The Joke’s on You: Five albums that had fun at the listener’s expense
While I’m not the biggest fan of most art that attempts to bridge the gap between music and comedy, there’s no denying that some musical recordings are undoubtedly filled with humour. Some might result in a minor rib-tickling, and other examples might have you genuinely rolling around, unable to breathe at the genuine hilarity.
Normally, the lyrical content causes this kind of response, but in some situations, the music can either be so incompetent or bizarre that it prompts a smirk from the listener. There have been many times where I’ve found myself grinning at the dryly humorous lyrics of David Berman, whether it was ever his intention or not to make the listener laugh with his dark yet poetic observations on life, and at the same time, I’ve given myself a stitch listening to the genuinely batshit early albums of Ween, due to how puerile and erratic their records could be.
However, there are occasions when artists release an album that isn’t meant to make the listener laugh but is instead made to make themselves laugh at the expense of the listener. When your primary objective is to make people want to listen to your material, you might think the last thing you’d want to do is make an album that humiliates your entire fanbase by poking fun at their own gullibility, but sometimes the allure of pranking someone or a group of people on such an industrial scale is too much to reject.
While plenty of acts may have toed the line between novelty and sincerity on their releases, here are five examples of ludicrous album releases that were released as a joke, with the joke in question being firmly directed at the audience themselves.
Five albums that had fun at the listener’s expense
MGMT – ‘Oracular Spectacular’
There aren’t many bands who can claim to have come out of the gates in the 21st century with such an era-defining album on their first attempt, but MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular from 2007 is certainly an example of a record that was both unavoidable and captured the zeitgeist so perfectly. You could barely go a moment without being exposed to the album’s hits, ‘Kids’ and ‘Time to Pretend’, and the band were ultimately set up for the remainder of their career based on the success of their debut.
However, the band would follow that up with a far more impenetrable album in Congratulations in 2010, and the negative reception that it received from fans of the band’s early singles was due to the fact that they’d completely abandoned their pop sheen in favour of making exploratory psychedelic rock. Why exactly did they do this? Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser were simply two stoner dudes who made the debut as a joke in an attempt to lampoon the culture of the modern era, and it suddenly spiralled out of their control and became a far bigger album than they could’ve anticipated. Whether the joke is on the listener or the band themselves is up for debate, but so many suckers thought they’d get a repeat of their debut.
Bob Dylan – ‘Self Portrait’
Throughout the 1960s, there weren’t many other solo artists who had the same level of cultural impact as Bob Dylan. Having released a string of successful records that captured the frustrations of a nation, writing protest music that inspired people to rebel and simply having an unmatched talent for songwriting, nobody could stop talking about the Minnesota-born folk-rock legend. One person who wished that people would, however, was Dylan himself.
In order to get people to give him a moment’s peace, he decided in 1970 to release an album so unappealing that he’d be able to shut up both his fans and critics for a moment, and the resulting double album, Self Portrait, did so with aplomb. A messy, overproduced record that delves into traditional covers and gospel music, this was exactly the album that people had been dreading to hear Dylan release, as it had all the potential to derail his career. In actual fact, this was exactly what Dylan wanted, and as predicted, he managed to get people to shut the fuck up for a moment by releasing something that he’d poured so little emotion into.
Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington – ‘Thrillington’
You might be forgiven for not immediately recognising the name Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington. An obscure lounge artist who only released one unsuccessful studio album in the late 1970s, he made his name by releasing an instrumental album that consisted only of covers of Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 album Ram. The original was an album that had its fair share of critics at the time, who saw it as a softening of McCartney’s previously stellar songwriting abilities that he had showcased with the Beatles, and therefore not many people in 1977 were going to care much about hearing an unknown jazz musician’s reworking of it.
The ruse behind all of this is that Thrillington was, in fact, McCartney himself. Recorded shortly after Ram came out, he decided to shelve the release of the record due to his focus on releasing music with Wings, but when he released the record, he chose to do so under the ludicrous pseudonym and attempted to avoid any association with it at all in order to keep up the mystery. Of course, speculation of Thrillington’s true identity was rife, and eventually, McCartney chose to peel back the veil and reveal himself to have been the prankster behind the record in 1989.
Negativland – ‘Helter Stupid’
Some jokes aren’t exactly ‘haha funny’, and can actually take on a more sick and twisted tone. If you’re after a more satirically-minded and sinister gag, then look no further than the elaborate hoax that experimental sound collage act Negativland chose to pull off over the course of two years in the late 1980s. In 1988, a year after the release of the band’s album, Escape the Noise, Minnesota teenager David Brom would murder his family with an axe in a horrific attack that was motivated by his deep-seated discontent with their religious outlook on life.
Negativland saw a depraved opportunity to trick news outlets into thinking that a song from their latest album entitled ‘Christianity is Stupid’ was part of the motivation behind Brom’s actions, and several stations chose to create a moral panic about the fact that this rock group had indirectly caused such a dreadful crime. However, the reality was that the band wanted to use some of the samples of news broadcasts reacting to the ‘news’ in order to piece together their next satirical salvo, Helter Stupid. A social commentary on how the media blows things out of proportion, the record pokes fun at the outrage that was caused by such a small slice of misinformation spreading out of control, and while the true crime is nothing to be laughed at, the sense of hysteria that they managed to work up was indicative that their mission had worked.
Elvis Presley – ‘Having Fun With Elvis on Stage’
There are countless people who would probably have done anything to see Elvis Presley perform live while he was still around, and while he’s yet to make a comeback as a hologram, the next best thing would be to pick up a live recording of his, shut your eyes, and pretend you’re in the room witnessing The King in his prime. One word of advice: don’t go looking for the 1974 live album, Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, unless you’re looking to enter a world of bitter disappointment, because it’s far from a great representation of how electrifying his live performances could be.
There’s no music on this ‘live album’ for the entirety of its 37-minute runtime, and instead, the listener is treated to out-of-context stage banter and ramblings from the legendary rock and roll singer. Because of the fact that all of the patter is stripped of its contextual cues, it’s a virtually impossible listen unless you’re the sort of person who takes great pleasure in eavesdropping in public places. The album was the idea of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who saw it as an opportunity to make a quick buck for himself by circumventing releasing any recorded material that his label, RCA could claim the rights to, and because they legally owned any musical recording he made, he was left only with the option to release a spoken word album of stage banter and interview excerpts, tricking all of his fans in the process.
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