It’s the holiday season, which means plenty of gatherings with mixed company. As usual, the only way to endure these will be alcohol and increasingly loud music, both of which provide excellent media for ruining said gatherings. While you can always spike the punch to ensure the party gradually devolves into a psychotropic nightmare, you could also play any of these subtly skewed pop songs, which kick just an element or two slightly out of place to make the listener gradually go insane. Here’s a great example of the form: Green Day’s “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams,” with the vocals a half-step off key. It sounds awful!
Blink-182’s emo-pop anthem “I Miss You” features vocals slowly increasing in pitch and music gradually decreasing. It sounds awful, and gets worse so over time, like a karaoke act gradually losing confidence but deciding to ratchet the conviction up to compensate.
Here’s Nickelback with every instrument subtly out of tune. It sounds less like an absolute disaster and more like a live Nickelback concert.
And here’s what happens if you take the precision-tuned music of “Beat It” and knock every instrument off tempo.
There is also a suite of “Pitch Shifter Madness” versions of songs, such as this one for Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Still, “madness” is putting it a little strongly. Creator Pluffnub gets the most mileage not out of madness but out of slight skews; all of these songs exist somewhere in the uncanny valley of musicianship, sounding professional but wrong. In an internet in which Bee Movie is now being made without bees, such subtle weirdness is welcome.
Except, oh, god:
Nothing is safe.