Dear Friends,
The Hard Taco song for May is called "Praise the Lo-Fi."
I put a lot of effort into trying to make mediocre performances sound good and fake instruments sound real. For this song, I went the extra mile to try to make it sound bad again. Surprisingly, it is much harder to make something sound under-produced than to make it sound over-produced. Go figure.
We made a few more Marvel-themed parodies this month, and I want to take a minute to complain about this first one, "We Didn't Stop with Hydra," which is exactly what the world needs... another parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
This is arguably the crown jewel of the VH1da-Vision catalog, and it is also represents one of my lowest moments in the last year.
Allow me to expose the magnitude of my shame. First off, I couldn't take on this project until I finished watching all the Marvel superhero films and Disney+ shows. So that alone was probably 50 hours of research. On top of that, I spent close to 15 hours working on the lyrics, and about 30 hours recording the music and editing the video, most of which was spent finding and trimming movie clips from YouTube.
So in the middle of this pointlessly backbreaking effort, I went to YouTube to find a clip from the original Billy Joel video. The second thing that came up in response to my search was "Avengers: Endgame Cast Sings We Didn't Start the Fire."
And my heart dropped into my pelvis.
Jimmy Fallon and his Tonight Show flunkies did a video parody of the same song... about the same thing. Not only that, but they had the the actual Avengers cast singing it. And here I am, countless hours deep into my own sad version which, by the way, does not feature original singing and dancing by Robert Downey Jr. and Paul Rudd.
And I'd like to go on record at this point to mention that I have always hated the original song, so humming the melody in my head over and over again was already a kind of torture.
So now I had a choice. I could throw in the proverbial towel (knowing that the most poignant proverbs are about towels), hang my poor head in shame, or...
I could make the best damn Avengers-themed parody... no, the Best. Damn. Overall. Parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire" that the world has seen in 30 years.
This was going to be a big lift, but a journey of a thousand towels starts with one towel. The problem is, some hack publishes a new spoof of "We Didn't Start the Fire" every 90 minutes or so. There are versions about Star Wars, Star Trek, Donald Trump, video games, Manga, SpongeBob, The Simpsons, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and even My Little Pony (I'm serious). And, of course, there are countless versions trying to encapsulate world events not covered in the original song. Somebody even wrote a meta-parody about how often the song is parodied.
It's like the Aristocrats joke. Everyone in this business has to do a version, and every version makes you feel awful in a completely different way.
So here is mine. Let me know if you agree it is the best ever. If I can get 10 views on YouTube, I will know I will consider that a victory.
And here are the other two we did this month. I defy all you My Little Pony fans to create fan-art to the tune of "Two Princes" and "Milkshake," even if they do sound like good names for ponies.
