h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One song can have many lives.

This one's a German communist song from the thirties. So you get the kind of Red Army-esque treatment (just listen for 15 seconds to get the idea, no need to endure the whole thing!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ihz0ryFRA

It's all brash and pompous. Yuck.

Fast forward the style to the 70s/80s, and you get the same song in a punk version. Much more rousing and enjoyable all round: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkicbh8UgUo
(Again, just watch a bit to get the idea, if you like.)

Now. The third one, I don't know WHAT to say about. I guess it's what you get if you put four old-school German communists in a room with instruments and dose them up with LSD. It's pure bat-shit mental. About 45 seconds in it gets best! Or worst...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656oLnW26Xk

Bloody hell. My head is ringing now.

Nobody actually likes jazz. They just pretend they do to seem sophisticated.

Freeform jazz doubly so.

Yep. I wouldn't throw all jazz out the window. Some of it is amazing. But some of it...well, what was that line from The Commitments? Something like "If you want to w, use that thing in you've got your hand, not your trumpet!"

That thing in you've got your hand?

Talking like Yoda I am.

Saxophones ...I just loathe saxophones...even if they play good party songs...

Here you can see and hear Mr Bertolt Brecht failing to apologise for his collaboration with that composer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkiqGxD4CZ8

oh my The Committments, I really have to watch that again. Love the Jazz haircut exchange.

Jazz - well, I like Dave Brubeck. But all that Cleo Laine stuff gets on my nerves.

I listened to the whole testimony he gave to that committee once. Parts of it are quite funny. He certainly had a sense of theatre, all right.

I haven't watched that film for years, but I'd really like to now. I hadn't even thought about it for years, until I posted that.

I watched it sometime last year with a German friend - we had to have the subtitles on for her because although her English is excellent, that is a dialect too far for her!
But it is just quite simply brilliant. (as is The Snapper which is a sort of follow-up). the book is even better