Skip to main content

Collapsed laughing: how the gap between music and comedy has disappeared

Comedy and music have always co-existed – but with artists from Dry Cleaning to Bo Burnham cleverly blurring the two, it’s hard to tell where the jokes begin and end

Some of my favourite music of this year was made by a comedian, and some of my favourite comedy by musicians. The comedian is Bo Burnham, whose Netflix standup special Inside was built around a series of songs satirising online life that were nuanced and sophisticated enough to completely transcend their comedy context. The accompanying album reached No 5 in the UK charts. The musicians are Dry Cleaning, a London post-punk outfit fronted by Florence Shaw, whose droll sprechgesang resembles left-field standup, her monologues filled with surrealism, sarcasm, offbeat observations and dialogue that brings to mind Victoria Wood or Alan Bennett. “I’m just sad about the collapse of heavy industry / I’ll be alright in a bit,” goes recent single Tony Speaks!.

These two examples are not outliers: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell comedy-music and music-music apart. Earlier this month, spoof pirate radio crew Kurupt FM – the team behind the BBC sitcom People Just Do Nothing – released their debut album, The Greatest Hits (Part 1). They may be steeped in UK garage nostalgia but these songs are more than just punchlines – and many were made with serious collaborators (D Double E, Sir Spyro, Mist, Chase and Status). Plus, Kurupt FM have a background in music rather than comedy: they did actually do pirate radio for real initially, and Hugo Chegwin, who plays the credulous Beats, has worked as a songwriter for Sam Smith and Tinie Tempah. The crew also have a successful club night. The trend continues with Bad Boy Chiller Crew, the social media jokers who recently began making bassline, and are now a serious proposition – in both the big-time and not particularly funny senses.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CTETX1
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more