Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What If Your Favorite Song Didn’t Exist?
No, I’m not talking about the plot of that English movie about the Beatles, or the lack thereof. What if you found yourself singing a song from your youth, but no one else remembered it? One day you google to see if your recollection of the lyrics was correct. And the google has nothing. In fact, the panopticon of the internet has nothing on this song. But you’re convinced it existed.
It’s smart, honest, funny, and as this episode shows, will go above and beyond what any other podcast would do to answer a listener’s query. Minor language warning, but when one of the hosts drops the effenheimer, it’s hard not to agree.
Published in General
James,
I can tell by the way you use your walk that you are a woman’s man, with no time to talk.
I could feel at the time there was no way of knowing …
I typed the sample lyrics into Google and it popped right up:
So Much Better by Evan Olson.
I got doz crazy search skilz.
Write it and make all of the millions!….. Let me revise the question: What If Your Favorite Song That Was a Hit Single Didn’t Exist?
Then, yeah. Duh! Write the song and make all the millions!
I have this very problem.
I really love a song called “Snowballs” from the early to mid 80s. It was a B-side of a single of a Chicago or Peter Cetera song. (I think) My mom sold off my vinyl collection in garage sale, when she moved – so I can’t just dig it up and look. (the only record she thought to save for me was the single “Money for Nothing” by the Dire Straights, because at the time that song was banned by the CRTC, and she thought that someday that single might be a collector’s item)
Anyways the song “Sonwballs” is essentially a long drum solo with some synthesizer and guitar accompaniment. My memory is a bit fuzzy about it because I really havent heard it since about 1989, when I left my record collection at my mom’s when I moved (without a stereo anyhow)
“. . . a threee hour tour.”
If you haven’t read Time and Again, by Jack Finney, you might be interested. It starts out with some researchers meeting each year to relate the tales they have discovered of people having just these sorts of strange memories. A man who knows the Titanic sank nonetheless has distinct memories as a boy of going down to the docks and watching her arrive to great fanfare. He remembers it distinctly, though he knows it can’t be true. Several other cases like this.
It all leads to a huge project of trying to find a way to enter these other realities which are evidently existing alongside ours, with the occasional crossovers if the conditions are exactly right.
An adaptation of this book was made into a movie starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer called Somewhere in Time. Not a bad movie, but the book (and its sequel “Time after Time”) was much better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Again_(Finney_novel)
Thanks. I’ve heard of the book but never read it.
This subject seems to have fascinated a lot of authors. Even Rod Serling got in on the act with an hour-long Twilight Zone episode called The Parallel starring Steve Forrest.
An equally interesting part of this whole thing would be the question “What if your favorite song did exist and nobody recognized it?” Which is, ultimately, the bottom line of the podcast. At the risk of dredging up the whole progressive era of several generations ago, why (as the podcast does) trust “experts” (or computerized experts, for that matter) ? None of them did this inquiry one bit of good.
My husband always said the purpose of the Bernstein Bears was to make fathers seem incompetent.
It’s a cool ep. I wonder if the parallel world Forrest visited had a cartoon character named El Soretoe.
My version of the thing I know existed but cannot prove is El Soretoe, a cartoon character from the Warner Brothers catalogue. He was a stereotypical “Mexican” archetype – a bandolero with sombrero and sarape, jowly, sleepy, riding a burro. Just what you expect from the studio in 1948. He had a red glowing red Beeeg Toe, which would inevitably be struck in the course of the plot, causing great pain and comic lamentations.
I have been convinced for decades that I saw a cartoon with this character. I can find absolutely no proof whatsoever it existed.
One of my books about the British car industry refers to a long-forgotten industry executive named Nixon. One of the anecdotes concerning him was footnoted “This story cannot be accurate, because Nixon died in 1964”. For an American reader, it was kind of Twilight zone-startling footnote, somewhat similar to the film “Yesterday”. For a fraction of a second, you think–“Wait, did I dream up that whole Watergate thing?”
When he said they won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, he meant it.
Warners had about a six-year unofficial hiatus on Mexican-themed cartoons, because the studio’s new producer, Eddie Seltzer, didn’t care for a bullfighting cartoon featuring Daffy Duck that was done in 1947. The next ones don’t show up until 1953, when the studio debuted Speedy Gonzales, and Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese decided to make a bullfighting cartoon with Bugs, specifically because Seltzer told them bullfighing cartoons weren’t funny.
So no late 1940s toe-banging (as for the hated, cartoon, you can judge for yourself. I always thought it was pretty good…)
A three hour Aria.
Dude, it’s good … I like it … but your favorite?
That’s why I haven’t named a favorite tune. I don’t think I can.
Don’t even suggest such a thing. We don’t want to give the next John Cage any ideas for the 4’33” of the 21st century.
Even though we have Blue-Ray players at home, I buy DVDs because they’re cheaper, and most of the motels I stay in only have DVD players . . .
Update: However, if a movie is visually stunning (like Gravity), I’ll get the Blue-Ray . . .
“Orange is the new Black.” – Donald Trump.
I need some of the 500 proof Tequila. Kills viruses, too.
Until you end up stiff as a board and tossed into the corner with all the other gringos….