Awesome Music

The cult classic The Room is best known for its stilted dialogue and scenery-chewing performance of actor/writer/director Tommy Wiseau. It turns out that if you chop up some of his choice words and sing them in the style of Prince, it gets much better. Nick Lutsko put this hilarious clip together a while back for Super Deluxe.

The Journey track Don’t Stop Believin’ made its mark on the pop charts, as a baseball team anthem, and playing on the jukebox in the final moments of The Sopranos. Now, hear it like you’ve never heard it before. Musician Frank Tedesco switched it up and played the melody in a minor key, which always makes things darker and more dramatic.

DJ Cummerbund’s latest musical mashup pays tribute to three musical greats and a wrestling legend. The tune is a delicious bouillabaisse of sounds from Wham!, Amy Winehouse, ZZ Top, and Blink-182, resulting in the most upbeat song ever about a heavy subject. Bonus points to TonyZed68, the YouTube commenter who called her Amy Whamhouse.

There’s a subgenre of country music that’s all about beer, dirt, trucks, and women. There I Ruined It created what he says is “what bro-country sounds like to people who don’t like bro-country.” The track, Got a Beer in My Beer, features a dog that drives a pickup while wearing cutoff jeans. We hope he’s not drinking that beer while driving.

If you spent any time on the Web in the early 2000s, you surely encountered some of those over-the-top song covers performed by Crazy Frog. Musician Luca Stricagnoli classes up the joint with a fingerstyle acoustic guitar medley of the Frog’s Eurodance remakes of Axel F, Popcorn, and Blue.

The Daft Punk hit Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger owes its funktastic sound to Edwin Birdsong’s Cola Bottle Baby. Instead of using samples, Josh Plotner performed the groovy dance track on soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass saxophones. A robot was still involved – in the form of a drum machine.

While it’s not as well-made as something by a luthier, Bernth’s homebrew harp guitar has more strings than we’ve ever seen on a string instrument. He cobbled it together from several smaller instruments and tuned them all differently to perform his track I’ll Still Miss You. We’re impressed that he can remember how all of the notes are arranged.

Postmodern Jukebox dusted off The Romantics’ 1980 hit What I Like About You and sent it even further back in the time machine. Their fresh interpretation gives the pop hit a 1960s sound, straight out of Motown, and clearly inspired by The Way You Do the Things You Do. That’s singer Tia Simone belting out the soulful vocals.

Celebrate Star Wars Day with a little musical interlude, courtesy of MayTree. The Korean a cappella group performed their playful interpretation of the jazzy tune that Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes’ was playing when we first visited Chalmun’s Cantina in A New Hope.

Norteño music is known for its catchy and danceable sounds, and Houston-based EZ Band masterfully melds the genre with popular songs. In this video, they deliver a Mexican Rick-Roll with their fun and original cover of Rick Astley’s inescapable pop hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.

We’ve never heard of the song Bling Bang Bang Born, but it sounds pretty amazing played on this 27-note street organ. Like a player piano, this music-making machine reads notes from a roll of paper, but it plays them on pipes like a calliope. Yuki Kojima has filled his YouTube channel with covers, including Thunderstruck, The Entertainer, and the Nyan Cat theme.

Musician Otu Suurmunne of Moonic Productions took Dolly Parton’s trademark track, Jolene, and imagined what it might have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne and his mates from Black Sabbath had created it instead. While Dolly’s softly-sung original will always be a classic, Otu’s angry take seems more appropriate for a tale of jealousy and desperation.

Musician and actor Michael Des Barres has had a colorful career that includes co-writing the Animotion hit Obsession. As it turns out, in 2020, Des Barres joined Puddles Pity Party to perform a Bowie-esque version of the track we’re used to hearing as lanky models saunter down the runway. And yes, that’s actor David Dastmalchian hamming it up.

(PG-13: Language) They’ve got 99 problems, but a beach ain’t one. Thanks to the warped mind behind There I Ruined It, we no longer have to imagine what Jay-Z’s 99 Problems might have sounded like if The Beach Boys had sung it back in the 1960s. The irony of five white boys singing the track isn’t lost on us.

The United Kingdom produced some of the greatest punk rock bands of all time, from The Clash to The Sex Pistols to The Buzzcocks. BLOXSY put together this compilation of 12 potent electric guitar riffs from U.K. punk tracks, which will have you standing up and moshing at your desk.

The Black Keys dropped by the Helpful Honda Sound Space at KROQ and turned in a fantastic short concert for a lucky few in attendance. The 24-minute set includes classics like Howlin for You, Gold on the Ceiling, and Lonely Boy, as well as three tracks off their latest album, Beautiful People (Stay High), On the Game, and This Is Nowhere.

Get your day started right with this weird and wonderful mashup from remixer Bill McClintock. Combining Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell, Teena Marie’s disco-funk track Square Biz, and Iron Maiden’s Wrathchild makes absolutely zero sense, but as usual, Bill created a delicious musical melange from seemingly incompatible ingredients.

We’ve seen alot of unusual instruments, but this is the first time we’ve come across the Cornu de Pompeii. Evidence of this G-shaped horn were found in the ruins of Pompeii, and María Ruíz and Abraham Cupeiro built a replica of it so we could hear what it might have sounded like. Listen to more here.

To create the music video for his original song Farewell, musician Bernth dove beneath the water with his guitar and performed the track while holding his breath for more than two minutes. It’s a beautiful and emotive track, and the studio recording really was performed with his guitar partially submerged in water to give it a dream-like quality.

James Blunt’s track You’re Beautiful is about as soft as pop songs get. But thanks to Otu Suurmunne of Moonic Productions, the 2004 hit song just got way more intense. His growly impression of German lead singer Till Lindemann is spot-on. His Rammsteined versions of Baby One More Time and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! are similarly entertaining.

Lorde provides her take on Talking Heads’ cover of Al Green’s Take Me to the River. It’s chill and minimalist, but you can still chicken bop to it. The single is part of A24’s upcoming tribute album, which will feature covers of songs that Talking Heads played in their 1984 concert fil Stop Making Sense. The list of artists is on A24’s Instagram page.

Franzoli Electronics is back with another high-voltage cover of a classic song. This time, his musical Tesla coils performed a version of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. Take our strong advice and remember to always think twice before playing with this much electricity.

It’s been over 50 years since Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. To celebrate the occasion, drummer Nick Mason asked fans to create their own animated music videos for each song on the classic prog rock album. This playlist is gradually revealing all ten winners plus behind-the-scenes interviews with the artists.