At work, we have our “choice” of several Muzak channels. One guy, it seems, always sets it to the Michael Jackson channel. Recently, I’ve noticed the repeat of Tatu every couple of hours. But last week, I think we found a channel programmed by someone who had been reading up on some of my past Wizbang contests, because they were playing The Worst Remakes Possible. I heard a punk version of Don Henley’s The Boys Of Summer and a techno remix of Judy Garland’s Somewhere Over The Rainbow.
I kept waiting for Disturbed’s cover of Tears for Fears’ Shout, but it never seemed to materialize…
J.
The live Muzak version of Shout is awesome.
I dunno, I must be missing the whole comedy concept here. Why would I want to watch an unfunny, idiotic boss on TV when I get to see one live, every day?
And I’ll bet I’m not alone.
Never mind, wrong thread.
I can’t imagine working in an office where they pipe in Muzak over the louspeakers. It sounds like something the Viet Cong would do to Yankee prisoners. I’d rather work in dead silence than listen to some garbage forced into my ears.
One of the scariest things I ever heard was in a Ft. Lauderdale shopping mall, circa 1983, where they had a Muzak version of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”… (for those who don’t catch the reference, parts of it were used as the theme music for “The Exorcist”).
That was back in my young irregular-hours programmer days. In the office I worked in at that time, they had a system that could play through your phone’s speaker. You punched a code, *8 or some such, to turn it on and off. The music was piped in via a boom box wired to the phone system. The phone system also used that for the music-on-hold.
During the day, they kept it on a “beautiful music” station. But after 5:00, when there was no one around but us programmers, the boom box got switched over to WSHE-FM, which at the time formatted hard rock, New Wave, the occasional Genesis bit, and some punk. We always had a rule that the last person to leave had to switch it back over to the beautiful-music station. But one night, someone forgot. The next morning, the company’s chief accountant called in sick. The receptionist had to put her on hold for a moment. When she picked the call back up, the receptionist was informed: “By the way, did you know the phone is playing ‘Whip It'”?
It must be my youth, but I prefer the Ataris’ version of The Boys Of Summer any day.
Speaking of covers, check out Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies. All they do is covers – some of them are extremely horrible. Some are just plain funny.
I dunno…I have a copy of Courtney Love singign Guns ‘n Roses Paradise City…that’s pretty scary. Beyond that…best remake of all times? There was a short lived group called the Bezadrine Monks. They were an a cappella groupl that sang songs in the style of the Gregorian monks, which were popular at the time. They sang a rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Brilliant.