A New Music Video

[joreth]

Pennsylvania University has an A Capella group called Pennsylvania 6-5000 and, one year, the group did an homage to Tom Lehrer's Masochistic Tango, with some ... interesting ... lyrical additions. 

I have a copy on casette tape and, as casette tapes do, it is aging and is probably no longer even playable after its last performance as I converted it to mp3. But I wanted to save this album from extinction because of the quality of the group's harmonics and the very humorous content of their parodies. 

And, to share with people, I created a slideshow of images to go with the audio track ... there is some graphic content and definately some sexual innuendo, but it's probably OK for teenagers and up (except for maybe one full-frontal of an anatomically correct male paper doll), although I hesitate to call it "work safe".

  

*I got this cassette copy when I was in high school.  One of the members of this group (not the lead singer of this song) was in my choir when I was in high school, which is how I came by it. 

Comments

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Have you contacted the current members? They might have a copy that they'd rerelease. A lot of college a cappella groups sell as much of their back catalog as they possibly can, although Penn6-5000 seem to have only two albums available.

I'm more of a Brown Derbies fan myself, but Penn6-5000 are really good too.

[joreth]

I searched for 3 days for Penn-6 to try and get a descent copy of this song and didn't locate anything other than a college newspaper article about how much that year's band sucked on stage.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

OK. I've emailed their current business manager and current president to find out if they've got a better copy, and I've pointed them to your fan video (by YouTube, not LJ).

I think that, in the intro, they're quoting "She says, 'Cosette, I love you very much'" from "Castle on a Cloud" (Les Mis). So that would be:

[joreth]

Sorry, I don't hear "she says" in that at all. I hear "ooo do wah Rosette..." and that doesn't sound anything like "she says, 'Cosette..."

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure. I can find you an mp3 of that song if it'd help.

[joreth]

That line is only available in this specific version of this song. That line is not part of the original song so we can't go back to Tom Lehrer, and any similarity to any other existing piece of work (such as Les Miserables itself) is circumstantial without verification from the Penn-6 group confirming or denying. Otherwise, we will merely be debating our own subjective experience of the line.

I've seen youtube debates over song lyrics before (notably in First of May) and they're entirely pointless unless someone of authority can speak up. I hear what I hear and you hear what you hear. Only one of those members who sang the line or the guy who wrote the modified lyrics (or someone with an official Penn-6 album if it has the lyrics printed on the case) can say with any certainty what those lyrics are because I still do not hear the line you claim to hear and sending me an audio file of a totally unrelated song that *you* think this one is referencing does nothing to change what I hear in this song.

If someone who is in a position to actually *know* what that line is, I'll change it, but I may never hear it as such.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

OK, fair enough. All I'd be able to demonstrate is that the Les Mis line is sung with the same rhythm and melody -- not that Penn Six were singing that line.

[joreth]

That rhythm and melody is part of the original Tom Lehrer score, performed in the 50s, while Les Mis was written in 1980, so that might even imply that Les Mis took it from Tom Lehrer, not that Penn-6 took it from Les Mis :-)