Saturday 14 April 2012

The origins of 58 million YouTube hits

I'm sure this has been blogged to death already, but it amused me so I thought I'd do it anyway. This YouTube clip had had 58,623,999 hits at the time of writing this. That's the same amount as the entire world horse population. Apparently.

The Trashmen's Surfin' Bird tune is one of the highlights of the Full Metal Jacket soundtrack for me, although it is in danger of proving the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. There was a Facebook campaign a couple of years ago to get it to number one for Christmas. Personally I thought getting Rage Against the Machine to number one was brilliant but it's been done now. I'd much rather see some decent new music topping the Festive Hit Parade (it is still called that isn't it?) By 'decent new music', of course, I mean real, original music, created by musicians because music means something to them and not just some formulaic shite spewed out by a TV unreality show.

This YouTube vid of Surfin' Bird  from the Full Metal Jacket OST is currently on just over a million views. I suppose that may have been a bit higher if they'd spelled the name of the film right!

Surfin' Bird was made by combining two songs by doo-wop band The Rivingtons: Papa Oom Mow Mow and The Bird's The Word:

I think if anything I prefer the two Rivingtons tunes to the Trashmen's hybrid version; they seem less contrived to me somehow. However, if I was only allowed to have one version of the tune(s) though it would have to be this one: 


Like it says at the top of the page: nothing particularly insightful or earth shattering, but I finished my playlist for this week's show earlier than usual and had a bit of free time! 

No comments:

Post a Comment