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alt title(s): Filk Dear Other Tropers, do you like this song? I hope it's good and famous, you can sing along Jus' rewrite the lyrics, keep the rhymes alive There's a certain art, and it's called writing A TV Tropes Filk Song A TV Tropes Filk Song!
See this song was written by the Beatle Paul You might see this done to anything at all If it's Meatloaf, folk songs, or a Broadway Hit Just rewrite the words, then you're set to have a TV Tropes Filk Song, A TV Tropes Filk Song!
TV Tropes filk song, filk song, filk song...
aside, "filk" is best described as the music of fandom, or at least, the music of the filk community. Songs about SF books or movies, fandom in-jokes, or even just related topics such as computer geeky references are all common sources for filk.
The term is believed to originate in the 1960s in an early SF fandom 'zine, where the editor didn't do enough copy editing, and typo'd "folk" music as "filk." The term stuck as a way to describe the peculiar style of musicianship, weird humor, and camaraderie of fandom musicians. (Some in the Society For Creative Anachronism claim it was actually their word first, and fandom got it from them; given the heavy overlap between SCAdians and fandom both then and now, it's probably a moot point.)
Filk has a couple of general styles: humorous, serious but positive, and depressing and angsty. The humor is often, but not always, parody (here defined broadly as "new lyrics," not only the ones referencing the originals — see Parody Satire Pastiche) — some filkers are specifically parodists, some do both parody and original, and many only do original work. Some even specialize in "refilking," parodying others' original filk songs.
Parody filk is sometimes seen on fanfic sites as an exclusively literary form — lyrics parodying a popular song, but not necessarily meant to be sung (and sometimes taking such liberties with the meter that it cannot be sung to the specified tune).
The angsty stuff is called "ose," as in, "it's ose, ose, and more-ose." Of course, like all things, especially fandom, there can be some overlap — there are terms such as "cheeri-ose," which is both cheery and depressing; "sucr-ose," sweet and sugary and depressing, and "verb-ose," long and drawn out...and depressing.
(Oh, and in case it isn't apparent already, a lot of filk songs have puns. Lots of puns.)
Most SF conventions nowadays have a room set aside for the filkers to sing in large bardic-style circles once the main panels end for the day — some even have concerts. Filk-specific conventions do exist, the biggest being the Ohio Valley Filk Fest, which includes the annual Pegasus Awards for best filk songs. Check it out for some examples of particularly well-regarded filk.
Unfortunately, defining filk more concretely than "the music of fandom, or at least, the music of the filk community" can be tricky; even in fandom circles, filk is sort of a Red Headed Stepchild that a lot of people don't like. That's probably because they've been exposed to one too many bad singers — filk has a performance aspect, and mangled music can put you off of the entire field. And Sturgeons Law still applies, after all — it's just that, unlike fanfiction, filk will often be sung aloud, which makes it harder to avoid the bad stuff when you're looking for the good.
So, there are a number of artists — Weird Al Yankovic and Jonathan Coulton are two examples — whose work is frequently sung in filk circles, but who don't consider themselves filkers. Other filkers, especially ones more on the "funny and pun-filled" side, prefer the term "dementia," derived from the Dr. Demento show, which has been playing comedy and novelty music since the '70s.
The examples will therefore be divided into "Filk," where the artist considers him- or herself a filker (or dementia artist; we're keeping it simple) and part of the community, "Found Filk," where the artist isn't a filker, but the music qualifies and has probably been sung in circles, and "Somewhere in Between," where it's not so clear.
See also Heavy Mithril, which almost by nature qualifies at least as "found filk", and Nerdcore.
Examples:
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Filk and Filk Artists of Note
- Leslie Fish, whose name has been described as "practically synonymous with filk." She has what might be the two most famous filk songs of all time:
- "Banned From Argo," an original song describing what happened when the the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise went on shore leave on the planet of Argo, and the swath of destruction they left in their wake. The piece became so popular that Leslie eventually became sick of it.
- Worse, to Leslie's loud but (mostly) good-natured complaint, "Banned from Argo" has been refilked so much, about everything from other Star Trek series to other TV shows to SCA storytelling to just random puns, that there's an entire songbook, "The Bastard Children of Argo."
- Bob Kanefsky took one of Leslie's Kipling tunes (see below) and wrote "They're Singing 'Banned From Argo'" about veteran filkers having come to hate the song. One verse states that Leslie Fish has plugged her ears because she doesn't want to listen to new filkers singing "Banned From Argo." And then Bob got Leslie to perform his song (well, it was her tune, after all).
- Hope Eyrie, written about the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon (though it took a number of years to finish), is sometimes considered the "anthem of filk."
- In addition to her original work, Leslie frequently sets Rudyard Kipling poetry to music; the resulting songs are called "Kipplefish."
- Heather Alexander, and her "heir" Alexander James Adams (long story). The most famous song is probably the archetypal song of battle, March of Cambreadth.
- Tom Smith, one of the most famous funny filkers. Songs include "307 Ale" and the Barenaked Ladies parody about Babylon 5 "Five Years".
- Frank Hayes has been in filk since the 1970s, and has written several classics of filk, including "Never Set the Cat on Fire" and "When I Was a Boy" (sung by Joe Bethancourt). But he's probably best known for forgetting his own lyrics, to the point that other filkers will, upon forgetting their lyrics, call out "Frank Hayes Disease!"
- The Funny Music Project, or FuMP, is a collective of funny filkers and dementia artists, including the aforementioned Tom Smith, Rob Balder, and The Great Luke Ski.
- Seanan McGuire, writer of the October Daye series, was a filker first, with several albums already and more coming. Example song: "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves". (Seanan's the blonde. For the others, see the next two lines.)
- Vixy and Tony, best known for the Firefly filk "Mal's Song". (They also work with Seanan a lot — see "Wicked Girls.")
- S.J. "Sooj" Tucker, "Skinny White Chick". Example song: "I'm So Sorry." (Frequently works with Vixy and Tony, and therefore Seanan; she's on the drums on "Wicked Girls.")
- The Bedlam Bards, primarily a Renaissance Faire duo until they got into Firefly fandom pretty heavily.
- Bob Kanefsky, master refilker, specializes in mashing up two of another filker's songs, setting the story of one song to the tune of another. And he does it very, very well.
- Mercedes Lackey sings and writes filk (or used to), often working with Leslie Fish and Heather Alexander. Recordings are available at The Firebird Arts And Music Catalog.
- Frequently, Fish or Alexander would, with Lackey's explicit encouragement, take the songs that appeared in the novels and set them to music.
- Eben Brooks has songs including "Hey There, Cthulhu" and "It's the End of the 'Verse as We Know It".
- Web Comics Narbonic and Skin Horse have attracted the attention of Ed Gedeon (author of Everyday Heroes), who posts almost daily parodies related to that day's strip. Others have started to follow Ed's lead; check the comments sections below the strips.
- Elf Quest has an entire filk album.
- Nerd Core, pretty much as a genre. For example, mc chris, professional nerdcore artist and voice actor best known for his work with Adult Swim, has Fett's Vette, a hip-hop ballad about everyone's favorite Star Wars Memetic Badass.
- Not sure if this counts, but... Crank Dat Druid Boy.
- The Ballad of the Noob, with acompanying Machinima, about a Level 1 noob in World Of Warcraft that takes on a Level 60 character.
- Oxhorn Brand Movies is another WOW Machinima maker that does a lot of original music and is soon to release an album of the songs.
- Terence Chua specializes in Cthulhu filk.
Found Filk
- As mentioned, pretty much everything by Weird Al Yankovic. Al has stated outright that he's doesn't consider himself a filker, but he certainly gets sung enough at filk circles...
- Ditto Jonathan Coulton, who enjoys that his music gets sung at filk conventions and circles, but doesn't really consider himself part of the community. (Filkers generally knew Coulton long before Portal.)
- Francis Scott Key set "The Star Spangled Banner" to pre-existing music — specifically, To Anacreon in Heaven, a mostly-humorous ballad to the Greek poet Anacreon, famous for...drinking hymns. Before that, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (also simply called "America") took the tune of the British anthem, "God Save The (King/Queen)".
- "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is a cleaned-up version of the irreverent Union marching song "John Brown's Body", which itself was based on a Protestant hymn. Worse still, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is well known enough that there are a large number of revisions of its lyrics as well, including ones by identified filkers.
- Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)" (possibly better known to younger tropers from the cover version by Shiny Toy Guns, used in a late 2009 car commercial) reworks David Bowie's "Space Oddity".
- Since the 1980s, Forbidden Broadway has been parodying current Broadway musicals by using their tunes against them.
- "The Modern Major-General's Song" from Gilbert And Sullivan's The Pirates Of Penzance is practically a filk waiting to happen. Everybody from Re Boot to Animaniacs to Tom Lehrer (see below) has rewritten that one.
- Even actual productions of Penzance tend to play around with the lyrics; see also "I've Got a Little List" from The Mikado.
- Electronic-postpunk-goth band ThouShaltNot arguably ventured into filk with their song "If I Only Were A Goth", a minor-key version of "If I Only Had A Brain" from The Wizard Of Oz with new, tongue-in-cheek lyrics.
- The album Touched By the Crimson King by Demons and Wizards.
- Demons & Wizards' singer's other band, Blind Guardian, has a lot of these. For example, the album Nightfall in Middle-Earth, which retells The Silmarillion.
- Their guitarist's other band, Iced Earth, has The Dark Saga, which tells the story of Spawn. Blind Guardian also has songs like The Bard's Song (The Hobbit) and some songs based on other sci-fi and fantasy novels.
- XTC has several songs about DC Comics characters. "You're Really Super, Supergirl", "Braniac's Daughter" and "Sergeant Rock (Is Going to Save Me)" are three.
- As mentioned, Heavy Mithril. Examples:
- The original, Led Zeppelin. At least four songs based off the works of JRR Tolkien, including "Ramble On" and parts of "Stairway to Heaven."
- Nightwish frequently references Dragonlance, The Lord Of The Rings and other works of fantasy.
- Nox Arcana's albums are full of these. One is about the Cthulhu Mythos, one about vampires, one about Edgar Allan Poe's works and so on.
- Iron Maiden: Many songs, including "Phantom Of The Opera", "Children of the Damned", "Quest For Fire", "Heaven Can Wait", "Brave New World", "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", "The Clansman" (about Braveheart) and "To Tame a Land" (about Dune).
- Even Metallica did "The Thing that Should Not Be" and "The Call of Ktulu" about HP Lovecraft. "One" is from the book/film Johnny Got His Gun, "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" is inspired by One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, and "Creeping Death" is the Exodus story from the point of view of the Angel of Death.
- Bolt Thrower. Death metal based on Warhammer 40000. Yes, really.
- Burzum, one of the most musically and criminally notorious Norwegian Black Metal bands, features lyrics based largely on LotR, generally viewing Morgoth in a sympathetic light. Despite being a church-burning neo-nazi murderer (for real), it's hard to take Varg Vikernes seriously when he writes a song called "The Crying Orc."
- Leonard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is a So Bad Its Good example of original filk (though it wasn't written by Nimoy himself; he just sang it — don't ask why).
- Most of the production of the now-defunct band S.P.O.C.K., if not all of it. Songs include Never Trust a Klingon, Neutral Zone, and Beam Me Up. In fact, it seems to have been the main point of the band.
- Many of the songs by the group The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets are about H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories.
- The Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination about Edgar Allan Poe's stories.
- Mastodon's most popular and arguably best album is based entirely upon Moby Dick.
- Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (Alice In Wonderland)
- There's a whole compilation album dedicated to Neil Gaiman's stories, called Where's Neil When You Need Him?
- Queen's "39" is a description of interstellar travel with time-dilation effects. (It helps to have an astrophysicist as your lead guitarist.)
- Queen has also done other found-filk songs, of which the best-known example is "Flash" (from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, for which they did the soundtrack). Similar to it, the album A Kind of Magic has songs they recorded for Highlander (such as "Who Wants To Live Forever", "Princes of the Universe" and "A Kind of Magic").
- Queen also got an elaborate reference in Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, a video game made by a fan. Both the title and the subtitle are songs by Queen, and one of the stages is "The Rhyan Sea", a reference to "Seven Seas of Rhye".
- Rapper Daniel Dumille recorded the album "Take Me To Your Leader" under the pseudonym "King Geedorah". It's an album about Godzilla's Arch Enemy.
- In his alternate persona of "Viktor Vaughn", he bases his "character" on Doctor Doom, and makes many other geek-culture references along the way.
- JibJab turns famous public-domain songs (and at least one that's still under copyright) into satirical songs about politics and pop culture.
- Australian University Revues, particularly at the University of Sydney. Recent examples include "Livin' la Vida Broker", from the Commerce Revue, and 'Sing Us A Song, We're The Taliban', from the Law Revue.
- A particularly good example is 500 Yards from the CSE Revue at the University of New South Wales.
- Similarly, the Capitol Steps have lampooned American politics for decades with their song parodies.
- PBS regular Mark Russell combines the political focus and immediacy of the Capitol Steps with the man-and-his-piano smartassery of Tom Lehrer, below-mentioned.
- The Perpetual Aquarium webcomic regularly includes not only filk songs related to various Neopets or pop culture themes, but whole filk musicals as well.
- It's beginning to look a lot like Dustbowl...
- Yugioh The Abridged Series has a few of these, including "Without Yugi", "Brooklyn Rage" and "I'm On A Blimp!" Take a wild guess as what each is a take on...
- Star One. Just...Star One. A progressive metal supergroup, assembled and fronted by Arjen Anthony Lucassen, existing solely as a tribute to filmed science fiction. Each song on their one studio album is about a different SF property, from Outland to Star Wars to Blakes Seven, plus a cover of Donovan's highly filk-circle-suitable comedy song "The Intergalactic Laxative."
- Cletus T. Judd, of I Love Nascar fame, is this.
- They Might Be Giants, "Godzilla".
- James Clerk Maxwell rewrote Robert Burns' "Comin' Through the Rye" with lyrics about physics and called it "Rigid Body Sings". He used to sing it, accompanying himself on the guitar. If it wasn't enough that he discovered that light was electromagnetic radiation entirely through the power of mathematics, it seems that he did this about 100 years before filk was invented.
- The early Cole Porter song "Bring Me Back My Butterfly" liberally borrows melodic elements from Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.
Somewhere in Between
- Tom Lehrer. It's likely that if Tom had gotten into fandom in the '60s, he'd have been a filker proper.
- Same goes for Allan Sherman.
- Voltaire has his Star Trek songs, including the entire album "Banned on Vulcan," as well as the song "Cantina" on Ookie Spooky. (Warning: This is a filthy song. You'll never see Star Wars the same way.) Voltaire's presence at events such as Dragon*Con put him in this category.
- Blue Oyster Cult did "Black Blade" about Elric of Melnibone. Hawkwind did an entire album about the White Haired Pretty Boy, The Chronicle of the Black Sword. This is a step above your average found filk because writer Michael Moorcock was directly involved with both bands, even occasionally performing with Hawkwind.
- And don't forget BOC's Godzilla, though that was probably more about the guitar solo...
- Plus, Hawkwind also did "Needle Gun," which about Moorcock's other notable character Jerry Cornelius (on "Chronicles FWIW"), as well as several songs based on the works of Roger Zelazny.
- Actor Robert Picardo has written a fair number of songs about Star Trek Voyager — which makes sense given that he was part of the main cast.
- Vampire: The Masquerade had an entire gothic/industrial album with a song for each of the thirteen vampire clans.
- Radio Free Cybertron has aired several of Túrin's Transformers Song Parodies.
- Guyz Nite wrote a song about Die Hard, that was even included in the fourth movie DVD.
- Touhou Project fandom has created an extensive catalog of work that, at least, seems to border on filk: take ZUN's original (instrumental) BGMs and boss themes and add lyrics about the games and the characters. Of course, these songs end up as the breeding ground for certain creative interpretations of said characters. One notable example (particularly when it comes to Alternate Character Interpretation) is IOSYS's interpretations of Alice Margatroid's various stage and boss themes, which explore her feelings for Marisa Kirisame.
- The HP Lovecraft Historical Society have done two albums of reworked Christmas carols. This includes such classics as "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Fishmen" and "Carol of the Old Ones".
- There's a World Of Warcraft Filk Song for pallies going around, sung to the tune of "I'm a little teapot."
I'm a little pally, short and stout, here is my mallet, here is my mount; when I get scared I scream and shout! I pull out my bubble and hearth right out.
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