Welcome to my weekly (hah, that’s not a promise I’ll keep) newsletter “Soundclowns are art”. Each week, I’ll be writing a little guiding note and review of a soundclown. Through this I hope to share with you an artform I rather enjoy. It’s going to be a weird journey. You’re going to hear a lot of stuff that might challenge what you perceive music to be. I can’t wait to share this all with you.
For those of you that are new a “Soundclown” is a song uploaded to soundcloud that features at least one component that is a “meme”. Some of them are just plain bad, some of them mash well known pop tracks, some of them take from weird corners of the internet to produce interesting results. We’ll be exploring the far corners, and trying to map the genre together. Won’t that be exciting.
As a note, I’ve explicitly decided to exclude tracks that were not uploaded to soundcloud, even if they would otherwise qualify as a soundclown. A good example of this is rainbow shitstorm which is a premier example of the shitcore genre. It was uploaded to bandcamp, and therefore does not qualify as a soundclown.
Without further ado, let’s move on to our first soundclown.
“im not sorry” by “CrotchOnFire” is a mashup of the “Quad City DJs” track “Space Jam” and the “Smash Mouth” track “All Star”. The reason that we’re starting here is that this track combines two commonly used tracks in the Soundclown genre. Space Jam is used with rampant abandon throughout the soundclown space, either the beat or the vocals, in hundreds if not thousands of mixes, and you should look at it as we go forward from here.
All Star is used in combination with it’s movie roots in shrek to combine to form several other soundclown memes. Excerpts from the movie can be found used in meme megamixes throughout the soundclown space.
As soundclown tracks go, this one is fairly well musically composed sounding neither atonal nor really phasing out of beat lock for it’s entire duration. While this may seem like a normal aesthetic choice, sounding good is absolutely not the goal in the soundclown space. Overall, this track is an excellent place to be introduced to soundclowns, familiar enough to the listener to not freak them out, while intriguing, leaving one to wonder where we could go from here.
Thanks, and I hope you’re excited to learn more about soundclowns!