NOVELTY SONGS

Since I am primarily working from home now, I recently went looking for something to break up the silence of the house. 

(I mean besides Sugar and Ginger's incessant barking at anything that moves outside the living room window.) 

I was excited to see there was a free version of Spotify, as I had always assumed it was a paid app. 

There was one outcome of checking out Spotify that should not have surprised me: I went down a music rabbit hole. 

When I was a kid - I have no recollection how it started - my musical genre of choice was not oldies, rock, country, gospel, or classical.

It was novelty songs.

Songs like Purple People Eater. The Monster Mash. Disco Duck. Ahab the Arab. The Witch Doctor.

Artists like Ray Stevens, Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones, Roger Miller, and Julie Brown. And later, absolutely anything by Weird Al Yankovic.

I guess I appreciated how these artists poked fun at a music industry that was too often incredibly self-serious. (As our culture entered the era of Boy George and Madonna.) 

And maybe also how they took their musical abilities, their lyrical talents, and their moments in the spotlight and used them to make people laugh rather than make themselves rich. (Although a few did both.)

There's something really admirable about that.