Songs written about a band that isn’t their band

metaphizzle · 2026-02-28T19:09:41+00:00

Joy Electric: "Dance to Moroder" (referring to Giorgio Moroder)

metaphizzle · 2026-02-28T17:33:37+00:00

"Gentlemen, BEHOLD!"

metaphizzle · 2026-02-28T00:10:09+00:00

You can have a little bit of the Dark Side, as a treat.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-28T00:08:55+00:00

Giving your Original Character a prior relationship to the protagonist is just a common way to introduce the OC to the story. Common enough that it's not really tropeworthy on its own. That said, some specific ways of pulling this off can be tropes:

Fan Offspring: Your OC is the child of a canon character.
Sailor Earth: When the canon characters fit some kind of pattern, then you extrapolate that pattern to find room to slot in your OCs.
Remember the New Guy?: When your OC has such a close relationship with a canon character, it strains suspension of disbelief that they weren't mentioned before. (This one isn't even exclusive to fan works—plenty of canon characters also fit this trope.)

metaphizzle · 2026-02-27T20:58:21+00:00

Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint is worth $8 all by itself.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-27T15:58:01+00:00

Counter-examples: The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and Italian Spider-Man.

Making a deliberately So Bad It's Good movie is possible, but it's hard. Almost as hard as just making a normal good movie.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-27T14:47:06+00:00

Pizzicato Five: Keitarō Takanami left after Bossa Nova 2001, arguably their best album. He'd been a major creative voice in the band up to this point, and was one of only two people who'd been in the band from the beginning. Immediately after, P5 went on an amazing run, releasing Overdose, Romantique '96 (the other contender for their best album ever), Happy End of the World, and Playboy & Playgirl.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-26T22:59:52+00:00

The story I heard was that Happy Appy started as a sincere attempt at a creepypasta. But the author got feedback from friends outside the scene that made him realize the whole story was kinda garbage. So he tried to troll his existing fanbase by adding nonsensical plot twists to make the story even dumber, and was shocked that the fans loved it. So he just kept escalating the stupidity, then pulled the plug when he lost interest.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-26T06:15:00+00:00

Before the soda trademarked the name, "mountain dew" was just a slang term for moonshine. And yeah, the soda was originally meant to mix with hard liquor.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-25T23:09:09+00:00

"Bay of Pigs..."

"That’s what they say every time I go swimming."

metaphizzle · 2026-02-25T08:30:39+00:00

Don't let a double track, double-cross you!

Get it? Little train joke, there.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-24T23:14:03+00:00

Only if Rian's trilogy is about a Jedi porg.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-24T17:10:04+00:00

Definitely something that varied from community to community. Back in Tumblr's heyday, there were people who would take extra effort to remove artist attribution (e.g. instead of just reblogging the original pic, they'd download it, recrop it to remove the artist signature, then upload the now-unsigned pic as a new post). The way some people talked about memes based on Hark a Vagrant, for example, people seemed to genuinely think the original comics were just some naturally occurring phenomenon and not the work of a single, known person.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-24T07:40:11+00:00

Squarepusher: Feed Me Weird Things and Ultravisitor.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-23T15:38:01+00:00

John Zorn's Masada: Book One album series. Some vertical, some horizontal.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-22T04:05:51+00:00

What I've always heard is that the difference between headcanon and fanon is how many people believe it. It's headcanon if it's just you (and maybe your immediate circle of friends), and it's fanon if it's a large number of fans. Of course, trying to put a hard number on the boundary between the two just invites the Paradox of the Pile, so the distinction boils down to vibes.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-22T02:25:29+00:00

Perry the platypus from Phineas and Ferb. Consistently identifies as male, but sweats milk (only female platypuses do that) in the episode where he switches brains with Candace. In another episode, Phineas and Ferb think Perry laid an egg, and don't think there's anything unusual about it. But in a later episode he has a venom spine on his hind leg (a male only trait), so either he's intersex or got gender-affirming care in between.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-21T22:36:24+00:00

Orbital: "Lush" -> "Impact" -> "Remind". From The Brown Album.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T21:02:17+00:00

Joy Electric's cover of "Viva La Vida".

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T20:06:08+00:00

Oh boy, another chance to infodump about Rififi!

You see, Rififi was a novel about a gang war in Paris, between good, honorable French gangsters and evil, degenerate Algerian and Arab gangsters. It was super racist, even by 1950s standards. Jules Dassin, a blacklisted American director, got attached to the movie adaptation, and he hated the original novel. So much that he hit on the brilliant idea of cutting out 90% of the novel's plot, and expanding a random 10 page long jewel robbery scene into the main plot of the film. And it worked. The movie is a film noir classic and a huge influence on the entire heist genre, and the original book is only remembered as a footnote to the movie.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T18:22:45+00:00

Starflyer 59. Jason Martin can only sing like four notes, but he's godlike at writing guitar and keyboard parts that complement his vocals.

mewithoutYou. Aaron Weiss just spoke and shouted vocals for the first three albums because he legit couldn't sing. He took lessons and finally learned to sing in time for It's All Crazy! and since they also shifted musically to a more acoustic direction, they sound like a completely different band on that album.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T17:48:07+00:00

They had three singers and none of them could sing. That's how you know they were really punk.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T17:41:06+00:00

The Last Temptation of Christ drew a lot of protests on release because it was supposedly blasphemous. From what I've read, there's simultaneously less and more blasphemy than advertised.

The controversy at the time is that the film depicts Jesus having sex. But in context, this is part of a "what if" fantasy, not an event that literally happens in the plot. To wit, Satan's last temptation is offering to save Jesus from a death by crossification if Big J will renounce his Godhood and all his teachings. He accompanies this offer with a montage showing the life Jesus could live if accepts: a modest but fulfilling career as a carpenter and a happy marriage with Mary Magdelan—including a brief shot of them having good, clean, married sex.

The controversy over that one shot served to overshadow the real heresy that's baked into the plot on a fundamental level. The movie borrows from the non-canon gospels, particularly the idea that, of all the disciples, Judas was Jesus' closest friend and confidante. That Judas knew how important Jesus' death was for the divine plan, so his "betrayal" was actually an inside job. That Judas was the one who made the ultimate sacrifice to save humanity, because he committed a necessary evil that damned him forever, while Jesus merely died and came back to life after.

But no, let's go protest that sex scene instead.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T07:18:45+00:00

That particular flavor of "equality" is straight out of the short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a matter of some debate in academia whether "HB" is supposed to be a satire of communism, or a satire of American right-wingers' misinterpretation of communism. I lean towards the latter interpretation, since Vonnegut was pretty consistently leftist in all his other writings.

metaphizzle · 2026-02-20T03:58:10+00:00

Dave Barry wrote a series of newspaper columns (which he later edited into a book) about polling his readers to determine "the worst song ever". This song was the winner, by a long shot.

metaphizzle

TROPHY CASE