Our Mission is Clear: To Revive Funkadelic

If you were to take an ordinary human, remove the kidneys, take out the lungs, yank out the intestines, take away the sweat glands, and so forth, then replace all these mere organs with pure talent, you may be left with something not unlike my friend Jeff Palen.

Jeff is always watching you.

Jeff's current thing is making music, and, not surprisingly, he's pretty good. I've talked about his bands here before, but in case you didn't hear it the first time, don't miss the message this time: You need to be listening to House of Orange.

I was checking up on them earlier today and was pleased to discover that they've released a few new songs since the last time I visited their site, along with two music videos.

Art of the Animal

King of the One Hit Wonder

Their Web site, by the way, is a MySpace page, which would be why I haven't checked it in ages. Seriously, does anyone still use MySpace? I thought most people had come to their senses, or, short of that, switched over to some other dumb site that allows you to clutter some corner of the Internet with stolen images and banal comments, like Facebook. There aren't still active Xanga or Geocities sites, are there?

I know, I know, I write a blog. I'm even running a blog contest, and two weeks ago I covered my entire page with YouTube videos that played video game music. Maybe I have no place to talk, but in my defense, I use a legible font on a high-contrast background, I don't have any glittery gifs proclaiming which Care Bear I am, and even though Tom's isn't in my top 8, he's still allowed to read my page because this blog is not Friends Only.

Songsmith Update: Before you go any further, it's important to know what Microsoft Songsmith is.

Apparently there's a trend in which people are taking the vocal tracks from popular songs and feeding them to Microsoft Songsmith. The results are universally hilarious.

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
AC/DC - Thunderstruck
Billy Idol - White Wedding
Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train
The Cars - Just What I Needed

Perhaps even funnier, I've found some songs improve after receiving the Songsmith treatment.

Oasis - Wonderwall
Radiohead - Creep
The Police - Roxanne
Rush - Tom Sawyer
And, of course...
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up