When the Masters of your Craft are named "The Whiffenpoofs" you are truly doomed.

Posted by: Dr. Zaius on April 14, 2005 10:04 AM

Yes! Finally, someone else expresses my feelings on the matter. Whenever I attempt to express this, the people who like the cutesy-pootsey acapella stuff accuse me of being the anti-Christ.

Posted by: dariusk on April 14, 2005 11:04 AM

The stuff wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so... so... white. I don't know, is that even a meaningful distinction to make? Maybe it applies to all bad music.

But what really bugged me about it in college (despite my secret desire to be harmonizing with someone somehow) was the sameness of it all. Not just with other groups at other schools, but when they did a cover of a pop song, it had to sound just like the pop song. That's not creation, that's mimeography. No one should treat a cover like that.

That said, there's a madrigals group at Williams who did a distinctly Rennaissance version of "Head Like a Hole" that I think is kinda dope. It still has that disturbing we're-a-bunch-of-white-kids timbre, though.

Posted by: misuba on April 14, 2005 11:21 AM

I agree totally with Misuba. Which is why it's refreshing to find a college group like EP. Far from white and infused with soul and creativity. At Stanford, no less!

It's not that the Nintendo thing doesn't make me chuckle for a second, but it gets old quickly. Maybe the innovation stagnates because the singers move on after 4 years.

Posted by: WhatUpThen on April 15, 2005 01:04 AM

I remember back in my freshmen and sophomore years of college, I was a part of the "Honors Program" at my school. I hated it. The program itself wasn't so bad; it was the people. Probably half of them were either chorus geeks or their groupies. As Jane pointed out, they had this sort of "in-your-face" geekiness to them, like they were always trying to show off how insightful and intelligent and cultured they were.

My roommate during freshman year and his friends were members of one of the school's acapella groups (yes, there were several), and the music they sang just had this desperate "look at me!" attitude, as though their cover of a bad pop song would reveal them as the hip intellectuals they so longed to be. I absolutely couldn't stand it, and often hoped that my roommate would flunk out so I could have some peace. Then, sophomore year, I met a completely new group of the same type of people. I don't know if any of them were actually in chorus, but they had the same attitude. The conversations they had amongst themselves were little more than contests to show off that they had managed to get through the first chapter of an Intro to Philosophy textbook. I wouldn't even have minded that if it weren't for the hint of desperation that surrounded them. They always seemed to be afraid that people wouldn't notice the "intellectual" persona they had adopted.

(I'd comment on the Nintendo thing in particular, but I was only able to tolerate about 30 seconds of it, including the intro.)

Posted by: Avenging Dentist on April 15, 2005 04:27 PM

Be nice, I thought it was kind of cute. At least the Super Mario Brothers theme - didn't recognize the other ones. Why is it that when that guy played SMB on his guitar it was cool but it's geeky in a cappella?

And I think it's GOOD geekiness, by the hacker standard: they've achieved a high level of success in making something (human voice) perform a task for which it wasn't intended (reproduce lo-fi digital music). By that standard, this is at least as cool as those Lego PC case mods, or (dare I say) turning Xbox controllers to uses their designers hadn't intended.

Posted by: JamesJ on April 16, 2005 02:18 PM

All of the sudden, the Mario Medley from Memory piano guy looks downright badass.

That's two compound words in a row.

Posted by: babylonian007 on April 17, 2005 11:09 AM