I’ve still got some terrible rips of those songs but it just ain’t the same. The bad news is that Songs of Season 2 never came out, and by this point I don’t have a whole lot of hope. You can finally get the old episodes on Amazon now. The good news is that Sifl & Olly did actually come back on YouTube in 2015, and that the show pretty much picked up where it left off. All of it quirky and a little nonsensical but it was pretty fun. Beck, Cibo Matto, hell even the Beastie Boys, who I’m pretty sure were a big influence on these folks – they were totally on the same wavelength. How can you not love this album? It reminds me of a specific point in time in the late 90s when there was this cultural movement of getting people together, doing stuff with no particular direction, and just putting it out. It’s not like these guys have a whole lotta range. I mean, a lot of these tunes make no sense without the context (and even still…), especially since you don’t know who’s doing a character. I can’t believe this was actually on national television.Įvery year or so I pull this out, a little further removed from that brief era where I actually used to see this on TV, and each time it makes a little less sense. So much that was obviously recorded in one take. The sheer number of songs that just throw random strings of rhymes together. Just listen to “Gravy for Baby”, the way they can barely make it through a single line without cracking up. I mean, even Lynch and Crocco would tell you that. I guess most of the clues are right there in the titles…”Rap Song”, “Country Boy”, “Fake Kiss Song”, “World Music”, “Beat Poets”, and so on. The other thing is that they’re all over the map musically from funk to grunge to laserdisco to country to hip-hop to vampire rock and back again, whatever they can get out of the limited tools they’ve got. Think perhaps of the early days of They Might be Giants, up to and including their debut album. A bunch of them come off like they’re just screwing with Casio presets. Matt Crocco (Sifl) and Liam Lynch (Olly) are talented but there’s nothing on here that sounds like it took more than an afternoon. Like the show itself, there’s a certain charm to how rudimentary it all is. And if you didn’t like a song, it was over in less than a minute anyway. Plus a lot of the tunes were super catchy so you didn’t really mind listening to them dozens of times. I got a lot of utility out of this disc, since the songs were short and could easily fit in between the cracks of a CD-R. In 2001, this album came out in a limited run. Eventually rips of the show’s music made the rounds on Napster but they were often very low quality, as though someone held up a tape recorder to their TV. There was no VHS and there would be no DVD (outside of a ‘lost’ 3rd season), as MTV took the rights and basically just sat on ’em. Luckily I had a few episodes on tape, because unless they aired it at 2 AM or whatever the show was just gone. Given the show’s budget I doubt they were losing money on it but the network was moving in a more reality-based direction that didn’t have room for shows that appealed to weird kids and stoners. Unsurprisingly, it was cancelled after two seasons. You would never see something like that on a major network today. It must’ve been the least focus-grouped show on the planet. It’s the sort of thing that couldn’t have come from anyone but those specific two people, and for that reason I felt a real kinship with it it was like something I could’ve made. It was all over the place, interviewing odd characters, airing fake infomercials, doing these goofy little songs…just whatever the guys with their hands in the socks thought was funny. I’d caught so many tail-ends of episodes that I almost didn’t believe it was a real show. Too old for Nickelodeon, too young for…whatever this was, but I still preferred to punch above my weight class, so to speak.īut there was one show I understood completely, a sock puppet variety show called Sifl and Olly. Daria, Celebrity Deathmatch, Tom Green, that one cartoon with the alien who lived inside the dude’s gigantic head, and so on. What I really liked was the oddball original programming they came up with. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t really into the music videos at the time even as a pre-teen dipshit, I knew when I was being pandered to. What’s that? Grandpa already told you that one? Huh? “What’s MTV?” Alright, let’s start over. Sit down, children, and I’ll tell you a tale of a time when MTV used to play music videos.
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