Music

My Top Five Favorite Cover Bands That Are Also Awesome And Funny (In No Particular Order)

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

I love covers. At the height of the Napster Age I had more than 2000 Beatles covers in my digital collection. It is much less now, because of poor back-up skills which I still possess to this day. What I really love is when an artist is able to cover a familiar song, retain that original sense, but still make it their own in some unique and interesting way. They need to cover the song, but also add some personality so it can stand apart. Like when Earth, Wind and Fire covered Got To Get You Into My Life — a Beatles cover that I would argue is easily much better than the original.

I just have a strong belief that if a musician can take someone else’s song and make it something different, then that is real craft and art. Having said that, these are the artists that not only do that, they shake the paradigm up a bit in the process. Conceptually funny doesn’t hurt much, either.

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Hail To The King — In Honor of Elvis Presley’s Birthday (01/08/1935)

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

I still have an Elvis documentary inside of me struggling to get out.

Back when I thought I still had a shot at a career in the movies, I outlined a documentary that would have had recreations of his death based on the various theories that were floating around… Okay, okay… theories that I imagined were floating around.

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My Top 5 Favorite Iconic Music Videos From My Youth That Were Really Terrible (in no particular order)

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

The 80s invented the Music Video. Sure there were music videos earlier than that, in different forms, but the 80s collated them and made them a thing. And then the videos not only killed the Radio Stars. They murdered them. Publicly. And left their bodies in the public square on display.

How Journey Ended Up With 'Cheeseball' Video for 'Separate Ways'

They were ill advised murders, because the majority of music videos of the time were unequivocally terrrible. But that didn’t keep those videos from digging down into our youthful brains and implanting themselves like those earwig monsters from Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.

And they are still there. Here are my top 5 favorite terrible music videos from the 80s. In no particular order.

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My Personal Invite to The Gangrene Film Festival: Apollo 13 on Sept 14 2012

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

Hello my dear friends with connections to Utah.

It is time once again for me to do a quick personal plug for our annual Comedy Short Film Festival (www.gangreneproductions.com & www.facebook.com/gangrenefilmfestival). It is less than a week away (at the Ed Kenley Amphitheater in Layton, Utah on Friday, September 14th) and I would like to encourage you to attend for a multitude of reasons (several of which I have bullet-pointed the last couple of years on Blogmaster2000.com and on Facebook and will now copy and paste and update where necessary):

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#ComposerCondoms – July 2011 (Failed Meme Creation Attempt)

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

Every once in a while I try to tackle the big wide social world all on my own and create a meme. I have failed to have any kind of impact whatsoever. Every single time. Here is my personal favorite attempt that gained zero notice on Twitter, and only made a little blip on Facebook when I reposted it to a Fan Page I administrate there for a local weekly comedy show that I produce.

If you are inspired by this one, then I invite you to pile on in the comments. I mean, only if you want. I mean, I don’t care. I am good if you don’t want to. It’s no biggie… Honest…

I have arranged these back into the order in which they were originally tweeted:

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The Current Top Five Nerdiest Things In My Life

/ Ben Fuller / Leave a comment

(Originally posted on Blogmaster2000.com on 1-24-12)

I no longer consider myself a full-fledged nerd /or a full on geek. At a certain point life just kind of takes over and those things that dominated our perception of ourselves lose some of their traction, as our very own Craig so aptly explained previously.  Right now, I tend to refer to myself as a Reformed Geek. Life has staged an intervention for me and forced me into its own 12 step program that has curtailed my dogged determination to be fully immersed in nerdology.

All of that does not mean that I no longer have any Geek tendencies, though. My former massive nerdishness still resonates strongly with my more nostalgic side and I keep my gauntleted hand in the water just to stay connected to that past part of me. That is why I thought it might be interesting to put together the following list of the current Top Five Nerdiest things in my life.

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The Flaming Lips at the Palms in Las Vegas – 9-16-07

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(Originally posted on i-Pocalypse.com on 9-22-07)

It is funny how the Flaming Lips just kind of snuck up on me. I had never heard of them until the release of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2001, and even then I only came across them on accident when the album was being streamed online by AOL in pre-release. The title completely caught me off guard and made me smile, which isn’t always an easy thing to do. And really, that in a nutshell has pretty much been my whole experiences with the band ever since – continually doing something that catches me off guard and makes me smile. I think I connect mostly with their music for their alternately goofy and wise lyrics and for their seemingly endlessly restless searching nature. And now I am a fan – as big a fan as I can be of anything, anyway…

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