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Jerkatorium
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Overdue Update: New Jerkatorium and Matchy Matchy songs
It has been over two months since the last Jerkatorium blog update. Since then, we have recorded five new original Matchy Matchy songs, one new cover song, and three new podcasts. I have no excuses for not updating this blog earlier. Let’s just launch into it.
SpinTunes #14 continued through to its resolution on May 26. We're thrilled that our occasional collaborator Micah Sommersmith won his well-earned and deserved victory.
As I’d explained in previous posts, Jerkatorium was compelled to judge the competition this year because we won SpinTunes #13 last year, and so we had to supply reviews for all of the songs throughout this year's competition. To that end, Jerkatorium continued to generate review podcasts for each round of SpinTunes #14. All four of those podcasts can be found at https://twojerksonevote.com. The podcasts are free to stream or download - but I should warn you that they are very specifically geared towards SpinTunes, and they would probably not interest anyone who wasn’t already following SpinTunes #14. We tried to inject some humorous bits into the podcasts, but even those bits are mostly inside jokes for SpinTuners.
As noted in the previous blog update, Jerkatorium’s alter ego band Matchy Matchy submitted those first two shadow entries (One Of These Days and I Think You’re Okay) for SpinTunes #14, but then time constraints and other projects prevented us from submitting shadow songs for the last two rounds. Instead, Jerkatorium completed a cover version of Today’s The Day by Inverse T. Clown for Song Fight’s 2018 Gift Of Music sidefight. Today’s The Day covers are sort of a thing on the internet, and to date there are over 30 different versions of the song online. For our cover, we changed some of the lyrics to tone down some of the gender-specific derogatory remarks that seemed a little gratuitous and unnecessary; that judgment might be arguable, but regardless we’ll chalk up our edits to “artistic license”. You can hear our version here:
Early on, we decided that we weren’t going to participate in the Nur Ein competition this year. The Nur Ein song challenge requirements tend to hurt the quality of the submissions: you might have a good song and then be compelled to include animal sounds, or backwards recording, or jump through some other hoop to have it qualify, thereby dragging down the appeal of the song. Also Nur Ein uses judges with no qualifications and no bona fides, who post their rankings anonymously. The judges are free to base their rankings on petty Song Fight resentments instead of any legitimate criteria. If Jerkatorium has no respect for Nur Ein’s challenges or judges, why would we make the effort to participate?
For some reason we changed our minds at the last minute and decided to compete in Nur Ein this year. Early on it was clear that the two least-qualified judges were dead set on giving us low rankings no matter what we submitted - a typical round would have two judges ranking us up with the very top songs and the other two putting us near (or at) last place. It was just a matter of time until the math caught up with us. We were eliminated after the fifth round (officially Round Four, but that’s still five songs because there’s a Round Zero). We never expected to win - the winning group (Merisan) is much more talented than us and submitted really fantastic songs every round - but it is disappointing that we didn’t get a fair shake.
Due to either confusion or unilateral decision, Chumpy submitted our Nur Ein songs as Matchy Matchy instead of Jerkatorium this year, but everyone knew it was us. The judges and other competitors occasionally even referred to us as Jerkatorium instead of Matchy Matchy on the bulletin board and during the listening parties. You can find our Matchy Matchy Nur Ein songs at:
The Round Zero challenge was entitled “Trial By Fire” and we had to incorporate sirens. The incorporation of sirens was a terrible, song-ruining requirement, and obviously a very bad idea; all of the submissions for that round suffered from it. Round 2 was entitled “Internet Sensation” and the challenge was to sell an imaginary product. Round 3 was entitled “3:20” and the listed challenge was Ambience. Round 4 was “We Should” and we were required to have a guest play a household item on the track. We actually had two guests that round: Brian Raiter and Andrei Balitaan each played various kitchen implements and other household items as percussion instruments, and I think it turned out great. Round 5 was “Never Knew The Guy”, and the challenge was to make the song a biography.
The day after submitting “We Should” to Nur Ein, Chumpy and I went back to clean the song up a little. Here is a better version of the song:
I’m so happy with our “We Should” that I’m making a music video for the song, and I’ll post a link as soon as it is finished.
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