Found on the Internet: Slap Chop Rap

I remember watching a TV program with mom when the Slap Chop commercial came on. My face lit up. It's Vince! With Slap Chop! Am I going to love his nuts? (That will make non-gay sense in a minute, promise.) Mom immediately left the room. "It's on every ten minutes!" I don't know about that, but after seeing this legend remix of the song, happening upon the source material live was like having Santa Claus just walk across your room when you so desperately want to believe.
This video was not so much "found" as "introduced"; thanks to Tristan for the tip. It got stuck in my head, too.
This had to be shared, if you haven't seen it already. It's one of the best commercial parodies/fitting song remixes I've ever seen. Slim pickings, admittedly, but this is high-quality; I've had this stuck in my head quite a bit.



Thought on the video:
-Stop having boring tuna. I would emphasize the tuna portion of that statement, but I suppose Vince would emphasize the latter.
-Auto-tune ain't all bad.
-I don't mind salad-making, really.
-This is an expert use of musical pauses and interesting effects. Use of the slapping noises in the videos to work with the the 80's-style rap beat was brilliant; emphasizing the lyrics by speeding up the video at parts and letting him go on "solos" (?) was a nice touch.
-The random black people at the middle are random, but I approve.
-Saying "you're gonna love my nuts" in any public scenario is always doomed to mockery and weird looks. (See the paragraph above.) Consequently, it is perfect for the internet. (see paragraph...actually, don't).
-The old lady at the end is awesome, period.

By the way, I don't encourage you to buy the Slap Chop. It looks like the kind of crap they sell on late-night infomercials, offering things like a bonus cheese grater to grab your attention.

Why people hate Nickelback

One day, I would like to have a chat with the the guy who reviews a Nickelback album, fills his review with the most comical, vitrolic hate...and gives the album a 4 out of 10.
"Really? A 4? That's not too bad."
"But you don't understand how indescribably...average...these guys are!"
"Uh huh."
"They're despicably mediocre."
"That doesn't sound so bad, really."
"I-It's not! Um...but they're everywhere!"

And so we reach the crux of the matter. Throughout my life, I can safetly say that I have listened to at least 20 hours of Nickelback. I can hear the band everywhere. I assume that the same can be said of many or most of my readers: they're one of the best-selling music acts of the last decade, one of the most-played groups on radio--in short, they are really well-known and expertly-promoted.

"Wow!" I can just hear some culture theorist in the future saying. "They must have really liked this group!" To which a better-informed culture theorist would say "Well...meh. The general consensus was, 'they have that one good song'..."
If you had never heard a Nickelback song before and just happened to hear one of their singles playing in a bar one day, you'd probably think it's okay, if you thought about it at all. Not that great, but average: sometimes worse, sometimes better. But we hear Nickelback on a pretty regular basis, and that's where it comes from.

It seems weird that a whole generation of people are either apathetic towards this band, or disproportionately hateful towards them. (I suppose there are fans on the opposite end, too: people who legitimately enjoy the band's music, and would defend its quality. There must be a great number of these people, if sales are any indication--but I have yet to meet one of them. I have seen places on the internet suggesting that an army of out-of-touch grandmothers are buying Nickelback albums for their 'hip' young grandchildren, but I'm certain that there are a number of people who like the music itself, too.) Aside from really, really solid promotion from their labels--and, if you want to get technical, the consolidation of radio stations into 5ish really big companies, allowing the same song to be played up and down the country--I attribute this to the fact that we expect more of the music we're exposed to. If a band is one of the most popular acts of the decade, and contains some of the most well-known songs in history, you'd expect them to be pretty good, too. It's a little subjective at this point, but the fact is that most people don't think Nickelback are that great. (I'll throw the Nickelback fans in my readership a bone here: sure, the band might sound pretty good. But you gotta understand: they just don't sound like one of the greatest bands in the world. And maybe they should be.)

And you'd expect a band that is played on radio constantly to be rather good. But it's understood surprisingly widely that they're not. You can see the same thing, on a smaller scale, with any other artist that happens to be really popular but makes music considered to be only above-average, if that. Like, I just searched "I hate miley cyrus" on Google, and it got just shy of 4.7 million hits. What did she ever do to you people?! Make average to above-average music? (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=I%20hate%20miley%20cyrus&meta=)

No. She made such music, and we were forced to listen to it everywhere we go. And given that the music (hers; Nickelback's; hell, even something more well-liked like The Beatles) will always be disliked by someone, the question will be begged: why are my ears being invaded over and over by this group/artist without my consent? And that is what causes the dissent. I went to a party in downtown Toronto last year featuring 3 bands, and the third band sucked; my friend and I left. This is the second time in the last year I've thought about the band since then--but if I heard the group as often as I hear Nickelback, you can bet your bottom dollar I would have thought more about them than that. When you hear a band over and over that you don't like (much), it will likely seem unnatural, and annoy you. And that's why every popular band on the planet has a list of detractors to match its fans.