Parody -- A Song of Itself, in Itself (aka a Mini-Tutorial)

Here, I rewrite many words of a familiar song: crafting lines that have meaning yet won’t be too long. Analyze the cadence, then I’d synchronize — I’m counting all the syllables and rehearse singing in time, verses that rhyme.

Parody. Wacky lyrics strung to someone’s music — that’s parody. When I sing along to that minus one — not karaoke; like I dig composing, delight in word play.

If you are wondering what this post is all about, read the opening paragraphs once more. It may come to you; then again, it may not. Really depends on how much you’ve been following my WittyCulus blog and those parodies of song I’d written so far…

I got the idea for this new “song” on January 6th, after having watched several of “Weird Al” Yankovic‘s recent music videos. He had released them online, one a day for 8 days, to promote his 2014 studio album titled “Mandatory Fun“. Of particular interest were songs such as “Word Crimes”, “Foil”, “Handy”, “First World Problems”, “Tacky” and “Sports Song”.

You gotta hand it to Yankovic — this master of song parodies keeps raising the bar. But I have to say there’s was one item which failed to rouse me: “Mission Statement” is such a dry and long-drawn affair, imho.

Even so, the subject of parody kept swirling in my head. And then it hit me: there’s this particular song — I shan’t reveal the name yet — that has the perfect chorus opening for my next exploit. I toyed with the idea and surprisingly wrote the first line of the first verse almost effortlessly; and it matched the style of the original song to boot.

Boy, was I feeling a rush of creative power! Alas, it took a good ten days to piece together this parody from bits and pieces of lyrics that developed over that week or two. (And another month to work in a commentary and finally publish all of it here…)

I actually did some research for this project. Well, inspiration without any work is simply a good feeling with nothing to show for it, wouldn’t you agree?

And learned something, did I — little nuggets like internal rhyme (I knew how to do this but didn’t know that term) and end rhyme; and something about song writing notation known as meter-tabs. I’d found the latter info here: http://learneverythingabout.com/lyrics/songwriter_exercises/songwriting_notation.html.

This new knowledge allowed me to better map my lyrics to the cadence of the original song and also keep a watchful eye on syllable counts. I think I’ll (buy some time now and) show an example in another post.

Now, let’s return to those words in the first 2 paragraphs; this time we look at them in the usual format:

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Perhaps you have already guessed it — the last line in the lyrics gave a big hint! Yes, I’ve just parodied the Bee Gees song called “Tragedy”, their chart-topper which needs no further introduction! That same last lyric line is my tribute to this talented trio of brothers who have written, sang and produced so many wonderful songs for the past 40 years or so.

To be honest, I only knew about them during the Fever days — those were the impressionable years for me, when their “Saturday Night Fever” and “Spirtis Having Flown” albums ruled the airwaves! But I’d gone back in time to listen to their older classics and have built a neat CD collection for myself. I remember once I went into Tower Records at Scotts Road and came out with like 10 Bee Gees CDs!

Here’s the official Tragedy video on Youtube for you to sing along to. I’m tempted to record myself singing a part of my parody, but am lacking in the music department currently, lol.

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It is highly unusual that my post doesn’t end here. I just had to come back and edit it to float a new idea that came early this morning (that’s Feb 12) as I was discussing this parody with my sonny boy. Yup, he’s one of the first few to read my new blog posts.

See if this amuses you and guess the song…

Go on, try your hand to develop this idea into a full set of lyrics. I’d certainly keep it in mind and let my brain do its thing.