#417: the Bobs, "Art for Art's Sake" (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4HRbkTx8n4

"Art for Art's Sake", by the Bobs, is not the only a-cappella song that will appear in my favorite songs countdown -- if I'm not overlooking any, there'll be five all told, plus most of a sixth -- but it's the one where I think the fact that no one's playing any instruments is most remarkable. It's why I've linked a live performance by the quartet: I consider it well worth watching. Because it's a New Wave pop song: the first thing we hear is the bassline (sung by the guy with the glasses), and later the chorus is helped into immortality by the glossy synthesizer hook (or that's what Foreigner or Night Ranger or Loverboy would've made it, and you can hear it that way in your head with no effort, although in fact it's sung by the same guy). The guitar solos are sung by the guy with the mustache; they're rather hair-metaly, but brief, and decidedly more fun for their unusual format.

The standard vocal harmonies and counterpoint are excellent, too, forming complex but immediately attractive chords. They're energized Glee Club elaborations on melodies one could imagine being composed, for calmer tempos, by Thomas Dolby or Steely Dan. Sometimes echo is inserted, by singing the echo. The chorus in particular has an inspired rhythm I could imagine overtaking stadiums at key moments of sporting events, if the people watching were more likely to have full sober muscle control than they probably are: over four spacious measures, the notes slam in on the first, fifth, six-and-a-halfth, and eighth of 16 beats (usually with an interjection at the 15.5th beat as well). And as with most Bobs songs, the lyrics are affectionate light satire. They don't bite, but that's okay; they aren't supposed to.

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I suspect 5+ songs of a-capppella might be more than the average rock-fan's Favorite Song Countdown would include, but it's still not many -- especially since it's the one form of music I ever perform (and/or assist in performing) in public. So as a bonus, excellent songs that missed the countdown, I am tossing you a few extra links.

* One is to possibly my 8-year-old's favorite song in the world, a complex yet jolly Italian barbershop-quartet-style harmony arrangement whose lyrics I've only translated enough to know they're something about "smashed to pieces on a Monday". On the whole I feel less awkward singing this than I do some of the devotional choir lyrics at the Presbyterian church downtown: Greenwall's "Superpezzi".

* A second, one of the most common forms of modern a-cappella, is a pop song cover: Wibijazz'n singing the voices and instruments of Steely Dan's "Peg" in entirely non-ridiculous fashion.

* A third is a lovely original pop song that refuses to treat the sung instruments as a gimmick at all: Spiralmouth's "Even Though".

* Finally, a song that isn't properly a-cappella, but sings the guitars and bass while packing in all the preposterousness that Wibijazz'n and Spiralmouth avoid, plus having more than enough left over for itself: Van Canto's Manowar cover "Kings of Metal". If this countdown was "425 songs that give me the biggest, dumbest, happiest smiles", Van Canto would be near the top -- and y'know, I don't have any good explanation why my criteria are fancier than that.