Chocolate Tuba

Pato Fu, Made in Japan

2024-08-30T00:00:00Z

Pato Fu, Made in Japan

A court in Brazil today shut down Twitter there because Melon Husk wouldn't comply with the laws there and turn over records from their right wing coup attempt on January 8, 2023. A lot of Brazilians made the move to Bluesky in response, and it got me thinking about some of my favorite Brazilian music. Pato Fu was an indie rock band that I got into several years ago. When I listened to my favorite song of theirs today, it struck me as a perfect Chocolate Tuba. The hook is from a classic pop song (which was originally from the soundtrack to a Swedish porn flick before being picked up by Sesame Street). The singer is singing in Japanese, not Portuguese. The climactic scene of the music video is set to some heavy dance music. The song is a real mess and shouldn't work, but it does. Brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbRRfgbQ040

Metalachi, Hot for Teacher

2024-07-01T00:00:00Z

Metalachi, Hot for Teacher

Laura mentioned this band to me Sunday as we were walking along the riverfront in Hoboken. I looked them up. They're a mariachi band that loves heavy metal, so they combine the two. Of the songs I sampled, this one seemed to do the best of including elements of both genres. I remember the video for this Van Halen song being all over MTV when I was in college.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht-c92U1Z9g

Bruno Mars vs. Strong Bad, Uptown Fhqwhgads

2024-06-19T00:00:00Z

Bruno Mars vs. Strong Bad, Uptown Fhqwhgads

So, for reasons I can't disclose, Laura and I were discussing Homestar Runner, which led me to go to their site, which led me to doing a web search for "fhqwhgads", which led me to this, this little bit of brilliance, this mashup of Bruno Mars' deracinated funk with Strong Bad and The Cheat's pop. Everybody to the limit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6IKTNmn3Uo

Rachid Taha, Rock el Casbah

2024-05-25T00:00:00Z

Rachid Taha, Rock el Casbah

Rachid Taha's cover of the Clash song "Rock the Casbah" is a thorough mixing of punk and Algerian rai music. The iconic chorus is sung in English, but the rest of the song is rendered in Arabic, and rock beats and guitars mix with Egyptian-style strings. The result is amazing. Taha famously met the Clash in Paris in 1981 and handed them a tape of his band's music, which they seemed interested in. A year later, their next album included "Rock the Casbah". Coincidence? Taha thought his tape may have influenced the band. So this cover is kind of him returning the favor, bringing things full circle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Sg9H2T_TQ

Hakim e Cleopatra, Walk Like an Egyptian

2024-05-24T00:00:00Z

Hakim e Cleopatra, Walk Like an Egyptian

I know absolutely nothing about this band. But my wife and I were laying in bed and she started playing this on her phone and I thought, "That could go up on Chocolate Tuba". And now it has. It doesn't particularly mesh the styles very well, but it may be more interesting for that failure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEl2GXVdYIQ

Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime (Stop Making Sense extract)

2024-05-16T00:00:00Z

Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime (Stop Making Sense extract)

The band that Talking Heads evolved into by the time the movie Stop Making Sense was made was the epitome of Chocolate Tuba, taking the angular minimalist punk the three- and four-piece versions of the band were known for and bringing in a healthy dose of R&B. Not something you would think would work, but boy did it ever, creating something unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGofoH9RDEA

Kermit the Frog, Once in a Lifetime

2024-05-15T00:00:00Z

Kermit the Frog, Once in a Lifetime

This cover of "Once in a Lifetime" actually strays the least from the original of any I've found. Also, it's abbreviated, not the full song. But combining the original's punk/African fusion with whatever it is that the Muppets do is at the very least amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCY0aeUx-Ns

Zoe Devlin Love, Once in a Lifetime

2024-05-14T00:00:00Z

Zoe Devlin Love, Once in a Lifetime

Following up from yesterday's post of Angélique Kidjo's cover of Talking Heads "Once in a Lifetime", another cover that reimagines the rather bloodless punk/African hybrid original, this time as deep roots reggae/dub. Gordon Wedderburn's translation of parts of the lyrics into Jamaican patois is a stroke of genius that really puts this one over the top, making it a paranoid masterpiece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EpnnykmzAM

Angélique Kidjo, Once in a Lifetime

2024-05-13T00:00:00Z

Angélique Kidjo, Once in a Lifetime

Angélique Kidjo is simulatenously from Benin, from nowhere, and from everywhere. She had the beginnings of a career in her home country, but left for Paris because of the politics of the day. Her music is rooted in Benin, but incorporates influences from all over the place. Which may have something to do with her decision to cover the album Remain in Light by Talking Heads, bringing their "African" album back to Africa. There is an amusing video for "Once in a Lifetime", but I'm instead going with this amateur video of a performance at Carnegie Hall in New York where David Byrne joined her and her band onstage for an unplanned, unrehearsed, and kind of vocally sloppy version of the song, because it really highlights the combination of David Byrne's punk-inspired diversion into cod-African music with Angélique Kidjo's cosmopolitan take on pan-African music, meeting at a place somewhere in the Atlantic, equidistant from New York, Paris, and Cotonou.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyMITjZe4aY

Yulduz Usmonova, Tak Boom

2024-05-08T00:00:00Z

Yulduz Usmonova, Tak Boom

25 years ago or so, during the great World Music scare. there was an attempt to make Uzbek pop songbird Yulduz Usmonova the Next Big Thing. She got a western release, she got western producers, she got western music. Well, kind of. She still sings Uzbek pop, but this single mixes in surf guitar, Jamaican toasting, South African choral music, a bit of jazz, the kitchen sink. Sounds like it might be a mess, but it actually works pretty well. I mean, I can still sing it 25 years on. It wasn't quite the hit they hoped for, and Yulduz went back to being the big fish in the Uzbek small pond. And it's hard to find this version of this song among all the similarly-titled other stuff she did ("Tak Bum", "Bum Tak", etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vIKf6IWNGo

The Devil's Anvil, Shisheler

2024-05-04T00:00:00Z

The Devil's Anvil, Shisheler

My wife Laura is a belly dancer (not professionally, just for fun). Last year, she was preparing for a hafla, where belly dancers get together to perform for each other, and the theme of it was "rock music", so she was looking for rock music she could belly dance to. She found this band from the 1960s, The Devil's Anvil, that played traditional Arabic, Turkish, and Greek music with rock rhythms and instruments. There were four members. The lead singer was Palestinian, and his main foil was an Israeli Jew. The band released one album in 1967, "Hard Rock from the Middle East". Unfortunately the album came out right as the Six Day War was happening in Israel, and the album sank like a rock. They never released another record. "Shisheler" is a traditional Turkish song given a rock treatment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO63pYDmhoE

Ot Vinta, Кохайтесь, чорноброві!

2024-05-03T00:00:00Z

Ot Vinta, Кохайтесь, чорноброві!

The title of this song translates to "Make Love, O Dark Browed Beauties". Which are also the first words of the song. Followed immediately by "But not with the Muscovites, For the Muscovites - are foreign people, They make trouble with you."

In case you hadn't guessed, Ot Vinta are Ukrainian. They love rockabilly. They love Ukrainian folk music. They combine the two into something they call Ukrabilly. They have a great visual sense; the band members all played in a children's theater group before Ot Vinta existed and use that theatrical talent when they perform. They also play with some of the top comedy groups in Ukraine, including one called Quarter 95, which was run by this guy named Volodomyr Zelenskyy; you may have heard of him in another context.

All of their videos are worth looking at. Even if you don't understand a word they're singing, they have an undeniable wackiness that comes through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpJdWHHAgH8

Systema Solar, Yo Voy Ganao

2024-05-02T00:00:00Z

Systema Solar, Yo Voy Ganao

The Wikipedia page for Systema Solar says "[t]heir music combines elements of Caribbean Colombian music, champeta, bullerengue, and cumbia, among other genres". I think they missed hip-hop. The flute that has the repeating hook is clearly a local thing. Colombia is known for a distinctive local flute called a gaita, but the one shown in the video doesn't look like one. Which isn't to say that what appears in the music isn't one. Whatever. The song is infectiously catchy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9t4XTOwtEo

Attwenger, Kaklakariada

2024-05-01T00:00:00Z

Attwenger, Kaklakariada

Attwenger sing in Austrian dialect that is barely intelligible to most other German speakers. Hans-Peter Falkner plays accordion and has a strong base in the local music based around that, basically what we would call "Oompah Music". Markus Binder plays drums like a madman. Put the two get together, you get Oomprock, I guess. I saw Attwenger play in a small courtyard in Manhattan several years ago in front of fewer than a hundred people. It was one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life. This live video gives an idea of what they're like. Kaklakariada is about how nationalism is a poison that infects idiots and makes them stupider and is probably my favorite song of theirs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCwir1CQZk8

Hardly Subtle, Stop Me Like This

2024-04-30T00:00:00Z

Hardly Subtle, Stop Me Like This

Mashups amaze me. This one for example, combines one of the worst indie rock bands in the world with a Jamaican reggae backing. My biggest complaint about The Smiths is that Morrissey's tuneless warbling has only a tenuous connection to the underlying music, which was mostly Johnny Marr's doing and was pretty decent. Hardly Subtle proves me right by taking the vocal from "Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before" and dropping in a very different backing track. And damned if it doesn't work.

Hardly Subtle - Reggae 7s Vol. 1 by Hardly Subtle

Spike Jones and his City Slickers with Homer & Jethro, Pal-Yat-Chee

2024-04-29T00:00:00Z

Spike Jones and his City Slickers with Homer & Jethro, Pal-Yat-Chee

Cultural collisions are nothing new. Here's one that goes back several decades and combines country music, opera, and jazz. Spike Jones with his rendition of "I, Pagliacci" is one for the books, one of my favorite collisions of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iumzj7Clwsc

The Cat, Hit The Road, Jack

2024-04-28T00:00:00Z

The Cat, Hit The Road, Jack

20 or so years ago, I picked up a CD that collected Thai bands playing western-inspired music back in the 1960s and 70s called Thai Beat-a-Go-Go Volume 1. One track that really stuck with me all these years is The Cat, a band that clearly knew how to play Thai music, covering Ray Charles' "Hit The Road, Jack".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-mfIfcAUJE

T.P. O.K. Jazz, En Entre OK, En Sort KO

2024-04-27T00:00:00Z

T.P. O.K. Jazz, En Entre OK, En Sort KO

In the 1930s, western record companies didn't record much music in Africa. But they sold a lot, and what they sold a lot of was Cuban music. So by the mid 1950s when T.P. O.K. Jazz started up in Congo (later Zaire, then back to Congo), Cuban music had become part of the vocabulary of the local musicians. You can hear it in one of their early songs, "En Entre OK, En Sort KO", kind of their statement of intent, where when you come in to hear them you're okay, but by the time they're done, you're knocked out. But you also hear the beginnings of that guitar sound that came to rule the continent. A true classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTaDQZuuz74

Kirsty Maccoll, Us Amazonians

2024-04-26T00:00:00Z

Kirsty Maccoll, Us Amazonians

Kirsty Maccoll's album Tropical Brainstorm was something of a departure for her. She had fallen in love with Cuban music, and started to meld aspects of it with her own pop music. This song, however, added a third element; the guitar work here in a song about Amazonians (presumably Brazilian), has guitar work straight out of Congo. Congolese music was one of the most popular genres across Africa for decades; the style is unmistakeable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zZCfIzimbw

Sto zvířat - Nikdy nic nebylo

2024-04-25T00:00:00Z

Sto zvířat - Nikdy nic nebylo

Some years back, the first album by Czech ska band Sto zvířat was released here in the US. I really enjoyed it. Sadly, none of their other albums were released here, but I kept up with them by ordering CDs from Czechia. One of their later albums had this charming videogame-themed video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugj2a0EFIHc

Meute, LoCKeDoWN2

2024-04-23T00:00:00Z

Meute, LoCKeDoWN2

Meet Meute. German techno marching band. If that's not a collision that belongs on Chocolate Tuba, nothing is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlFrI8_Orys

3 Mustaphas 3, Buke E Kripe Ne Vater tone/Kalaxhojne

2024-04-21T00:00:00Z

3 Mustaphas 3, Buke E Kripe Ne Vater tone/Kalaxhojne

If you’re interested in cross-cultural collisions, nobody did it better than 3 Mustaphas 3, a group from ~~England~~ Szegerely, a Balkan republic that doesn’t appear on any maps. Forward in all directions! This tune combines Rock with Albanian folk music, and the folk music is what gives it the kick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3zpJkf6ESY

Rot Front, The Robots

2024-04-20T00:00:00Z

Rot Front, The Robots

Rot Front is a band from Berlin headed by Ukrainian expat Yuriy Gurzhy. This is a cover of Kraftwerk’s song, thereby combining klezmer (kinda) and electronica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACO5g4SVhfg