are “Kyle Took a Bullet For Me” and “The Metal”. Their style is all over the place, and each of their songs are so different from each other that it takes a long time to get tired of listening to them.
United Breaks Guitars is making the rounds; it sounds like a joke until you find out it’s a true story and it’s pretty good (I do not reccomend it to people who can’t stand country).
About any song by Les Luthiers is in danger of being reused for high school festivals, but the most used one has to be their take on Thales’ Theorem (lyrics in Spanish, sorry, but it’s just the theorem).
I would add pretty much the entire catalogs of Kinky Friedman and the Austin Lounge Lizards. They both occasionally succeed at hitting the sweet spot of being both funny and genuinely moving.
I’m 41, and Snoopy and His Friends the Royal Guardsmen was my favorite record when I was six. I think everyone (at least of a certain age) knows the songs, but it takes a True Nerd to identify the name of the band!
My favorite Weird Al schtick has to be “Bob” – Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, reworked entirely in palindromes.
Has anyone mentioned some of Zappa’s early work? “Absolutely Free”, the Mothers’ second album, includes some terrific “novelty” stuff, like “Call Any Vegetable” and “Status Back Baby”.
