New logo, and "Meat Grinder" results are in

Jerkatorium came in 3rd place (out of 11 entries) for our entry to the "Meat Grinder" Song Fight, which sounds about right for the song.  Our entry is an eccentric piece, and not a barn-burner by any means.  It got mostly "meh" reviews on the SongFight.org bulletin board.  The vote margin was very small, with almost all of the songs getting 7 to 11 votes each, which might help to explain why the winning song was essentially an instrumental 'throwaway track'.  This is not sour grapes on my part; I don't think Jerkatorium deserved to win the Meat Grinder Song Fight, but I strongly believe that Glenny should have won for his inventive and interesting submission, and I believe that the winning entry should have received a much smaller fraction of the votes.

The default Jerkatorium logo/image up until now (if Jerkatorium could be said to have one) had been my self-portrait from the January 2013 Commuter Challenge:

That image was always a place-holder at best, and it has been outdated since April, when Chumpy became a regular collaborator/member of Jerkatorium.  Chumpy has been half of Jerkatorium for the past 8 months already, and having my face as the logo/image is really inadequate.  In order to spur myself to take action, I decided to update the logo as part of the "independent project" November/December 2015 Commuter Challenge.  I am still tweaking the logo, but this is the current idea:

The other parts of that Commuter Challenge were to continue to submit songs for at least half of the Song Fights (The Rat Brain, Day of the Dead, The War On, and Meat Grinder), and cover art for at least one Song Fight per month (The Rat Brain, The War On, and Fearless Love), and I/we met those goals.  So huzzah!

"Meat Grinder" posted at SongFight.org

Jerkatorium lost the "The War On" Song Fight pretty badly, tying for 6th place out of 9 entries; it is the worst we've scored since my first Song Fight submission (the embarrassing "Grim Reality" fiasco I described in the 27DEC2014 post).  I like "The War On."  Chumpy attributes the poor vote count to the song being too political and literal.  That's a fair assessment, but I thought the vitriol of it would somehow add to its charm.  I was wrong.

One of the main references in the song is the Starbucks red coffee cup "controversy".  It is a very timely reference, and it should make the song completely outdated by Xmas 2015 (just 9 days from now) and forever after, so I went ahead and slapped together a quick slideshow video and put it up on YouTube in order to share the song on Facebook before its relevance expires (I don't know how to share music on FB without posting it as a video on YouTube).  It is not my ideal vision of what a Jerkatorium music video should look like, but I didn't have time for anything more, and the only other viable option was a single static image - this seemed like an okay middle ground:

In other news, we submitted a song to the "Meat Grinder" Song Fight, and the songs are posted at the Song Fight website for your listening pleasure (and for voting, if you like the song).

We also committed ourselves to doing a cover song for a fellow SongFighter.  This cover project was organized "secret Santa" style, so I can't blab about what the song is or who we're recording it for.  It is due January 11, and I'll post a link to the song after it's finished.  With any luck Jerkatorium will have entered another Song Fight or two in the interim.  I will keep you posted.