Friday, September 9, 2011

Ben Folds on the tyranny of cool

From To the Best of Our Knowledge, Ben Folds on a cappella groups and the tyranny of cool:

I mean, look, if you looked up reality show singing contest a cappella cover artist that would pretty much be dork, you know? But they know that, and it’s like they’ve just broken the chains of that, which I really admire. I think that’s hard to do in an overly commercialized world of cool. Everyone can’t be cool. That’s so boring, and so old, and they’ve been doing that since I was a kid, and I thought it would stop one day, and it just keeps going. It’s creative bullying, is what it is. And so I like to take the side of these people.
Folds, whose music is popular among a cappella groups, is a judge for the NBC show The Sing-Off. Here’s one central-Illinois-centric example of Folds’s music, nearly a cappella (there’s some percussion): “Effington.”

[What I know of Ben Folds’s music I like, and I owe my acquaintance with it to my children.]

comments: 2

Anonymous said...

This is probably my favorite Ben Folds song, sung by Yale's Society of Orpheus and Bacchus (the SOB).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhjvxBdhKTM

This song came out during my early adolescence, and it helped me tremendously to just try to be my own person. Your kids have good taste in music!

Michael Leddy said...

Yes, they do. :)

I hope you know that Effingham (“The Crossroads of Opportunity”) is a city in central Illinois. No joke.