More proof that people on the Internet have too much free time.
So, you just heard the latest stupid thing some celebrity said. It's astonishingly and hilariously stupid; in fact, every time you hear it, it gets funnier and funnier. Actually, after a while, it seems to have its own peculiar rhythm. All you need to do is loop it a few times, set it to a drumbeat, and add a couple of instruments... tada! It's a new song! Make a simple video for it, slap it on YouTube, and you're good to go!
Note that the statement does not have to be stupid. It could have odd diction, or idiosyncratic pronunciation, or something else that made it the grist in the mill of Memetic Mutation. Whatever it was, it's got a nice techno beat now. Recent Real Life examples may be Auto-Tuned to make it even more danceable. To make things even easier, there are now apps for Android and iOS that would automatically do that for you!
Compare Earworm, Voice Clip Song and Speedy Techno Remake. See Caramelldansen Vid and Red Zone Remix Vid for specific examples of this trope that have gotten out of hand.
Examples:
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The Beetis, with Wilford Brimley's Diabeetus commercials.
"I've fallen and I can't get up" has become such a pervasive meme, it was only natural that when YouTube came about, there'd be dozens of remixes about it.
Kaiba, meanwhile, has an practically an entire subgenre consisting of his use of Enemy Controller, and how easily it can be warped and put to music. To wit, here's an example of one.
The Japanese have the "Futae no Kiwami" meme, which consists of remixing lines from the various dubbed versions of a Calling Your Attacks scene from Rurouni Kenshin (the English dub being the most popular) into other songs. Mixes range from video game music to anime theme songs to... other remixable stupid statements.
Don't call this Sayonara, Zetsubou-Senseiremix normal! Normal is never meant in a good way! (I know, you were probably expecting me to put "This remix has left me in despair" but people write that so much I thought it'd be nice to do something different.)
The Kyubey Rap someone made out of sound clips from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. However, it's in Japanese, so unless you know the language you'll barely know what he's singing.
From 300: Sparta? This is YouTube! It was a fad at one point to take the raw techno beat and put stupid stuff on it. Just search for "Sparta remix" on YouTube, and prepare to cover your ears.
It's worth noting that not only do the remixes simply reuse the same techno beat, but many of them also follow the established "template" coined by the original. Hence why many of them center around other famous three(ish)-word phrases to mimic the treatment done to original "This is Sparta!" line. For example, the "THIS IS PATRICK!" one pulls it off perfectly.
Hot Rod has a scene where two characters start repeatedly yelling "cool beans!" at each other in various ridiculous ways, then suddenly a hip-hop beat starts backing it up. Yes, this happens in the film itself. Looks like they decided to be one step ahead of the internet.
A variation of this can be seen in this music video based on a couple of lines from Silence Of The Lambs. Note that while it is mostly footage from the movie, the quotes themselves only make up the chorus.
...Pretty much everything else Pogo has done, too. The reason the Alice mix is no longer on his own channel? He's been hired by Disney because his mixes are so awesome.
Rare in-media example: Planes, Trains and Automobiles used one of these as background music/credits music, consisting of Neil's "You're messing with the wrong guy!" and Del's "Del Griffith," "Hooo-ey," and "It's over, we can laugh about it now" set to a DJish remix completely with Record Needle Scratches.
Featured in the Christian Slater movie Pump Up The Volume, where students remix an interview between the anonymous pirate DJ "Happy Harry Hard-On" and Mr Deaver, guidance councillor. David Deaver speaking ♫.
After seeing this remix of the Iron Man 2 trailer, Jon Favreu, the director of the movie, liked it enough to contact the creator and have him do a 45-second version as an official TV spot.
The theme song from Mortal Kombat could be seen as an official example, since practically every vocal (except the Title Scream) is taken from the announcer of the first game. It's still awesome, though.
If you want to try and turn (your resignation from politics) into some kind of anti-war protest, expect to hear your little "Mountain of conflict" soundbite everywhere, from ringtones to a dance-mix on YouTube.
Another official example would be "Brain Dance" by Martini Ranch, which extensively samples dialogue from Brain Dead and is the end credits song for the movie itself.
An official one was made to promote Full Metal Jacket. It reached #2 in the UK charts.
Batman does one in-universe at the Penguin's mayoral campaign rally in Batman Returns, complete with D.J. Scratch.
In one episode of The Secret Show, aliens spying on UZZ HQ constructed a 'music' video made of the UZZ leader announcing his name (which, as you know, is changed daily for security reasons.)
Two weeks later, he made the same statement, then reiterated his statement in rhythm, to make the Reverse Psychology even more obvious.
RNC chairman Michael Steele accepted when Stephen challenged him to a rap battle, but he never showed up. So Stephen just had to do it for him.
Flight of the Conchords actually has at least one in series example: when someone at a night club comments on the lack of women with "There's too many dicks on the dance floor", we're treated to a techno Group Song composed mostly of repeating said line.
Parodied on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, in the "WeepingWillow17 episode, itself a parody of Lonely Girl 15. When Megan Wheeler posts a plea to the (apparent) kidnappers of the titular Willow, their response inexplicably starts off with a dance mix. Along with the general Shown Their Work in that episode, the writers probably just wanted to squeeze one more in.
Also parodied in Fun with Dick and Jane. After our hero fights Lawrence Dobson to get to a job interview, both men find a line of dozens. Just before they go out for a drink, one of the executives calls Dick into his office. No, not to give him a job, but to call other execs in and show everyone the SSDM based on Dick's statements after his boss crashed the company he used to work for and left him holding the bag.
Parodied in [2] with "Mosbius Designs Has Failed."
"God Warrior" by Combichrist takes clips from the infamous episode of "Trading Spouses" regarding the ending freak out by the so called God Warrior. The music however is much darker and more aggressive then most techno or EBM (which is understandable considering that it's aggrotech) and focuses on the horrible idiocy and offensiveness of this woman.
Fictional Example. In one of the televised versions of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels; Wexford discovers a body at a music festival and has to make an announcement to the crowd asking them to stay until interviewed by the police. The headline act later remixes Wexford's announcement into a dance mix and posts it to him as a ghoulish practical joke.
A very old example is the stalker's video from Penn & Teller Get Killed. Penn is very amused with it.
Jimmy Fallon does a sketch called "Remix the Clips," where he shows a few funny or outrageous YouTube clips and then has Questlove create a Stupid Statement Dance Mix from them on the spot.
In an extremely rare live example, Stephen Fry, the host of Quite Interesting, or QI, a panel quiz show, flubs the line "They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is ...". The other guests proceed to rib him mercilessly for the next 3-4 minutes, even coming up with a Stupid Statement Dance Mix within 30 seconds of Stephen's flubbing the line.
And when, discussing a formula for the number of times you can fold a sheet of paper, he explained in all seriousness that "what you need is length and thickness," the entire panel warned him that this would be a dance mix tomorrow.
The Ur Example is the composition "It's Gonna Rain" by Steve Reich, where he took part of a speech from an over-the-top street preacher and looped it...in 1965. Many of the early pioneers in the techno/trance/house genre cite Steve Reich and specifically this piece as an inspiration.
Another early example was Scott Johnson's "John Somebody" which came out in the late 70's. It sampled random bits of phone conversations with friends and recordings of laughter and played guitar riffs to accompany them. Though his work wasn't necessarily to mock them, but to bring attention to the musical quality of the human voice.
An early example comes from lead singer David Byrne and frequent producer/collaborator Brian Eno: The 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is made up of songs based around samples from interviews, field recordings, or TV broadcasts. The samples weren't as 'chopped and screwed' as many of these other examples, and the focus was on sampling-as-an-instrument instead of making fun of celebrities, but the essentials are there: voice samples, played around with and used as if a vocal track, and set to a backing beat.
Also in 1984, Time Zone (Johnny Rotten and Afrika Bambaataa) first recorded their classic rap World Destruction, then made it into a dance mix version featuring, among other things, a sample of then-Presidential candidate Walter Mondale saying "Mr. Reagan has a thing about arms control."
Also running for President in 1984 was Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose iconic address to the Democratic Convention and one of his "Free South Africa" speeches were sampled by Stetsasonic for 1987's A.F.R.I.C.A.
Arguable proto-example: Ice Cube wrote a song called "The Predator" in 1992, whose refrain looped Arnold Schwarzenegger's catchphrase "I'll be back," from the film Terminator.
Prince had a #1 hit single in 1989 with "Batdance". The song is literally two Stupid Statement Dance Mixes mashed together: a maniacal dance beat for Batman and the Joker, with a slinky funk number for Vicki Vale. Each section also got their own 12" remix.
Similarly, Madonna's "Now I'm Following You" remix, based on a cover of a 1930s tune heard in Dick Tracy. Madonna even "interacts" with the movie's characters, causing an overlap with another trope.
One of the earliest clear examples (predating YouTube by a good ten years) has to be It's a Skull (AKA Valhalla, in the style of... a crap dance mix), which featured vocals made entirely from voice samples taken from Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity, an adventure game for the Amiga, created as an entry to Amiga Power's regular "In the style of..." competition, and later published on the coverdisk a few issues later.
Madonna "What the fuck do you think you're doing" techno remix
Mylo's Destroy Rock & Roll. Naming a list of "evil" bands one after another has got a good beat to it.
In a very different example we have Tim Lambesis of As I Lay Dying's side project Austrian Death Machine. The concept is to make brutal, hardcore, thrash/metalcore songs out of Arnie quotes. It even has Chad Ackerman of Destroy the Runner performing Arnie impressions.
80's mutant disco group Was (Not Was) released a dance mix of the first George Bush's "read my lips" speech under the name A Thousand Points of Night.
Bass Guitar giant Victor Wooten of all people has one.
Some of multimedia performance group Emergency Broadcast Network's work in this vein was used as an opening act for U2 in the 90s.
TAS-1000's only album, A Message For Marta was all songs based around loops of answering machine messages (taken from a tape that was in a used answering machine a member purchased).
Negativland's U2 single set some bootlegged outtakes of a foul-mouthed Casey Kasem to a cheesy instrumental version of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Naturally the official release got sued out of existence.
Negativland has done a number of these over the years. The best known and most controversial is probably "Christianity Is Stupid" in which a recording of Rev. Estus Pirkle, speaking in a self-produced 1971 film about what life under Godless communism would be like, is taken out of context and re-edited.
FRONTIER PSYCHIATRIST! Made by The Avalanches from various clips from non-musical records (as well as movies).
Marcus Kinchin's "Dub of Doom" remix of The Nightcrawlers' "Push The Feeling On" was far more popular than the original song, to the extent that all subsequent remixes were based on his.
"Call My Name", an early self-released song by The Spinto Band, did this with The Childlike Empress from the film version of The NeverEnding Story ("Why don't you do what you dream, Bastian? Call my name! Call my name!").
When Paris Hilton's pop album came out, Danger Mouse and Banksy made 500 CDs with a SSDM of all the stupid things Paris has ever said and distributed them randomly in record shops in the UK amongst the real albums.
They Might Be Giants' "P.S.O.K." - though there is a brief chorus of sorts sung by John Flansburgh, most of the vocals are sampled stage banter from Kiss's Paul Stanley, sourced from a bootleg collection of banter entitled People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest. It mainly demonstrates how Stanley keeps using variations on the same lines show after show:
We haven't played this one but once all this whole tour
We haven't played this one in a long time
I don't think we've played this one in a long time
We haven't played this one in a long time
During his Thing A Week project, Jonathan Coulton did a few of these.
Roughly 80% of Fatboy Slim's music is this, such as:
His remix of "I Get Live" by Mike and Charlie (sampling a Method Man interview). Yeah, he loves doing these.
German techno band Scooter delighted us with hits like "Hyper, hyper" and "How much is the fish?".
In Henry Rollins' stand up special, Up For It, he made fun of various genres of electronic music due to a perceived lack of quality in the music itself and because he thought it takes little to no talent to produce. Dubstep artist SKisM sampled bits of this rant in his track, "Rave Review." Before him was AC Slater with "Play the Record Again".
V.I.M.'s 1991 song "Maggie's Last Party" is one of then-former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sampling from a speech presumably criticizing the rave scene.
Aussies would remember "Pauline Pantsdown", based on remixing words spoken by politician Pauline Hanson from about ten years ago. It wasn't techno but it actually got airtime and reached #5 on the Triple J Hottest 100.
Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student at a John Kerry rally: "Don't taze me, bro! Don't taze me! I didn't do anything!" Fortunately for us, they didn't listen.
A variation was the video for "Dirty Laundry"; instead of sound clips, it used video clips of news reporters and anchors.
"W's Duty" by Jonathan Coulton is a Stupid Statement Dance Mix of George W. Bush talking about duty, because Jonathan Coulton is willing to admit that it does in fact sound like a word for poop and this is in fact funny.
His song "Bacteria" does the same with an employee video about proper sanitation from KFC.
Bill Bailey remixes soundbites from politicians, especially George W. Bush, live as part of his act. And occasionally stranger things, like snippets of the weather forecast.
JEAN MICHEL JARRE IS A FRAAAAAUD
GWB's many statements over those eight long painful years just begged to be SSDM'd. Even Neil Young got in on it. In his 2006 release Living With War, the song "Let's Impeach the President"note Subtlety has never been Mr. Young's strong point. includes a coda in which a 100-voice chorus shouts "FLIP!.... FLOP!" over soundbites of Shrub saying first one thing, then another, about the 9-11 attacks, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
And the remix of the King of Spain chewing Chavez out with approximately, "Why don't you shut up?"
It doesn't get any more stupid than this, when a reporter says, "He climbed to the top of Mount Everest, but... he's gay. Excuse me, he's blind." The short version, with just the stupid statement, can be found here or here and here and here and the remix can be found here and mostly here. It never ceases to be hilarious and painful.
Hide your kids, hide your wives, hide your kids, hide your wives, hide your kids, hide your wives, and hide your husbands cuz they be rapin' everybody out here...
The "Chk-Chk Boom!" girl, a Kings Cross resident who gave a fabricated eyewitness account of a public shooting to A Current Affair complete with the aforementioned sound effect, has been turned into several dance mixes.
Here's a genuine eyewitness account of a foiled gas station robbery, from Kansas City resident Diana Radcliff, set to an Autotune that earned her and the group international viral notoriety.
While he was watching Gaddafi's latest rant promising to destroy the pro-democratic uprising against him, Israeli musician Noy Alooshe thought that the dictator's crazy gesticulations and speech patterns reminded him of a trance party. The result: Zenga Zenga, the same speech autotuned to Pitbull's "Hey Baby." It's become popular among members of the Libyan opposition.
Lego: Lord of the Rings (part of the LEGO Adaptation Game series) has an item you can unlock that plays a techno remix of various lines from the game. It also acts as a disco ball and lights up dark caves. And makes nearby figures rock out.
There is also a remix of Marisa Stole the Precious Thing comprised entirely of sounds heard at JR Line train stations in Japan, mostly prerecorded messages like "the doors are now closing" and various station announcements.
And one set to a product recall announcement, of all things. Panasonic wasn't very good at making sure their kerosene heaters didn't cause carbon monoxide poisoning back in the 80s.
The Kirby Punch, U.N. Owen, and Mc-Giygas all originated from Nico Nico Douga. The Japanese know a thing or two about stupid statement dance remixes.
The Red Alert 3trailer is more a compilation of Awesome Statement Dance Mixes, but it also includes "All your base are belong to us", courtesy of George Takei.
Minamimoto'sZetta Mix. And while we're on the subject of stupid statements: Beat's Bwaagh Mix. That last one may turn your brain to mush. Proceed with caution.
Valve seems to have taken them YTPMVs to heart, as the snippet of the Team Fortress 2 theme at the end of "Meet the Spy" is overlaid with sounds of the Spy stabbing the Soldier and Heavy, complete with the victims' cries. Of course the fandom is leaping onto the footage with abandon, and we should expect to see every "standard SSDM" using it out by the next month latest.
Mass Effect: There's the PriiiizeTechnoPorno Groove Mix. It was only a matter of time before we got the logical conclusion. "Look at this...HUMAN. I WILL SHOW YOU TRUE POWER. Sneaking into the captain's quarters...I KNOW YOU FEEL THIS."
Puzzlingly, the end-credits music for Sanitarium is a remix of various lines from the game. It may not be one statement over and over, but it's close enough to this trope to be amusingly incongruous with the rest of the game.
There are several remixes of a Let's Play for Super Kaizo World when the LPer, Proton Jon is spin-jumping on a Pokey, which is moving at an excruciatingly slow pace (rather bad, since he only has 100 seconds to complete the course). His cries of "MOVE FASTER POKEY!" have apparently undergone Memetic Mutation. "Groove faster Pokey!"
The folks at the mrbrown show took several soundbites from the National Day address, made by the Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong, and then remixed them to the rhythm of "My Humps" by the Black-Eyed peas. This one needs a bit of context first: the Prime Minister had made a jarring malapropism when he addressed an earlier podcast by the mrbrown show, in which an aspiring politician can't get his order of noodles, because the hawker has surveillance footage proof that he did not order what he had claimed to. This in itself was referencing an incident that happened during the 2006 General Elections in Singapore. The Prime Minister countered this by saying "I will say, mee siam mai hum", which means "rice vermecilli without cockles". However, the dish of mee siam is never eaten with cockles anyway, which demonstrated how out of touch the Prime Minister, and his scriptwriters, were with the people. It can be argued that he was trying to say hiam, or "chillies/spice", but who eats non-spicy mee siam anyway? At any rate, you can check it out here.
"We No Speak Americano" is an exceeding popular example of this, having become a Top 40 hit in the US.
Coppercab, a Youtuber who posts videos expressing his outrage at the treatment of redhaired people (like himself) by his peers, is a rather hilarious target for thistype of thing.
There was another one, using his rant/demand for people to remove his "tour of my house" video from various websites, but it's gone now. (Anyone manage to save that one?)
True Capitalist gets this a lot. So much so, that its host hates it.
Quarter-Life's horrible grammar has even been touched by this trope, sparking a small series of Galaxy Man remixes. The original is here
Wolfgang, Pass auf! here. The statement, from a video called Reifenverlust, "loss of a tire," quickly became a meme in the German-speaking world. (The title, in case you were wondering, means "Wolfgang, look out!" or "Wolfgang, heads up!")
This thread on rpg.net is essentially a text-based version.
Reagan: well, well, well, we-we-we-we-we, well, well, well, we-we-we-we-we... Homer: Hee hee. You know what? He did say "well" a lot!
Someone alse made one of Ralph playing an endless game of Duck, Duck, Goose, even after everyone else has long been gone in the german dub. Complete with a video loop.
The Bloodhound Gang did a variant on this with their song "Ralph Wiggum," which is a song made entirely out of quotes by, well, Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons. "I'm a pop sensation," indeed. Though technically, one line was spoken to him, instead of by him.
An in-universe example, Dipper of Gravity Falls once finds out to his dismay that the other residents have taken his puberty-cracked voice and remixed it.
There is not enough room on this page to list all the remixes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and we don't want to play favorites, but just Take Our Word for It that there a lot of them. It might be exaggerating to say every line from every episode has been incorporated into one somewhere, but only slightly.
One particularly noteworthy example is 'Avast Fluttershy's Ass' which, rather than reworking Fluttershy's lines into lyrics, reworks miniscule samples of them (and a few sound effects, such as her kicking a vase) into the melody. Also uses her "Flutterguy" voice to provide bass. It actually became so popular that it received multiple remixes and inspired several imitators.
Not exactly an example of this trope as it isn't a celebrity or movie quote, but instead about how astronomer Patrick Mooreplays the xylophone (or least he did till arthritis stopped him). "Par-pa-pa-pa-pa-Patrick!"
Robert Byrd's "Barbaric" speech got the treatment in this YTMND.
German late-night commedian Stefan Raab has done quite a few of these, most famously involving the german chancelor singing "Go get me a bottle of beer, else I'm going on strike!"
Though his canonical example of the trope may just be 'Maschen-Draht-Zaun'.
A more serious take on this can be found here. It takes statements made by politicians and media commentators and remixes them into songs, in order to make a statement on the power of the media.
This Youtube channel is entirely based on pasting the "I'm Black Y'all" rap from the hip-hop mockumentary CB 4 over various VGM songs. With hilarious results, of course.
Stark Effect's Mic In-Track, an EP of techno songs based around anonymous internet-users' home recordings, which were unwittingly shared on peer-to-peer file-sharing programs due to being left in the same folder as their shared music. "Bunny Rabbits Satan Cheese And Milk" and "Eeples And Beeneenees" best fit the stupid statement dance mix formula, though "I Miss You" is actually downright sad.
Fall on Your Sword have produced a few, most notably Shatner on the Mount, though to be fair, a full album of Stupid Statement Dance Mixes could probably be made from but a fraction of Shatner's ramblings.
Ashens later reviewed a handheld game called Retieval Mankind's Batman for his popular Popstation Watch videos. He made a passing joke about how the tat looked like a fat Batarang. Then, this video happened.
Ashens himself made one from an old clip from Columbo. He plays it anytime he needs to show off a device's audio quality instead of playing a licensed song and risking a takedown notice.
Courtesy of Vangaurd on Current TV: Dr. Martin Ssempa who can't tell the difference between shock vidoes, coprophagia and homosexuality: Dey Eat Da Poo Poo!
Politician Howard Dean's surprisingly enthusiastic speech after the 2004 Iowa Caucusus (he came in third, after investing very heavily in the state) spawned a number of dance remixes.
