30 days of music - Day 3: a song that makes me happy

A song about an evil genius in love.

What's not to love?

If a smart musically inclined bloke made a half-pony half-monkey monster to please me and ruined a pony making a gift for me, I'd be willing to put aside rather strong ideals of animal activism and be happy.



Jonathan Coulton is pure genius.

He makes me happy because his music is nothing like what I've grown up being told 'music' is.

With light tunes and pleasant vocals that let the hilarious songwriter in him take centre stage, JoCo is automatically refreshing and a high dose of good, clean, happy.

It also helps that he's an incredibly smart and sensible artist, because of the way he distributes his music. It's Free to take (often enough), to mess up, remix, enact, sing to your sock doll, to do what you please with it. Including making videos for the song like the one here.

The happiest music has to be the most accessible.

If Skullcrusher Mountain didn't put you in a good mood, try JoCo's full-of-awesome version of the frankly demeaning Baby Got Back. It's the fourth song on that link.

Buffy kicks some Cullen arse

Like there was any doubt as to what would happen if Buffy the Vampire Slayer met Edward Cullen (cue contemptuous sneer) of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight.

Remix artist and self confessed pop-culture hacker Jonathan McIntosh brings together the icons of vampire fiction in this great political remix.

(To be fair, maybe we shouldn't call Twilight 'vampire fiction' and even bother comparing the two; as a racy romance, Twilight would be perfectly acceptable time pass entertainment.)

In six minutes, Jonathan McIntosh reminds us that

• Buffy's cool.
• Spike's cooler and infinitely more admirable topless, than Edward and it is preposterous to even take those two names in the same sentence.
  
• Vampire pop culture of 1997 - 2003 is way (waaaay) better than the post 2005 upstarts.

But more significantly

• Buffy was all about girl power. On the other hand, Twilight with all its sensuality (and sexuality) can fall quite easily into the "Oh-Bella!"-"Oh-Edward" Mills and Boon style of story telling that seems to portray Edward's possessiveness and creepy behaviour as Love. Jonathan says it best in this post.
• Vidding and remixes can be extremely useful in political and social commentary. Copyright is thus severely curtailing the fundamental right to expression through transformative works.

Here's the video (Creative Commons BY-NC-3.0 License): Watch and learn Bella.