Stupid Statement Dance Mix

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"It's too late! They already have it on YouTube! And someone even made it into a music video!"

Stupid. Statement. Dance. Mix.
Stupid. Statement. Dance. Mix.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Stu-Stu-Stu-Stu-Stu-Stu-StuStuStuStu.

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 Ear Worm, 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 of Stupid Statement Dance Mixes include:

Advertising

Anime and Manga

Film - Live Action

Live-Action TV

Music

  • 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.
  • The band Talking Heads seem to have been instrumental in the development of this trope, oddly enough:
  • 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 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.
  • Pre-Internet proto-example: At a 1986 Venom concert in New Jersey, the late Joe Cole, roadie for opening act Black Flag, recorded the drunken onstage banter of Cronos, singer for headlining act Venom ("It's called Newcastle Brown Ale! IT KNOCKS YOU ON YOUR FUCKIN' BACK, LET ME TELL YOU!!"), with the songs edited out. Sonic Youth leader Thurston Moore released the recorded ranting as an unofficial 7 single on his record label Ecstatic Peace, and the Beastie Boys sampled it.
  • 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.
  • British art-pop group The Chap, with Never a frown with Gordon Brown.
  • 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).
  • Another proto-example would be Negativland's U2 single, which 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.
  • Imma let you finish... but I have the best stupid statement mixes of all time, yo!
  • 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

News and Current Affairs

Radio

Traditional Games

Video Games

Web Original

Western Animation

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!

Candace: Mom! Phineas and Ferb are digitally tuning my voice!

  • SpongeBob SquarePants in the movie soundtrack is "Prince Paul's Bubble Party" which remixes lines on the episode Bubblestand.
  • Adventure Time another canon example is Jake make one out of the old recordings of Dad in Dads Dungeon.

Unsorted

YouTube Comment: I just got rickrolled by some retarded kid with an orange coming out his nose...