Really Bad Music

This morning, Whitney got an email from Amazon with some suggestions from its famously dodgy recommendations mechanism. Among them, it said that customers who had bought Micro Machines V4 in the past also bought Crazy Frog Racer 2. This immediately raised several important questions:

1. Why did people who bought a decent game by Codemasters go on to buy that?


2. What justifies there being a game called Crazy Frog Racer 2?


3. Who bought the first one?


4. Who decided to make that, anyway?


5. Why did the whole Crazy Frog thing become a fad in the first place instead of the creators immediately being hunted down with cricket bats and their vital organs turned into wind chimes?

Of course, it had me thinking about the whole phenomenon - after someone stole the sound of a Scandinavian impersonating a two-stroke motorcycle off the Internet and marketed it as a particularly annoying ringtone, it spread into this and even had a single written. Well, I say "written" - it was just "Beverly Hills Cop" with some extra noises added. But that was easily enough for it to become popular among the morons that propagated the thing in the first place.

I vaguely remembered that last time I mentioned this topic, gr33bo (because he is frustratingly good at coming up with counterarguments for otherwise completely unsalvageable things) defended it, saying that perhaps we'd look back on it later as "top quality cheese" like Christmas hits of the past such as the Mr. Blobby song. So, with Youtube being as helpful as ever at preserving ghosts of the past that should have been long buried, I looked that up and was surprised to see that over the fifteen or so years that it has existed, time has made my opinion of the song remain firmly as that of one of the seven worst pieces of music ever written (although it's quite funny seeing the comparatively young Jeremy Clarkson put in a brief appearance at the beginning).

I would like to be proud of most British things now that I'm surrounded by Americans, but as a nation, I can't deny that it has genuinely appalling taste. (If you're outside Britain the ghastly pink and yellow apparition in that video will mean nothing to you, and even though Wikipedia can do a decent job explaining its existence, I'm not going to try and do that myself.)

I also have to wonder about the mechanical motif that they seemed to be going for in that video, particularly the Psycho-like chords near the end. It's as if it's signifying the gears of madness grinding upon your mortal soul and the song wearing away your very fibres of being. Etc etc. And that's a pretty accurate description, as ever since I watched that video the blasted thing has been stuck in my head and will not go away.