See our list of all previous winners.
“Ha-He” by Kenya’s Just a Band won the mixtape competition (MAKMENDE AMERUDI!), but with a paltry 5 votes. Granted, there was a 5-way race going on, but only 16 votes total. Not sure if I erred by posting mid-week, or if we just didn’t have any interest in world music.
So we’ll move this back to Sunday night and do what Anchor of Gold does best: Be weird.
Theoretically parts of Canada should be repping the letter N, but since democracy doesn’t work, we’re applying ranked choice voting and you’re getting “The four New states, and it’s 100% shitposting.” You’re welcome.
1.) New Hampshire: The Shaggs, “My Pal Foot Foot”
Oh. My. God.
So here’s the story: These three girls’ father was wildly superstitious, and got a palm reading from his mother. She made 3 predictions: He’d marry a strawberry blonde (check), he’d have two sons after she died (check, never mind that they had like 7 kids), and that his daughters would be a world famous band. Keep in mind that palm reading was obviously done *before* he got married, which means this lunatic had to have held onto said dream for at least 20 years.
To fulfill his mother’s canonical destiny, he pulled his daughters out of school, forbade them to listen to any music, and made them practice for hours a day.
And his reward was the musical equivalent of Rod Dowhower’s 1995 Vanderbilt offense.
I guess to be fair, his mother didn’t say why the band would be world famous. After all, Rod Dowhower’s offenses were world famous for ineptness too.
Anyway, it’s incredible how all 3 girls are playing completely different songs and somehow hit the same downbeat. Particularly since the drummer’s elastic time signature sounds like she invented the Continuously Variable Transmission.
Frank Zappa said they were “better than the Beatles,” but to be fair, I think Frank was kind of a weirdo. Wasn’t he? I mean, he named his kids Dweezil and Moon Unit? Hang on, there’s a knock on my door.
…I’ve been handed a note from the spokesman for the Amalgamated Association of Weirdos, Local 6 7/8 (who looked a lot like Pinman, come to think of it), that just says “You better believe it.” Well, there we go then.
2.) New Jersey: Reason to Live, “Funky Groove”
Oh boy, I hope I’m not the only one who’s familiar with “Stairway to Stardom.” It was a legendarily awful public access “talent” show in New York for years, run by a guy named Frank Masi.
Calling this “New Jersey” is a bit of a cheat, but if you watch the actual episode, the bass guy says their song is being played on WNJR, Newark radio. That’s good enough for me.
And honestly, what you see above pretty much sums up the entire show. Four guys in a basement, with a hole in the wall behind them, who cannot synchronize their dance moves to save their lives. The song itself is admittedly funky indeed, but you’re here for the dancing.
Actually, that’s a lie. These guys were easily the most talented performers to ever show up. Feel free to look up “Stairway on Stardom” on YouTube and lose an hour off your day, and several years off your life.
(Side note: It really is a shame that we’ve lost the absolute joy that was public access television. Do you think John Daker of Peoria, Illinois was ever going to sing “Amore” on TikTok? No. No, you do not.)
3.) New Mexico – The Fireballs, “Bottle of Wine”
Back in 1964 or so, Tom Paxton (an indie folk singer-songwriter, and boy there’s a description guaranteed to make me get up and go home) wrote “Bottle of Wine.” He intended it to be a melancholy, overwrought description of an alcoholic’s cravings and desperation. Then he gave it to Judy Collins to record, which didn’t help anything.
Then the Fireballs here looked at it and said “lol what if we turn it into a goodtime frat boys drinking song”? And so they did. And then it hit the Top 10 on the Billboard charts because, as always, it was the 1960s and people just did whatever. One of those retro Top 40 countdowns had Arthur Brown yelling I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE in between Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” and the Beatles singing “Hey Jude,” because of course it did.
4.) New York – Edward M. Favor, “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?”
Ignore that vinyl in the screenshot, this is an actual Edison wax cylinder recording from 1901! It’s why the announcer guy’s yelling the song title at the start — the cylinders had no way to put a label on them for identification.
In fact, pretty much *everyone* had to yell in the wax cylinder era — they all but screamed the songs into those long megaphone-looking cones that transmuted the sound into grooves on the cylinder. In fact, this was a year before Edison came up with the gold molding process. Before then, a popular singer just had to sing the same damn song hundreds (or even thousands) of times to cut enough cylinders to keep up with public demand.
But enough history, let’s talk about the lyrics. When it comes out that Mrs. Murphy accidentally left the overalls in the pot where she was washing earlier in the day, no one even gives a second thought to her using the same pot for laundry and cooking. It was the 1900s, sanitation was a polite suggestion and the plum pudding model explained the atom. They all just take it in stride and “what ho, cheerio and pip pip” or whatever slang people said in 1901.
You know who else recording this madness? BING CROSBY. No fooling.
Yeah guys, I’m thinking the four-part harmonies there don’t quite mesh with the material.
That’d be the same Bing Crosby who recorded “Christmas Dinner Country Style,” and THANK YOU again to whoever submitted that during the Christmas goofiness. Man, for a bona fide legend, old Bing recorded some … let’s call it really esoteric material.
5.) New York – Singing Sisters of Syracuse, “Shine on Harvest Moon”
A convent of nuns from upstate New York armed with a slightly off-key ragtime piano and kazoos. Shut it down, this is the greatest thing in history. Nothing I can type can possibly add to this.
Nunavut: The Jerry Cans, “Iqanajarumanngittunga”
I don’t really know what I was expecting to find from Nunavut, but it wasn’t legitimately enjoyable Inuit country rock. So there you go, consider this your reward for surviving this article.
The Shaggs, “Philosophy of the World”
Here, have another hypnotic Shaggs song. Scare the neighborhood children. Play it at your funeral.
Up Next
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
