Songkick

I was really thrilled when Coudal featured Battle of the Bands in their “Fresh Signals” feed a couple of weeks ago. I really love what they do over there, and always find amusing and engaging tidbits. It’s been a while since I indulged in a geeky literary-musical pairing, so I’m now directing you to the brilliant contest they ran, “Booking Bands.” (Oh, the cleverness kills me. And books and covers, &c.) In their own words:

“The idea is to mash up the name of a book with the name of a band. Here’s a few of our examples to get you started:

The Things They Might Be Giants Carried*
The Who Moved My Cheese*
The Old Man and The Sea and Cake*
Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory*
Catch 182*
Horton Hears a Hoobastank*
Of Mice and Men at Work*
Bare Naked Lunch Ladies*
The Agony and the XTC*”

Horton Hears a Hoobastank? Eet kills me. They ran a contest for these, which I wish I caught because I bet I could’ve come up with some pretty good ones. Here are some of my favorites:

The Sun Also RZA
Last Yo La Tengo in Paris
Chromeo & Juliet
Megadeth of a Salesmen

A problem we come across a lot with machine learning are band names that are also commonly used words, like Justice, Spoon, Pavement, et al. How do you train a robot to know that that’s a band and not just a normal word and vice versa? Anyway, I thought I’d give it a shot. Here are mine:

Interview with the Vampire Weekend
Super Furry Animals Farm (not very good, I admit)
Legends of the Fall (This doesn’t really count as a mash-up.)
Peter and the Wolf Parade
Beach House of Sand and Fog
About a Beastie Boy (Dude, what is it saying about me that I only know about most of these “books” because they were made into movies??!)
Fast Food National
The Sound and We are the Fury
Burial Child
To the Razorlight-house
Sonic Youth without Youth (I’m on a roll!!!)
Lady Chatterley’s Modern Lovers
Okkervil River Runs Through It
God of Small Faces
White Rabbits at Rest
The Optimist’s Sons & Daughters
Middlesex Pistols
The Twilight Sad of the Idols
The Love as Laughter Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land of Talk
Of Mice and Man Man

I have to pry myself away and get back to work! How good am I?!!!