It’s nice to see that the YouTube age has brought back the idea of comedy through song. In the early 70s you had the Smothers Brothers. The late 70s had Steve Martin. The 80s ushered in Spinal Tap and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic (both of whom continue to record today). But the 90s was a dry spell for comedy set to a tune.
Then sometime in the past decade, YouTube made it possible for funny songs to go viral, and we got an explosion of them — from the political satire of the Jib Jab songs to ‘Dick in a Box’ and a whole lot in between. Adam Sandberg has just about single-handedly carried the torch with ‘Box’ and such gems as ‘Lazy Sunday,’ ‘Natalie Raps’ and ‘Motherlover.’
I found myself with one extra song that I didn’t want to scrap, so Rufus Wainwright Week has been extended by a day. Lucky you! 🙂
Wainwright’s 5th, and most recent, studio album was Release the Stars, probably his weakest effort to date but still one of the best albums I’ve heard in the past few years. Unfortunately it’s been almost impossible to find YouTube clips from this album. I’ve previously highlighted ‘
It’s been five years since Eminem’s last album — the mediocre Encore — and I’m torn on whether his new one, Relapse, was worth the wait. 
Want Two contains a lot of ambitious and emotional music: album opener ‘Agnus Dei’ is a string-drenched, hyper-passionate Catholic hymn performed in Latin; closer ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ is a 9-minute epic alternating between a capella crooning and Mediterranean dance beats; ‘Little Sister’ is a baroque treat that, stripped of its vocals, would sound like it was written in the early 18th century.
