yustyoking

 

“R U dead?” texts Mario, my bud from college who is now a huge macher in satellite radio in New York. The man can even score tickets to Hamilton, that’s how big he is!

No, I’m not dead, but after writing still another Great American Novel and facing the grim reality of self-publishing it as an e-book, it did occur to me that there might be something wrong with this picture.

I’m doing publicity for a Swedish band, instead.

If U want the full story, U will B required to click on 2 links. Two! Heavens 2 Betsy!!! Can’t I put it on Twitter and let you just scroll down to the GIF?

Nope.

Yes, I do PR releases that are 280 characters, but it occurred to me that my blog would give me an opportunity to tell my side of the story. Thank you, Roland Hedley!

 

******************* Not ABBA *******************

 

Note: This description of the band isn’t a totally factual account. Its main purpose is to entertain.  :-]

Of all the friends I made during my junior year abroad in Uppsala, Sweden, the most lasting has been Mutte Fjutt. (Not his real name.) With my beard, long hair and Che Guevara good looks, I got chosen to star in a student film. Mutte was the soundman.

We became BFF’s. One link is that we both suffer from clinical depression. It can leave us out of the mix for weeks at a time. Saddled with ADHD, we also tend to over-focus on projects— to the exclusion of things like eating, sleeping and answering the phone. I guess the main glue has been our artistic integrity. Mutte and I never promise what we don’t deliver. Where other people— finding themselves responsible for more than they bargained for— will palm off a fast and dirty, lick and a promise piece of cowpie, Mutte and I bust our balls to deliver top grade shit. We even keep deadlines!

In a world of b.s. artists, he’s a kindred spirit. You see why the dude is an inspiration to me.

As part of the electronic universe of music loops (google it), Mutte has created some nice instrumentals, trying his hand at disco, samba, ballads and Christmas songs. Upon creating the soundtrack to a rap song— it sounds like a benighted combo playing on the stage of a club in the town of Örebro— Mutte teamed up with a relic, the cantankerous 1980’s punk rock singer/songwriter Clive Flatenbad. They be the Svedish music duo realPfft.

Flatenbad is a Swedish name (Clive’s daddy), while “Clive” is British (his mamma). Like so many offspring of mixed marriages, Clive has battled his way through life with a major inferiority complex. This is also Very Swedish. Tro inte att du är nåt. “Don’t think you’re somebody special.” After generations of oppression by King and Church, followed by nanny socialist government, Swedes feel under-utilized and frustrated. They know there’s something missing, they just don’t know what.

Our little “across the pond” project never could have happened in the Old Days, but what with the Internet, Skype and the current administration, the boys have created a song entitled “Fake News,” contemplating the struggles of America’s 45^th president.

Sample lyric: “Fake News” U call it, / President Trump. / Y R U / A nervous grump?

Comic rap, it’s 2 minutes and 20 seconds of querulous satire, firing off an endless series of questions that Sarah Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t deign to spit at. But enough about us.

The song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NEJZNdT54w

The video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2StFLWAiit0

 

There’s no holding down Clive, which explains the wideo. Talk about low production values, I suspect he made it in a farmhouse on the island of Gotland. Sweden has youth centers in every town, Fritidsgårdar, that deliver a higher quality musical product than this! Still, Clive’s a funny old geezer. Compared to the likes of Rihanna and Jay-Z, we’re a herd of dinosaurs.

 

****************** PayPal Me! ******************

 

As a song, “Fake News” ain’t a bad piece of wax. I think it has great potential. Since I’m in America and they are not, I took it upon myself to… hand over the business end to a buddy from my Army days called KK. He looks like Tom Cruise and talks like Bill Murray, but his main claim to fame is being a self-employed handyman in Rockville, Maryland. Rockville! I hear the sweet sound of coin clanking into the cash register already. The dude may spend his days building bookshelves and cleaning attics, but he knows how to run a business.

KK googled the particulars of releasing your own music, and found TuneCore, an independent digital music distribution service founded in 2005, operating out of Brooklyn, New York. For the princely sum of $9.99, we were able to submit Mutte and Clive’s masterpiece for sale as an Mp3 file on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and about a dozen other sites worldwide. “Neat!” doesn’t begin to describe it. And since TuneCore pays the proceeds solely into American bank accounts based on American addresses, KK has opened a bank account for the band where, hopefully, we’ll all become millionaires when “Fake News” becomes the NBT, goes viral and saves the world!

U C what a crew of dreamers we R! If U never dream…

Over 30 years ago, Clive, bless his friggin’ heart, stopped fighting with people long enough to join STIM, the Swedish Composers and Songwriters’ International Music Bureau. So “Fake News” by realPfft is registered with Panther Songs, a music publisher in Stockholm.

It fell upon my lot to name the band. Since Fjutt is the Swedish for pfft, I announced the band name: “Pfft.” Only thing is, Mutte soon googled that and discovered an Asian boy who calls himself PFFT. And he’s fucking fantastic! How can we compete with him??? We can’t. He got there first.

Business manager KK ran into a similar blank wall when he tried to obtain the domain name pfft.com. It’s for sale for $12,000. Ha ha ha ha! Since Donald Trump’s Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump, KK solved the problem by applying for the domain names realpfft.com and realpfft.org. We got them.

I then went to Twitter and found the same imbroglio: Many clever individuals use “pfft” in conjunction with their Twitter accounts. Holding my breath, I applied for a Twitter account @realPfft. Shazam! We got that one, too.

The gods are smiling upon us.

At which point Mutte said over the phone, “Why don’t we just call ourselves ‘realPfft’?”

A band was born!

 

********************* Israeli Cover Art??? ******************

 

The. Cover. Art. I wrote a political polemic (a nice word for “hatchet job”) in early 2016 entitled “Grump’s America,” predicting the mess a Trump presidency would likely cause should the dear man ever be elected. As usual, my writing left a lot to be desired. The nicest thing about it was the political cartoon by Kuny on the cover, a picture of The Donald in boxing gloves glowering over his tiny, little wall.

Kuny is an Israeli artist, like, 90 years old, living in Netanya. I met him years back on a trip to Israel. We like each other. It’s a fun cartoon. When El Trumpo won the election, I deleted that e-book from Amazon mucho pronto! No longer an unpublished author, I think I sold one copy.

So when it was time to deliver cover art for the rap song “Fake News,” I knew to whom to turn. Kuny cut out letters, like in a ransom note, and arrayed them across the top: F-a-k-e-N-e-w-s. Then he pasted his cartoon under them. Then he drew a piss yellow casket with the words “by realPfft” on the side. It’s ugly, it’s a mess, it’s all wrong, but precisely right for this song.

We on our way!

 

********************* Press. Release. *****************

 

I sent press releases to the trades and The Washington Post gossip column. I also send out blasts on Twitter from the realPfft account. I tweet people like Stephen Colbert and Colin Jost. Lookin’ for an opening, a nibble, a tug on my single filament line.

Meanwhile, Mutte has created the “Mutte’s illegal mix” swing version of “Fake News.” Saxophone. Bongos. To be released on April 6, 2018. At 3 minutes and 9 seconds, it contains several extra verses. For example:

Like Xi in China, / President for life. / Try it in America?/ That don’t sound so nice.

Full disclosure: We ain’t gone viral yet.

Love, Kevin

PS:  PUT US ON FACEBOOK!  Add realPfft to your network! Help us get out there! Join realPfft Nation! (I just made that one up…)