Take-Offs and Put-Ons
Dustin Ballard's "There I Ruin'd It" Plunders Classic Rock
Listen to the interview with There I Ruin’d It’s Dustin Ballard:
Some parodies crossover into the realm of originality simply by depth of focus, or attitude. You get that sense from a lot of There I Ruin’d It, the mashup project by one adman, Dustin Ballard of Dallas, Texas. Careful, you can’t click on just one, and you’ll start hearing trap doors everywhere. These clips rule:
https://www.tiktok.com/@thereiruinedit
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
TR: What a hilarious, what a hilarious gig you have there.
DB: Well, thank you so much. Yeah, more of a side gig, but uh, something fun I do in the evenings for sure. Yeah.
My day job is as an advertising creative director. I've done that for a long time. And so I guess in that respect, I've kind of trained my brain to day in and day out, come up with funny ideas and in that context, get rejected and start over from scratch.
And, you know, so I've kind of like, you know, Maybe hone that skill. Um, but I'm also a musician on the side. I'm a primarily a fiddle player and a violinist. And so, during this all started during COVID, um, when our band wasn't playing and, uh, I just kind of out of musical boredom, I had posted this one video on YouTube, Or I had this thought of, you know, what if you took a music video, but you completely replaced all the audio and change the genre.
So I did all the vocal instruments myself, but I made sure to line it up to the video. So it gave this effect that um in that case that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga were singing shallow as a polka song And so I just put this kind of dumb thing out there on YouTube It kind of took off on reddit and on YouTube.
And so I thought okay, let's that's fine. Let me just do a second one. I got nothing else to do is and, it started out for the first maybe year. So it was a YouTube presence. It was long form, like full songs and like kind of a lot of video editing to kind of create that effect that this is this, you know, alternate universe we're living in.
Um, and then eventually it evolved into TikTok and Instagram is more shorter form little, you know, daily posts that are also kind of right. Right…
AI kind of makes me sad that we’re born with the voices we’re born with…
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
TR: And tell us about your numbers. What's the numbers game? You expanded, you went shorter, where do you, you know, where's your biggest following? What's the, what's the data that you've shared?
DB: It really, as far as just number of followers really took off when I got into TikTok. Um, I'm over 3 million followers there. These days, Instagram is just as hot. It's almost 2 million followers there. Altogether, I think it's 6 million followers across YouTube. Yeah. So, yeah, certainly way beyond what I ever would have thought.
Just tinkering around in my music room every evening, you know, right…
TR: And what's your, do you have a schedule? You just sort of do it when you feel like it through once a month. What's your what's your output?
DB: So when it was YouTube and it was more elaborate I would try to post every few weeks and then when I got into short form it jumped to like daily like every day or two.
I try to get some little quirky thing out there. Um, I, I can't keep up that schedule anymore just cause eventually I was like, okay, I got a job and a family and like, um, so these days I try to get a couple things out a week if I can, but it just, uh, you know, depends on the schedule.
TR: That's a lot twice a week. Tell us a little bit about your process.
DB: Yeah. So I, you know, it's a very in one sense, it's very themed in this idea of ruining music, but I also try to keep people on their toes in the way I quote unquote ruin songs.
And so it can be everything from, you know, AI these days, there's a lot of stuff to remixes, to mashups, to me doing all the instruments, to, to more just random stuff, like you mentioned, taking out a bunch of yes. And a bunch of songs and compiling them to something totally different. So I'm always trying to think of what new ways to freshen it up.
So it doesn't get boring for people….
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
also
there I ruined it official site
Wikipedia page
Johnny Cash's Taylor Swift Cover Predicts the Boring Future of AI Music, by Kate Knibbs, Wired Magazine
absolute elsewhere
John Buxton posts sturdy recommendations on how to start a classical collection. His recent entry on Schubert’s String Quintet (C major, D. 956) gave us this galloping Pavel Haas Quartet 2013 recording on Supraphon (violinists Veronika Jaruskova and Marek Zwiebel, violist Pavel Nikl, and cellist Peter Jarusek with cellist Danjulo Ishizaka) from the Czech Republic. The Guarneri Quartet’s 19xx with Leonard Rose (on Sony) still wins our vote, but that could work out as nostalgia bias.
Then something pulled me back into early Martha Argerich, this live 1966 concert, which features a magnificent Chopin Barcarolle, one of those pieces that can sound as different from pianist to pianist as it can from from night to night without losing its familiarity, and many stripes of bravado. We have catching up to do.
We can’t stop listening to this Polish pianist Ewa Poblocka’s Bach. Will she tour?
incoming
Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio, by Katherine Rye Jewell (University of North Carolina Press)
Oh yeah we went there