The Song Fight Bulletin Board

How a Bjam at Songfight came to be.

I can't exactly remember, and it was only about 4 months ago. Heh. It was either me reading Penny-Arcade(off-topic, am wearing a Twisp and Catsby shirt today and had three people at school comment on it ) thus being linked to MC Frontalot, thus being linked to SF, thus me going 'whoa' and joining. Or it was me finding somesongs, where I found Josh, where I found Songfight. First time I ever did a song(a horrible horrible one, as all firsts are) was by Josh's pushing, so you have him to blame for my crappy music here.

But I honestly can't remember where I first found about this place. Short term memory loss-woo!

The chain of events that triggered my discovery of songfight.

1. I am part of a group of fans of <a href="http://www.sifl-n-olly.com">The Sifl and Olly Show</a> on the <a href="http://www.yahoogroups.com">Yahoo Groups</a> website called the <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sockheads/">Sockheads.</a> One day, someone <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sockheads ... >posted</a> a link to <a href="http://www.frontalot.com">MC Frontalot's website</a>.

2. I checked out <a href="http://www.frontalot.com">MC Frontalot's website</a>, and I liked what I heard. The <a href="http://www.songfight.org/songpage.php?k ... man">Gonna Be Your Man</a> fight was going on at the time, and <a href="http://www.frontalot.com/gal/galA.html">Front's</a> entry is still my fave <a href="http://www.frontalot.com/gal/galF.html">MC Frontalot</a> <a href="http://www.songfight.org/music/gonna_be ... ">track</a> to this day.

3. I decided to do a nerdcore <a href="http://www.songfight.org/music/mumbojum ... ">track</a> the very next week for the <a href="http://www.songfight.org/songpage.php?k ... mbo">Mumbo Jumbo</a> fight. My entry won. It could be argued that I won because of a <a href="http://www.unfunny.org/strips/unfunny0073.jpg">Friend Flood</a> before I knew what one was. Even if I did ask people to only vote for me if they <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sockheads ... 339">Liked my entry the best.</a>

I have been part of the songfight community ever since!

ROCK!

Glenn (DR FUNK)

I was reading other Dumbrella stuff (like explodingdog and drew.corrupt.net and so on) and so I poked around on dumbrella.com. I saw Songfight. ABCD Puppies was in voting. NiL and pricklypears got me hooked. I failed to write anything for "Zero to Phantom" but I bought a crappy pawnshop guitar and learned how to play it well enough to record a few samples of me strumming a few basic chords which I looped (badly) for "I LOVE YOU," using a poem I'd already written a few years before as lyrics.

I still haven't won on a solo effort.

i wrote about how i found songfight but it got pruned. oh well. it shall remain privy only to the select few that read it the first time.

bzl wrote:the rest is history.

Holy crap, that's how I found this place too.

[/not the real Dread Pirate Roberts]

How I Found Song Fight


Okay, it all goes back to long long long when ago I was doing my student teaching. And there was this girl named Karen in my cohort. Karen often felt like the black sheep around the rest of the cohort because she didn't drink, and she was this big ole Christian (like she would go to China posing as a foreign exchange student, but she was really doing missionary work). So we would be all, "HEY LETS GO TO A BAR" and Karen would be all "awwwwman". So when Karen invites me to her brother's birthday party, I say yes, because Karen's cool and we don't get to hang out.

So. Karen's brother tells us all about this online game called Acrophobia where people compete by expanding a series of letters into phrases or sentences that relate to a certain theme. (Like LATT becomes "Los Angeles traffic: terrible!"). So after the party I went home and played it, for like hours and hours on end, I think possibly all night, because I can be quite obsessive sometimes.

I moved to New York and took my addiction with me, and realized (after having played the game for about 6 months) that certain players formed teams, and so I joined one. One night, playing a game, this one guy on my team changed his name so that it was AYBABTU. And I was all "What the heck does that mean?" And then he tells me "All your base are belong to us", to which I reply "I still have no idea what that means". He explains that it's a meme currently floating around the internet, and this was the first I had ever heard the word meme, so I'm still "I still don't understand you, and am starting to think I may never understand you again." My brain was just not getting the concept.

a long time ago, two guys playing an online game pretty much wrote:"So a meme is an idea? Why the hell do we need a new word for it?"

"Well, it's kind of like an idea, but it's really the way in which that idea spreads. How people hear it and then do other things with it. It's like how a genome carries genetic information, a meme carries information about ideas."

"Okay, my brain is exploding now."

And somewhere along the line, he was like "Go to memepool.com", either to try and help me understand AYBABTU or to understand what a meme is. And so I went there and obsessively went through every link they had archived. One of which was a something about a place called songfight.com.

i thought Glenn was old school, but he only beat me by a couple of weeks.

-heard about somesongs from brad's blog but didn't really care.
-a couple of months later heard about songfight from sex piano. watched unless i change my mind and bad attraction.
-i did a song for bad attraction but never sent it in.
-one of the sex piano guys wanted me to say a line for his need stilts. it seemed boring so I stuck a bunch of samples in around it figuring he would just take out what he needed (he didn't).
-i submitted that to songfight because i'm a weiner.
-about a minute later i realised i shouldn't have.

Er, I guess everybody's doing it.

I found songfight via Blind Mime, who's in the INTERNET SUPERGROUP Tapegerm with me. He did a buncha songs for it. I'd checked it out at some point when "Postcard" was up, that being the "downtime" between Narbotic and FMs. Wrote a few lines for that, but noticed the date was way late and also wasn't very inspired yet to record songs with vocals.
Later, decided I really did want to do songs with words. So when Mr Mime mentioned it again, I decided to check it out again. That was during "Unless I Change My Mind." Joined the forums, voted for my favorite, wrote lyrics for "Bad Attraction" and ran into soundcard latency problems so I didn't submit it. Wrote lyrics for "Need Stilts" but decided they were stupid. Recorded the next week's entry "Science et al" using samples. Entered my first fight. By the next fight "Space Cadet" I had a new soundcard with ASIO capability which killed my latency problem, entered with my own vocals (which got terrible reviews, of course!) and have been a member since.
-bill

I've got no idea how I found Songfight! And it only happened about 6 months ago.

That's the great thing about the short-term memory loss caused by longtime alcohol abuse. Everyday is a new adventure!

15-16 puzzle wrote:

j$ wrote:not trying to wrinkle the thread

Wow, I'd hate to see what actually trying would look like.

Well, it worked, didn't it?

I was perusing the archive and realized that I was among a small, select group of lucky individuals who could boast that they had lost to Starfinger's "More Than Soup". The list also includes:

Calfborg
Catknife Horsebomb
Eddiebangs
High Density
Jack Shite
Lightning Ear Fart
Pompeii
The Sober Irishman

Maybe we need t-shirts or something.

And to stay nominally on topic, I found out about songfight.org from collin/narbotic's other site where he wrote songs based on titles that people e-mailed him. I can't remember it's name (was it narbotic.com?) and I'm too lazy to try to figure it out...

perhaps the only fight i'd call "a well deserved loss".

narbotic.com, yes, which is also being squatted on. and is also the only listed point of contact for breakerbreaker.org, which is not being squatted on.

hey All,

I found out about songfight from a friend who had gone to Songfight Live: San San Francico. I think I put it off a long time before submitting my first fight, Indie Rock Bottom. There was at least a two week deadline, and I had time to write a song, sequence the back up tracks, and record it. I was suprised to win! I can't remember if I had tried and failed before then. Anyway, winning was a great way to get me to come back. I tried to stay anonymous for a long time, stayed off the boards etc., until that same friend and I went to see Young Zombies in Love, which included a number of high profile songfighters in the cast. I told my friend not to tell anyone who I was, but he quickly went up to DH of DT and introduced me as Ken from Ken's Super Duper Band 'n Stuff. So much for anonymity. I think the real turning point for me was when I decided to attend Songfight Live: Seattle. Meeting everyone in person made such a difference for me. The list of people there is amazing. Spud and fluffy picking me up at the airport... Eating waffles with Mad Dog and Hoblit... Arguing about everything with erik and frankie... CD shopping with the Suzies... Ah the memories... It wasn't long after that I hosted a show in my living room with the Suzies/Brody/sonofsupercar/and more. Spud was there, Roymond and King Arthur showed up. It was neat. That launched the whole Songfight Presents... empire. Meeting songfighters has since become one of my favorite activies.

Where was I... Oh yeah.

And that man, who first told me about songfight, was my good friend Hudi Brenman. A man who has never entered a single songfight yet knows the archive better than I ever will.

Thanks Hudi!

Be well,
Ken

brick pig
somesongs
songfight
addiction

blue
craigslist
songfight
brody
jack shite

roymond wrote:brick pig
somesongs
songfight
addiction

yeah, I miss brick pig.

Ken, hopefully I will see year after year

I think I have to blame Wigu for my being here.

Early 2004ish.
Penny-Arcade
MC Frontalot
Somesongs
Songfight

I also lurked for a bit in 2003ish but was all "Ooh, yeah, I could never do that" so never thought any more of it.

drew once mentioned songfight in one of his toothpastefordinner mailing list emails. i checked it out, fought, and now i am still here. sorry.

A super long time ago, I did a google search and this fight called Pieces of 8 was up.


Uhmm, I know Phunt is kind of new, but I've been listening since a friend told me about songfight in real life. How weird is it when Internet Memes do that? My suitemates Joey Q and Mogosagatai won two fights in a row with friend flooding before realizing that they should stop telling their friends about songs and that people would lose interest quickly enough to restore balance to the force. The first fight was Upcoming Downtime for those suitemates as Karl's Mom & the Delicate Flowers. We were heavily impressed by WreckdoM although a little embarrassed about it. We floated through the archives and loved the place.

Joey Q lives in Chicago now where he's studying and pursuing a career in Opera. Mogosagatai made entries under lots of names for a while and I listened occasionally. I made one really terrible entry (terrible to the point where I think it's bad), but I sent it in just to get over the stigma of not being a musician. I .. uh.. this might be obvious to anybody who is reading this far in the history thread, but I'm not a trained musician. Well anyway, I don't even know why, but I wanted to play with sound so my bad entry came out in Left/Right. I'm Poor History. I suggest not listening to it. Uhm, after that, I didn't submit again for a while because the song was tragically bad, but there was also something weird about it that I liked and it haunted me.

One day, I heard The Books. Weeks later I downloaded a lot of lectures by a certain professor who we will call the Phuntman. These lectures were amazing and I told Mogosagatai we should make songs out of them starting with Pasty White Man and he was up for it because we had talked a lot about what could be done with music but hadn't bothered executing. We have been executing for a few months now. Songfight is wonderful. Joey Q hates Phunt.

I know the names I'm dropping aren't famously connected to webcomics, but I thought this was interesting anyway because we heard about songfight but didn't do regular submissions until a noninternet meme hit us. The Books. This is already longer than almost everybody wants it to be, but I think I'll keep going because that's who I am.

Narbotic and Drew Tetz's effort in The Templates only lasted two songs... or did it?

Egg wrote:Joey Q hates Phunt.

Which is strange when you consider that the last thing he did was Tiggernaut. What a choir boy...

I found out about SF from the same guy who told Egg--a guy who's never submitted to songfight, and who's posted to the boards exactly twice (both times were reviews!). Joey and I wrote a "Between the Rain", heavily influenced by "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", but didn't finish it till about three weeks later, by which time we had already finished two other songs. And then summer came and I did a bunch of solo stuff under various "one-time" band names, and then fall came and Joey had gone to Chicago to be an opera singer.

Egg also moved away (to France) shortly after we formed Phunt. But as it turns out, we're good (or bad, if you will) at collaborating over the interweb.

I found Songfight through Marcus Kellis's Livejournal.

Now you know who to blame.