False Idols

Initially I approached this assignment much as Sam did, simpatico as we are: pick a bunch of songs that would be just so inappropriate that the cringe factor would send people scrabbling for their remotes faster than Carl Lewis singing the national anthem. Unfortunately once I quickly hit upon Ween’s “Spinal Meningitis”, I realized just couldn’t top that without getting deep into Doctor Demento territory. So… Stuff that just wouldn’t be sung on “Idol”… hmm… Well, what about stuff that just couldn’t be sung on “Idol”? Not just stuff like The Chordettes or The Coasters, you could get back-up singers to fill that in. And like Sam, I got a chuckle out of picturing someone getting up there and repeating, “Right about now, the funk soul brother” over and over. But then that chuckle shifted up into a guffaw when the next song came to mind. It’s the last song on my playlist, and set the theme for the whole thing. So now onto the idolatry:

1. Daft Punk, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”
Yeah you guessed it. The idea here is songs that no one can sing, because even though there are “vocals”, you’re actually not hearing a human voice at all. This playlist will run the gamut of vocoder, voicebox, and computer-generated speech, but stop just short of the computerized pitch-quantizing used most famously on Cher’s “Believe” and recently Chris Brown’s “Forever”. That’s really just either fixing up people who can’t sing, or adding an interesting effect onto vocals that someone actually could sing. I’m going for no human presence at all. And this song, one of two recent songs that brought the vocoder back into the public ear (the other being Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic”), also has the whole ridiculous repetition thing working against it. I mean you’d have to be a complete moron to get up there and just repeat the vocoder bit over and over and rap over it and call it your own song, right? A moron, right? (sigh) Anyway, “Harder” is on this list instead of the better known “One More Time” because that song, like the Cher and Chris Brown tracks, features a deft (daft?) combination of actual human voice and vocoder / voicebox. Someone could actually pull it off live, and we’ll be having none of that. None at all.

2. Air, “Remember”
Okay here we go - not only is it vocoder, it’s vocoder in French!!! Take that, middle America! It’s not so much an afterlife, more a sort of après-vie…

3. Kraftwerk, “Numbers / Computer World Part 2″
ha ha ha ha, okay I admit I’m having a blast with this list. I mean can you picture some farm girl from Iowa getting up at an audition, crossing her fingers, blowing the bangs out of her eyes, taking a deep breath and launching into “eins, zwei, drei, vier…”? Of course that might be no more incongruous than Afrika Bambaataa falling in love with Kraftwerk and getting all his late-70s Bronx park-partiers counting to four in Japanese without even knowing what they were saying. Y’know, without a fish in your ear…

4. Zapp, “More Bounce To The Ounce”
Well, setting aside the ouevre of Peter Frampton, this may well be the most famous vocoder / voicebox song of all, though it favors Roger Troutman’s tremolous keyboards over Mr. Frampton’s power 70s guitar. Roger and his voicebox went on to record a fairly successful ballad of all things, “I Want To Be Your Man”. Then he was late. As in “the late Troutman Roger Troutman”.

5. The Art Of Noise, “Paranoimia (Max Headroom Vocal Mix)”
Okay this one strays off the path a bit, for though all the vocals are sampled, there’s no vocoder or otherwise computerized voice. Unless of course you count the lead vocals by perhaps the most famous computer-generated talking head of all time, Max Headroom. You can keep all your Matt Frewer conspiracy theories, this is the real deal, the actual Max Headroom, captured on the vinyl 12″ single version of AON’s “Paranoimia”, and duplicated in all his glory for your listening pleasure. It still would be fun to see an Idoler attempt this - it would be kinda like getting your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

6. Radiohead, “Fitter Happier”
This is the one that just had me bursting out laughing when I pictured someone onstage reciting this. Finally leaving all humans (affected, effected, and fictional) behind, we enter the realm of the actual computer voice (with apologies to Majel Barrett). This one reminds me of going to the Boston Museum Of Science when I was a kid and fooling around with their voice synthesizer. It’s fun to find out! I can walk like a penguin! …In a cage, on antibiotics. Or at least a very surprised looking whale…

Download: Daft Punk, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)

Download: Air, “Remember” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)

Download: Kraftwerk, “Numbers / Computer World Part 2″ (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)

Download: Zapp, “More Bounce To The Ounce” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)

Download: The Art Of Noise, “Paranoimia (Max Headroom Vocal Mix)” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)

Download: Radiohead, “Fitter Happier” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)