Poetry for grown-ups, “Worry Wart” marries soul music with comic memories, before relentlessly veering into current events.
If you like playlists and similar tunes, Worry Wart’s genres are Philly Soul, Amapiano and Lo-Fi Hip Hop. Finally, some interesting genres!
A reaction to the dramatic female singers currently dominating the charts, at 72 BPM, the track features a calm male vocal and his peppy girlfriend. Who finishes his sentences.
A throwback to Ed Ames’s “Who Will Answer?” and Johnny Sea’s “Day for Decision,” the track fills a void in today’s pop music scene. Or maybe that’s aiming a little high.
Music maestro Mutte Fjutt in Uppsala, Sweden and punk rocker Clive Flatenbad—a k a rap duo realPfft— continue their odyssey through the world of AI-generated sights and sounds.
Mutte accessed the Suno music app at Microsoft Copilot, using the prompt: “Create a song about a broken tooth.” AI generated a complete track— music, lyrics and singing voice— even if the music was fuzzy, the vocal only 37 seconds long and the singer forgot some of the lyrics. Mutte deconstructed the music and re-recorded it, adding flourishes, solos and final mix.
Graphic artist Kuny used Bing Image Creator DALL-E for the artwork. Prompt: “Show a handsome man and woman kissing.” AI rules!
Since March 2018, Mutte and Clive have been grinding out their quirky version of hit music. They started their collaboration doing political satire and have branched out from there into rap, hip hop, rock, pop, R&B, soul, jazz, bebop, K-pop and whatever else tickles their funny bone. “Everything we do is comedy,” insists Clive.
Sweden is joining NATO (my old stomping ground), Donald Trump is up for re-election, there’s heartache in Ukraine and headache in Gaza. Extreme weather plagues the planet and mass extinction looms on the horizon. Rarely have we been more in need of a laugh. Love that funky music!
Kev
My Broken Tooth
It tasted blood on my tongue
When our lips collided, something came undone
A rush of pain, a moment’s hesitation
But I couldn’t resist the thrill of your sensation (ooh-yeah)
You left a piece of you in my broken tooth
A bittersweet reminder of our reckless youth
Every time I smile, I’m reminded of the past
But I wouldn’t change a thing, those memories last (yeah-yeah-yeah)
Taking his inspiration from Mason Williams’ April 1968 hit song “Classical Gas,” Mutte Fjutt in the Swedish rap duo realPfft has created his own symphonic pop instrumental. It’s a classic.
In 1967, the same Mason Williams created an art installation titled “Bus.” A life-size color photograph of a Greyhound bus in 1:1 scale, this unusually large poster mural measures 10 feet by 36 feet. It consists of 16 sheets of silkscreened billboard paper which three people taped together using double-sided Scotch tape. Williams said it took nine man-hours to tape together each copy. Produced in a numbered, limited edition of 200, each one sold in a specially designed and printed cardboard box.
In celebration of Williams’ concrete art, Kuny, who does realPfft’s cover art, designed, photographed and labeled his “Classic” box, as seen above. Dimensions: 4 inches in height by 5 ½ inches wide by 3 ½ inches deep. Signed prints are available.
When performer Clive Flatenbad in the Swedish rap duo realPfft is at his most unproductive, the musical maestro in Mutte Fjutt steps forward, creating bright and exciting instrumental compositions like this one that play repeatedly inside your head. Thank God for Mutte! “Moosehunting in England” is a joke title, consciously inappropriate since the moose in England died out 8,000 years ago.
A.I. rules! Musical maestro Mutte Fjutt in Uppsala, Sweden has composed his third A.I. hit in a row: First came “Turing Test?”, then “I skogens dunkla famn” and now “Tik Tok Girls.”
The A.I.-generated song lyrics were created by ChatGPT using the prompt “Write a song about Tik Tok Girls.” Having grown up with the Swedish equivalent of Top 40 radio, the boys are no strangers to cheesy lyrics.
The song voice and cadence in “Tik Tok Girls” came from the text-to-speech platform TTS Free.
The A.I. cover art of a glamorous young lady was created by Fotor from the prompt “Smartphone with a girl on the screen.”
The melody and musical arrangement are by Mutte & Clive in realPfft, of course. Hooray for humans, wherever we may be hiding.
Hell hath no fury like an elusive song title. The meta data at the music distributor did not recognize the words Tik Tok as part of the English language!
Mutte & Clive informed the distributor that “Tik Tok girls” is a description, like Swifties, YouTubers, soccer moms and boomer dads. Tik Tok describes a particular type of young lady— exuberant and extroverted, showing off her talent on social media.
There is no law which allows anyone to copyright a song title. When I searched for “Tik Tok Girls” on Spotify, I found three other artists who had already used this identical title: Brent Havard, Koron Don and Rana Naveed. iTunes even has tracks with the same title by Team Broken Heart and Dj Dozza. So that’s five other artists who have already released tracks using the title “Tik Tok Girls.”
Music loop aficionados, Mutte & Clive have several years’ experience sharing loops that other musicians have also purchased the right to use. Their feeling is: This is not a problem, the more, the merrier. Let listeners create playlists based on similarities in the material.
Unexpected news! The boys have a growing fan base in China and South Korea. “Tik Tok Girls” is their entry into the world of K-pop. Jinjeon! Progress!
Tik Tok Girls
In the realm where seconds dance and whirl
There’s a place called Tik Tok for every boy and girl
Yellow sunshine fills the sky. The fall weather is unseasonably warm. It’s early in November and 34 residents of Washington, DC stand on the Observation Tower of Dulles International Airport, waving goodbye to the last of the pandas. Dressed in panda-inspired knitted caps, their hearts are breaking as they press against one another and hold hands, already pining for their missing teddy bears. Frantically loyal, they seriously wonder what will become of the panda habitat so assiduously created at the National Zoo, now that its inhabitants are being repatriated to China.
They need not worry. Locating an Italian manufacturer of snowmaking equipment in the Tyrol and flying one of its machines across the ocean, within two weeks, the zoo proudly announces that it has been ranked as Number Four worldwide in Emperor Penguin habitat. The future looks icy bright! On the Endangered Species List, classified as Near Threatened, Emperor Penguins’ existence is being propped up by cryogenically archiving penguin DNA as well as having them breed in captivity.
As the first pair of Emperor Penguins arrives from the Antarctic, they are whisked from the airport to the zoo by Constitutional Van Lines LLC, who landed a government contract after proffering the lowest bid to Congress. All well and good, but unfortunately, not everyone gets the memo: A trio of 13-year-old carjackers from Anacostia waylay the red, white and blue Constitutional Van Lines truck and make off with its two avian passengers.
“Who has our penguins and when will we get them back?!” thunders the Style section of The Washington Post.
The penguincam at the National Zoo shows a forlorn image: A state-of-the-art orange snow gun on wheels is parked in the corner of an empty, snow-encrusted enclosure. With neither penguins nor pandas in attendance, only a nest of mice can be seen scurrying about, black squiggles on a white background.
Offering a $10,000 reward, Fiends of the Zoo manages to provide the authorities with the names and addresses of the perpetrators, who have surreptitiously stashed their captives in a refrigerated meat locker at a local grocery store. The boys feed the birds canned sardines and raw Maryland perch.
This trio of miscreants is promptly captured by the police and brought before a judge. Since they are being tried as minors, The Post withholds their names from publication, although this doesn’t stop Antoine, Reggie and Tupac from getting thoroughly doxed online.
Having defecated in every corner of the meat locker, the penguins— nicknamed Lunchcart and Boxcar— seem no worse off for their ordeal. They are transported forthwith to the zoo.
Nothing in the Nation’s Capital, however, goes in quite as straightforward a fashion as one might wish. Thoroughly fed up with the Biden administration’s support of Israel, in December of 2023, Palestinian college students from Gaza— in the U.S. on student visas— tunnel their way into the penguin enclosure and capture Boxcar. Lunchcart escapes getting taken hostage only because he is housed separately and under observation after being inoculated against bird flu.
All over the zoo, Palestinian protesters march in groups, chanting through megaphones “Ha! Ha! Hamas! From the border to the sea, Ha-Ha-Hamas is you and me!” The noise level is deafening. Young girls in traditional checkered black and white kaffiyeh look like the devilish progeny of Yasser Arafat. They hang posters on the wire cages that say “LET GAZA BE FREE AS A BIRD!”
Waving Palestinian flags, they scrawl graffiti on retaining walls. Many of them get arrested and threatened with deportation. Who has raised these radicals? They promise a whole new generation of discord in international politics.
Naturally, this hostage drama garners both headlines and worldwide indignation. It feels as if Berke Breathed’s penguin hero Opus has jumped off the pages of the comic strip Bloom County and is being chased in circles in real life.
“While America considers this to be a case of domestic terrorism,” announces the Secretary-General of the United Nations at a press conference, looking appropriately somber and serious, “the United Nations insists on providing assistance, lest this form of activism become a daily occurrence.”
A special session of the United Nations is called to order to confront the dilemma. The sun is shining on First Avenue in New York City, but it’s cold. “Terrorism is as terrorism does,” insists the American ambassador.
The government of Antarctica would protest the capture of its citizen if Antarctica had a government. Since Antarctica has no government, Israel offers to represent the fauna of the region, claiming preeminence in dealing with Palestinians. “You can count the number of anti-Hamas Gazans on the fingers of one hand,” the Israeli ambassador assures the General Assembly.
After a tumultuous debate that includes a walkout and boycott by the Gulf States, Russia is assigned the responsibility of rescuing the penguin, based on their expertise in back-channel, underhanded double-dealing. Normally, these traits would be frowned upon, but beggars can’t be choosers. “If the Palestinians misbehave, don’t look at us!” swears the Russian ambassador. “Talk to the Iranians. Hamas warriors are clients of Iran.”
Everyone agrees that choosing Russia as negotiator is not a perfect solution, but it’s an acceptable compromise under trying circumstances.
The Russians and the Palestinians meet at the Rosemont Day Spa in the Catskills. Taking the Palestinian negotiators prisoner, the Russians pump sleeping gas into their quarters and storm the building. Using brute force, they rescue Boxcar. Unfortunately, the penguin succumbs to injuries sustained during her liberation.
It is at this point that noted theologian Meyer Bahnhof enters the picture, claiming from Lagos, Portugal that penguins are “the Chosen Ones,” anointed by God. Banned on many social media platforms for his rabidly Zionist outbursts, Bahnhof goes on Reddit and prophesizes a telepathic link between the thought processes of penguins and Artificial Intelligence. When asked, A.I. confirms this hypothesis. “Behold, the Lion of Zion is a penguin!” rants the theologian. “Down with the Philistines. Delilah be damned! Yahweh rules.”
While the whole world seems to be screaming for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war, almost no one is insisting that Russia accept a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Slowly, methodically, Israel drives the Palestinians of Gaza deep into the Sinai Peninsula. For want of a better solution, the United Nations, the Gulf States, Egypt and the International Court in The Hague spearhead a humanitarian rescue operation which leaves two million Gazans as semi-permanent refugees in Egypt.
“Who needs Gaza?” ask the Israelis, taking a scorched-earth approach to Palestinian intransigence.
Global warming once again grabs the headlines. “We have plenty of water, but it’s in the wrong place,” declares the United Nations, alarmed over melting icecaps and rising sea levels. They decide to seriously curb emissions and combat global warming by the year 2055. As long as it doesn’t cost too much.
Since almost nothing is known about the mating habits of penguins, intensive study, scientific research and public scrutiny are applied to the problem. Eventually, Lunchcart and a newly-arrived female nicknamed Mayfly mate. They have a chick named Lotus Leopard, who grows up to become one of the leaders of the zoo’s Emperor Penguin colony.
Meanwhile, flummoxed by melting sea ice, Emperor Penguins in Antarctica face total extinction by the year 2100.
For the second time in a row, Sweden’s Mutte Fjutt in the rap band realPfft has used A.I. technology to produce an exemplary track. ChatGPT created the song lyrics. TTS Free, a text-to-speech program, gave us the voice and cadences of cozy Uncle Sven. Cover art by Fotor based on the prompt “A troll walks in the woods.” The trap melody and musical arrangement are, however, created by the boys themselves. Been there, done that, with great success. Swedes, they wanted to try out Artificial Intelligence in Swedish. Here’s an English translation of ChatGPT’s slightly cheesy Swedish song lyrics:
Da capo. Again. “Influence Peddling” is a tune which the Swedish rap band realPfft released in November, 2019. Hunter Biden’s never-ending soap opera breathes new life into this chestnut.
I have been keeping the Hunter Biden swamp at arm’s length. It’s a cocktail of egomania, self-centered greed, immaturity, careless foolishness, stupidity and lack of a moral compass.
Not good.
Hunter’s apologists explain that he was battling drug addiction, depression and alcoholism. Mental illness and mental anguish are terrible afflictions to behold, but neither constitutes a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Where were the adults in the room? Joe Biden limits his knowledge of the events to a claim that he asked his son Hunter if Hunter knew what he was doing and Hunter said yes, he did.
If you are going to be this irresponsible as a parent, you deserve to reap the consequences. America is not known as a stupid country, but there is a streak of mulish stupidity in the Bidens’ behavior that is miles wide.
The “d’oh” dumbness isn’t limited to the Bidens. Just look at the mess America’s 45th president has created for himself. These people need a dog collar and someone to pull on the leash whenever they venture too close to the nearest cliff. What is wrong with these people? Taylor Swift’s drama queen persona resembles Albert Einstein in comparison to this gluttony of ineptitude.
This is another good reason for the Democratic Party to retire Joe and Kamala after four years of White House service and choose a different pair of candidates for president and vice president in 2024.
The Writers Guild of America— 11,500 screenwriters— are on strike and I have a lot of time on my hands. Not that I am a commercial screenwriter. It’s summer and I have a lot of time on my hands.
Just this month, I applied to a talent agency to rep me. Their second Q was “What kind of work are you looking for?” Having low self-esteem, I don’t expect to get signed up straight-away by a major blockbuster. As many as half the new shows on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube and Apple tv get canceled after just one season. The metrics are brutal that way. Since everyone has to start somewhere, I have instructed the agency that I am looking for gainful employment on one or more of those series, the ones facing extinction.
In the meantime, I dog walk.
Fortunately, there are dozens of online courses, competitions and workshops for would-be screenwriters. There is a whole cottage industry of helpmates who, for a nominal fee, will explain why your writing sucks. You are using the wrong-colored notecards. Your pegboard is the wrong size. Stuff like that. I signed up with Three Media in Stockholm, Sweden, for the course “Screenwriting. It’s Complicated.” The first thing I have learned is that no one knows what makes a show great. Good writing, high production values, talented actors and meaningful direction all contribute to the possibility of major success. Yet, sometimes, in spite of the very best laid plans, a show still lacks “heart.” The writers never seem to find their voice. Everyone on set seems to be simply going through the motions. The “star” phones it in. The director never gets a grip on the material. Some of which may even be in French!
Je me souviens, I think back fondly to the desert location of a recent TV pilot titled “Roar of the Lion!” Hired to assist the caterers, I was thrilled to be part of a major film project, I can tell you, the smell of pancake make-up and Fresnel lenses baking in the sun. I offered to assist the writing staff in any way I possibly could. Editing. Rewrite. Even transcription. (Typing up notes from a brainstorming session.) Appreciative, they sent me into town to buy donuts.
The good news is, I really hit it off with the female lead, Anna Petrovska. What a darling lady! A ruddy redhead, her skin luminous, her bright red toenails shone like rubies against the backdrop of desert sand. A notorious insomniac, she stayed up all night, practicing lines. Bleary-eyed, I accompanied her on this emotional journey. The line “I love you, Robert” was delivered with the following motivation (I quote verbatim from the script):
Sweating in the sweltering heat of the Kalahari, Cecilia mentions this in passing, meanwhile gutting the carcass of the dead lion in prep to stuffing it.
An anti-poaching polemic, the film skates the razor-sharp edge of satirical discontent.
Lying in one another’s arms, Anna and I worked up a sweat, as well.
All of this was before the writers strike, of course.
At home in Maryland, I was surprised to get an email from L.A. It was the director, informing me that additional dialogue was needed during post-production. I mean, this is in the middle of the writers strike. The film cutter, the assistant director and the director found themselves sitting at the editing console, trying to figure out how best to rescue their baby from early oblivion. “We know you harbor the ambition to become a wordsmith on the soundstages of Hollywood,” wrote my erstwhile benefactor. “Here’s a warm-up exercise in the dramatic arts. Cecilia needs to write to Robert from Paris where she is held captive by the villain Sultan Rhubarb. What does she say to Robert? We know that his answer is yes, since we filmed the chase sequence that takes up the last third of the movie. But what does Cecilia actually say? Your thoughts on the matter are most welcome.”
It was super groovy of the director to get in touch with me! I greatly appreciate it. You’ll notice that, since screenwriters are on strike, he never asks me to write any actual dialogue.
Being a blabbermouth, I have a pupu platter of great ideas about what to put in Cecilia’s letter to Robert. As I see it, she is more than just a blood-and-guts taxidermist, up to her elbows in animal cadavers. The lass has a lion’s heart worth of emotion pent-up inside her artisan persona. “Oh, boykie!” she writes, adding a touch of South African flair to the cocktail. “When I think of the blackness of night during our sojourn in Darkest Africa,” she exclaims, using the classical, chauvinistic, colonial moniker for the continent, “my memory of the braying of the hyenas sustains me, confirming that ‘We’ll always have Botswana.’ Come rescue me & etc. Yours, CC.”
Coming to a streaming service near you. Release date TBA.
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