Some people these days are concerned about oil shortages. Others are worried that we’re running out of rainforests. Yet more live in fear lest mankind exhaust its supply of Cooler Ranch Doritos. Not I, however (well, okay, I do worry about a paucity of snacks from time to time, while not worrying in the least that A Paucity of Snacks would be like, the best snack shortage-related band name ever); I fear that our race has lost a resource, nay, a very piece of our collective birthright, in our present lack of suitably awesome novelty musical artists.
Clearly, I do not exaggerate when I say that this problem has already gone on far too long. Alas, our memory grows short concerning such matters, and many alive today recall not how during World War II we were able to field a vast and unstoppable force of guys writing silly songs about Hitler and his implied fruitulosity whilst simultaneously making a mockery of those who made Pearl Harbor a day that will ever live in infamy (I am here, needless to say, referring chiefly to Ben Affleck, may a thousand curses be all up in his grill). After the war was over, many of these great men successfully made the transition back to the peacetime novelty song business, finding that with the newfound wealth and affluence of the burgeoning middle class came an insatiable thirst for music about monkeys, the undead, and Jimmy Durante. They rose to this great challenge, and as late as the 60s, these proud veterans of the Greatest Novelty Song Generation regaled
As their numbers waned however, newcomers, raised on the legendary work of their elders, took the metaphorical rubber chicken/torch in hand and carried on this fine tradition, using new cutting edge technology left over from NASA to make chipmunk voices and thereby ensure that even through the tribulations of Vietnam, skanky hippies, and that time that Richard Nixon built a groovy time machine and tried to steal Captain Caveman’s funky mojo. This generation too, passed into the goofy and baboon-infested mists of time but nobody really noticed for a while because even regular 80s music was pretty silly a lot of the time, while simultaneously being decisively sweet (not to mention being my greatest weakness, assuming that you consider clearing out a retro dance club with my inhumanly dorkalicious dance skillz to be a weakness).
So anyway, now here we are; we’ve got Weird Al (who, for all his badassitude, is but one man, and unable to usher in a new Renaissance of silliness all by his lonesome) and a hideous Pandemonium of Boy Bands (which, in addition to being funny, in a tragical trainwreck full of clowns and beef stroganoff kind of way, would also make a pretty good name for a band, as long as it had nothing to do with actual boy bands and everything to do with pandemonium). Sure we’ve got a few guys out there working in basements to remix “Feelin’ Groovy” to imply that Osama bin Laden is all too fond of goats, but really, if China declared some kind of a novelty song war on us right now, we’d be caught in an altogether with-our-pants-down-like fashion (and not in the good way, like when you’re trying to smuggle a bunch of ferrets into a theatre so you can let them loose during The Wild Thornberrys vs. Predator and you forgot to wear a belt so there you are in the line for popcorn with your pants full of ferrets waiting for your trough of Raisinets and all of a sudden Henry Kissinger melts out of the shadows and commands you to partake of a spontaneous DDR tournament against the ghost of Macaulay Culkin so your pants fall off and there’s ferrets everywhere and there’s your 2nd Grade English teacher standing over there with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Batman, and the Harlem Globetrotters all looking at you with mute embarrassment and they know it’s you because all of you were in that benefit concert last year to raise money for ugly kids so you want to just run away but you know that if you do you’ll have to pay a heft late fee on ferret rentals but you can’t afford it because you already stopped by the railroad tracks and squashed all your pennies so that Abe Lincoln looks like some kind of funky presidential troll, which would also make a sweet band name but anyway you’re still there with no pants and a bunch of ferrets that you’re trying to drive before you that you may hear the lamentations of their women, but they’re just freakin’ ferrets, so they don’t lamentate anyhow, which is why you need pants in the first place).
So yeah, America, let’s get on the ball here and start farming some new talent in the novelty song industry by taking existing pop singers even less seriously than we already do and trying to get the government to subsidize increased goofy song research so that our great nation may once more be a shining beacon of musical retardedness unto the world. Also, look out for ferrets.
