Stories of Songfight History

Duncan, of Level Nivelo · Tue Dec 14, 2004 5:12 pm

15-16 puzzle wrote:I did the music for the Ulysses song "Adam and Steve".

Which was fantastic, by the way... I still listen to that one.

Hoblit · Post by **Hoblit** » Tue Dec 14, 2004 6:13 pm

I copied and pasted this from our dear old dumbrella boards when someone asked about songfight back in the day. <font size="1">big thanks to 15-16puzzle for helping me dig it up</font>

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Songfight.com

I'm not exactly and expert and apparently I arrived on the scene exactly one year after it started. However, the creator is a guy named Colin who lives in NYC and is in a band called Breaker Breaker. You can learn more about this fellow @ http://www.narbotic.com as narbotic was his handle. At that time there was only 1 title a week...and sometimes it was longer than two weeks. For a while it got really consistent with 1 title each week every week..then it slowed down...then it came to a halt. This is important because something happened.

At this point the community was going strong and had begun a life of it's own. We were involved in cover fights (side competitions involving cover songs or 'remakes') and other side fights called Meanwhile. Meanwhile was a temporary venue while songfight would experience it's hiatus. But like I said, it halted on Postcard. After a month and solid into another... all of us who were interested in keeping this thing going were buzzing around the boards trying to figure out what to do. If we went on ..who's toes would be stepping on? Finally, **** and ** (Fightmaster and Fightmaster JR.) decided to take the reigns and whip the horse onward. Songifight DOT org was born. Eventually we got narbotic's blessing because now songfight.com refreshes and points to songfight.org. While all of this was going on, Jeff Fal had opened up http://www.somesongs.com which is a place you can post your song whether songfight related or not and get a community of people voting and commenting on your song. Then JB had a great idea and started a web ring of all the artist who wanted to join...and that if I'm not mistaken was the birth or at least the birth time of songfight.net which is a NET of all songfight related sites.

Things got heavy once again and the format had to change due to the sites overwhelming growth. First Fightmasters added another title each week to have two fights. Now there are three. Through all of this we have made some good friends and a lot of us have met in different cities to perform and party together. Songfight Live is something that we look forward to. It's our little vacations and it makes this tight community even closer.

In conclusion, this site has come a long way. Starting out with maybe 3 or 4 guys competing on one title and jumping to 10 then to 15 and now there are a great number of entries each week with new and exciting titles to chose from. We would like to see it continue and we hope that it will help springboard success for those folks who put hard work and love into their entries each week. Let us see where this thing takes us.
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<font size="1">fights are currently back to two title format obviously</font>

drew · Post by **drew** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 8:13 am

If one of the mods can move my posts from the ZERO TO PHANTOM thread in here I can continue to post some crap in this thread, I quit the other one since it seemed like no one read it, but I missed seeing this thread.

Post by jb » Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:14 am

can't move posts from thread to thread, but i split yours off into "More Stories of Songfight History".

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 12:14 pm

Okay, somebody else has probably already noticed this and mentioned it, but I couldn't find a reference anywhere... according to my count, one of the "vintage" songfights of not long ago (ABCD/Zero to Phantom) was songfight #250.

It was also interesting to note that the "Shreds" fight (my first) was #87, so even though I sorta still feel like a "new guy" here, 2/3 of the fights have happened since I arrived a year and a half ago...

Somebody else's counts may vary slightly, but maybe that's why we got the recycled titles that week, to celebrate a milestone in Song Fight History!

Charles

jack · Post by **jack** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 6:49 pm

king_arthur wrote:
Somebody else's counts may vary slightly, but maybe that's why we got the recycled titles that week, to celebrate a milestone in Song Fight History!

Charles

wasn't that weekend it was due veteran's day weekend?

roymond · Post by **roymond** » Sun May 07, 2006 12:27 pm

So, I'm trying to find the old meanwhile pages, and this is what I get so far:
Oct 2002
Dec 2002
Jan 2003
Feb 2003

Does that about cover it? The Waybackmachine doesn't have anything else from the cybertoys or workshop3d domains. Were there other hosts involved?

jack · Post by **jack** » Sun May 07, 2006 10:31 pm

roymond wrote:So, I'm trying to find the old meanwhile pages, and this is what I get so far:

Dec 2002

go here and click the songfight and somesongs links to the left. it's like a time warp!

Ratt Poizon · Post by **Ratt Poizon** » Sun May 07, 2006 10:35 pm

HAHA!!! Ratt Poizons first fight was at electricderekland. that was fun. it was "the truth about aspartame" we posted it only because everyone was submitting crappy acoustic guitar/whiny singing songs, and winning (I guess that hasn't really changed that much). And if you didn't sound like that... people tore you a new one. so that's always fun. then the next 2 or 3 songs were all done by myself... I remember for each one I'd stay up drinking until 5:00 a.m. finishing it. but I didn't have a way to get it on the internet because I live in the woods, so I'd drive 40 miles and try to wake people up that had a fast connection to post it for me. the one got entered as band name "I have a lawnmower that will eat your soul" for some reason... and the other one was screwed up too... I think it was Pig Sticker. what ever happened to that minty handy guy anyway? he was cool 8)
ultimately this is the awesomest waste of time I can think of (even better than watching Walker: Texas Ranger).

Egg · Post by **Egg** » Wed May 24, 2006 6:00 am

Clarification concerning the inclusion of artist history in reviews:

There are definitely things I don't know about each fighter. It is presumptuous to include artist history in the reviews thread. It is also relatively useless to the artist. But some people said "good work" in response to the review that did have artist bios in it, so I figured I'd at least clarify what I thought was wrong.

Crates was actually pretty close in his guess about me. Phunt. Don't tell. is only one of the members of Phunt Your Friends though. It's Phunt minus one not Phunt plus some. But the review is pretty much spot on about the track which is sparse and sounds similar to the last song Phunt Your Friends submitted <unnecessary>.

However, he was wrong about some other things, so I'm going to pipe up and say some nice things that contradict him.

Fly Paper Orchestra has only one submission to songfight!, but it is the work of a long time presence. His name is Dan. He also has friends, apparently. And they are nice to listen to as well. I really enjoyed this track. I'm especially happy with the dying animal/horn sound. There are times when I wish the song wasn't so darned simple, but maybe that's what makes it fun to listen to.

Puce is correctly identified in the vocals of Popular Electronics, and I think he's playing too. Writing by Jpoint. edit: Plat has sung in PE efforts.

then in response to last week's histories
Carpetburn is Furry Pedro and his bud, and Furry Pedro has been submitting as Those Meddling Kids since Rockopalousaninjananophone Eternal-The Vishnu Cycle. It is unlikely that they were planning on breaking their 0-4 streak by wowing the crowd. They prefer resorting to acts of trickery, the foul knaves.

Cuddlebuddies is actually two people who have submitted to songfight before but under different collaborative efforts.

Cutie Pies. It's hard to believe it's been a year since Tanker Truck, but that's true. But this is another group composed of multiple songfighters who have been around even longer than that.

The two primary members of Phunt Your Friends have suffered far more than 27 crippling defeats, buddy.

Prophets of the Robot War is one I'm not sure about. I think they've been around songfight for a bit though. At least listening. Maybe friends of RattPoizon. I wouldn't just assume they're new because it's the only submission under that band name.

Ratt Poizon is not new. He's been here longer than a lot of us. He submitted for The Truth About Aspartame. See post directly above this one.

WreckdoM has been a primary, named artist in more than 73 submissions.

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed May 24, 2006 8:20 am

I wrote a song for "Galaxies Floating on a Dark Matter Stream" which had the line "Galaxies are floating on a dark matter stream". I never really did like that line in the song, so I didn't record it. I recently changed the line so that it says "Our family's a photograph that I've never seen". If you'd like to hear the song (now called "My Siamese Twin") you can hear it here:

http://www.15-16puzzle.com/songs/15-16p ... setwin.mp3

roymond · Post by **roymond** » Wed May 24, 2006 9:02 am

erik wrote:I wrote a song for "Galaxies Floating on a Dark Matter Stream" which had the line "Galaxies are floating on a dark matter stream". I never really did like that line in the song, so I didn't record it. I recently changed the line so that it says "Our family's a photograph that I've never seen".

Titles of songs needn't appear in the lyrics, of course. I dig your update to the song, in any case.

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Wed May 24, 2006 9:32 am

Hey Egg,

Have you ever been to the SF Wiki?

Egg · Post by **Egg** » Wed May 24, 2006 2:25 pm

Niveous wrote:Hey Egg,

Have you ever been to the SF Wiki?

Nope. But I see a link in Roymond's sig above your post. So here I go.

edit: hahaha, I like the entry for phunt. It almost made me laugh at loud in this room of anonymous students at computers. I might add something to it to note the fact that no musician or even 2 musicians are in every submission with the word phunt in the title.

sausage boy · Post by **sausage boy** » Wed May 31, 2006 10:01 pm

roymond wrote:
erik wrote:I wrote a song for "Galaxies Floating on a Dark Matter Stream" which had the line "Galaxies are floating on a dark matter stream". I never really did like that line in the song, so I didn't record it. I recently changed the line so that it says "Our family's a photograph that I've never seen".
Titles of songs needn't appear in the lyrics, of course. I dig your update to the song, in any case.

I remember Jonny Juice and the Good Time Boys Blue Signal got shat on from a great height for being a little too loose with the song title, which, frankly, i was fine with.

Also, at the start of my Angry All Over entry is a short sample of something that was left on my answering machine. I have never had music left on my answering machine, and I found it astonishing.

Drew Tetz · Post by **Drew Tetz** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 8:19 pm

This thread is so cool.

I first found out about Song Fight through the comic Indie Rock Pete. Crazy, right? I know a ton of people that were led to Song Fight through MC Frontalot, by way of Penny-Arcade, but I got to SF through Indie Rock Pete through Diesel Sweeties through Penny-Arcade... but I digress.

"Postcard" was the live fight when that happened. I remember that I downloaded 15-16 Puzzle's entry - this was back when the entrants were in alphabetical order, right? - and really liked it, and liked a lot of the other entries I downloaded. Eventually, I downloaded the whole fight, and went through and tagged every song with "Song Fight" for the album. I felt like I discovered some kind of amazing secret; it was my first experience with actual "indie" music, and I was blown away that songs I loved could be written by people without any professional production or record contract or anything.

This was, like, summer of eighth grade, give or take a couple months. Now I'm graduating high school.

Eventually, I started digging through the archives: first just listening to the fight winners, then finding artists I liked and getting all their tracks. I heard 15-16 Puzzle's "World of Screens", and it was just amazing. It was on repeat for, like, a whole month.

Around that point I stopped waiting for the site to update. I kept going through the archives, but it was sort of anticlimactic to start checking the site during the fight that went down, heh.

Then I found Meanwhile, started posting on the boards, made some really really crappy entries, and started hanging out on IRC and making a nuisance of myself. I'd like to apologize to Spud and everyone else that I annoyed during that time. Song Fight's been a very good community to me. I love you guys. I just realized I was dragging this way out, so, uh, I'll finish the nostalgia later...

Reist · Post by **Reist** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 4:21 pm

Okay, so I know that I read something about Josh Woodward being Big Mountain Fudge Cake, but I can't seem to find it ... don't even know if I should believe it ... Josh was awesome - I love his stuff. Even so, if it's true, I think that's almost a legendary tale of history ... anyone willing to fill me in?

Bjam · Post by **Bjam** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:43 pm

Josh dropped out of Songfighting a year or so ago, and he was known for 'guy and guitar' music that was well produced and he often won. He still does a lot of acoustic stuff on his own, but occasionally he does these 30 second 'rock' songs under the pseudonym 'Big Mountain Fudge Cake' for Songfight. I think it's partly due to him sticking it to the man, and the fact that everyone has to do some genre jumping sometimes. (I don't think his 'normal' fans would like BMFC as much as traditional Josh songs).

Pretty sure that's about it.

j$ · Post by j$ » Tue Jun 13, 2006 3:59 am

I sincerely hope that Mr Woodward is nothing to do with Big Mountain Fudge Cake as,imo, it would indicate a level of bitterness towards Songfight bordering on the psychotic.

Although if I had to make a choice, I would MUCH rather listen to BMFC than any of Josh Woodward's faux-emotive folk dribblings, so it's all good.

Reist · Post by **Reist** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 3:53 pm

j$ wrote:faux-emotive folk dribblings

I actually like his stuff quite a bit ... what does faux-emotive mean anyways?

Post by **Lunkhead** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 4:27 pm

I got the impression that some people found Josh's lyrics and vocal delivery to be cheesy and unconvincing, sounding sometimes too contrived or insincere. Personally, I was impressed with his musicianship and production, and was about 50/50 on his songs. He did seem to win a disproportionate number of times, though, even when his entry was clearly not the best of the fight. That tended to piss people off. Like when his joke song for "Violet Wants It Her Way" won, even though it wasn't funny or original or good. That sucked. My song was totally the best that time!

Reist · Post by **Reist** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 4:55 pm

I really like his "Waiting Takes Time" song