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Two Funny Videos about Economics?

An Economics Duology!


You can’t make fun of American culture without making fun of the way we put commerce above everything. “The business of America is business!” said one of our presidents*. So I’m posting a couple of business-related songs from my recent special as standalone videos, mostly because they turned out really good and I’m proud of them, but also because they compliment each other really well in a one-two punch of satire, digging into some of our underlying cultural beliefs that have formed this culture we’re swimming in .

The Invisible Hand of the Market! 👻

One of those cultural beliefs is found in the metaphor of the invisible hand—the belief that free markets are guided “as if by an invisible hand” to produce the most equitable distribution of goods and wealth and thus the best of all possible worlds. It’s a belief held by those politicians who tell you regulations are the enemy of progress, freedom, and prosperity. They have an unwavering and almost religious belief that if you let people and companies pursue their self interest things will just work out.

When someone tells you “we don’t need laws telling industries not to pollute, the invisible hand of the market is in control!” it sounds less like economic theory and more like there’s a shadowy villain organization like Spectre or Quantum called The Invisible Hand running things.

So that’s why I wrote The Invisible Hand in the style of a James Bond theme song, with amazing video design by Steven Rosenthal.

Corporations Are People Too!

Another odd economic belief we have here in America is that corporations are treated like persons in the eyes of the law. It’s why a company like Hobby Lobby can say they have religious beliefs that allow them to deny birth control coverage in their health care plan. And it’s also how corporations get away with spending billions to support political candidates: their money is considered speech, to which they have a constitutional right because they’re persons!

This idea of corporate personhood gets so ridiculous I had to make fun of it the best way I knew how: with a sunshine pop animated video in the style of Schoolhouse Rock! Character design and illustration are by my good friend and great artist Dan Pavelich (check out his TeePublic store!)

If you want a little more backstory—and more jokes!—on these topics check out the intro monologues in the full special! Or better yet, check out the whole special! There are songs about the Satanic Panic, Henry Ford, 19th Century minstrel shows and how they kind of relate to current laws that try to control the way we teach the history of race in America…

*the full quote is “the chief business of the American people is business,” from Calvin Coolidge, 1925.

Cover Tuesday returns!

Let’s get Stoopit!

I like to do things that are fun and musical on or around my birthday. In the pandemic lockdown year of 2020 I did an outdoor set of music in Prospect Park here in Brooklyn. Last year my monthly comedy show The Odd Rock Comedy Hour fell right on my actual birthday so I had a Studio 54-themed show and party, full of disco songs, fabulous outfits, and comedy!

This year I’m bringing back Cover Tuesday, the weekly cover song live stream I did for 2 years  (bi-weekly the 2nd year) starting at the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020 and running for over 70 shows!

The show will happen on Tuesday (obvi) Sep 24, at its usual time of 8:15 NYC time on my twitch channel and the very self-indulgent theme is songs that are somehow connected to my birthday, which I’ll explain in more detail in the show. It’ll make sense 🙂

I even designed a new emote for the return show: an animated gif of a guitar on fire!

Seriously, how cool is that? If you’re in the chat room it will pop up if you type “robproFlame”

And the old emotes are still in there, the bic lighter (type “robproBic”) and the lag jag (“robproLagjag”), designed to chase away the video lag, which I really hope won’t make a comeback. I have a new laptop and I’ve tweaked my settings for optimum performance!

So join me on Tuesday, Sep 24, for a fun set of stoopit covers, some good birthday week vibes, and hopefully no lag issues!

Nostalgia! Great for music, terrible for policy!

🎶 Let’s go back to mid-century…” 🎶

Recently something said by a member of Congress from Wisconsin caught my ear because it perfectly exemplified the mentality I make fun of in the opening song of my new comedy special. He said he hoped there was a plan in place for January of 2025 to get the country back to where we were in the 1960s. That would be great if you were a 12-year-old Beatle fan but not great if you were black, a woman, a draft-eligible young man, gay, or someone who would prefer not to ponder nuclear war every day.

But nostalgia is about emotion, not facts; and it’s a mixed emotion. It’s like a sad longing mixed with a dose of comfort. And people can not only feel nostalgia for times in their past (even if those times weren’t always great, like middle school) but can feel nostalgia for times they never lived in or things that never happened. That’s because memory and imagination are intertwined in our brains, using a lot of the same circuitry.

“Were those really the days?”

A common ploy of politicians is to take the emotions triggered by nostalgia and use them to gain support. Fascists have used this tactic over and over.

“We must reclaim our imagined past!”

The trick is to mythologize the past, make people sad that the mythologized past doesn’t exist, blame an out group for destroying that past, and use that stoked anger to rise to power. The Nazis did it by creating a mythologized past of Teutonic greatness and blamed its downfall on Romani, homosexuals, and Jewish people. Currently in the US the GOP blames the loss of a past that never existed on “woke,” which is a handy term that can encompass anything they don’t like. Woke starts by meaning the black community, gay community, trans community, and extends to feminists and people who believe in global warming.

So enjoy the emotions brought on by nostalgia when remembering childhood friends, or maybe fairs and events in your hometown, but be wary when someone tries to use nostalgia to blame a group of people for why things suck. If someone wants your support, ask for specific policy ideas, not feel-good imaginings. And when they say that we need to go back to the way things were, find out who they mean by “we.”

“…or is this just a power play hidden in a nostalgic haze?”

And now, please enjoy the stand-alone music video of “Were Those Really the Days?” an upbeat, Brill Building era tune that plays with the idea of nostalgia and its (ab)use by people seeking power. Or better yet, check out the whole special, The American Songbook: Redacted on YouTube!

Irony is even more dead

A song I wrote as a joke 16 years ago is basically the GOP platform of today.

It was 2008. A presidential election year. Sarah Palin, a half-term governor from Alaska and John McCain’s surprising pick as a VP candidate, was constantly talking about “real America,” or “pro-America parts of America, creating the unspoken assertion that there were parts of America that weren’t real or were anti-America.

To clarify what she meant by “real America” Palin would say things like: “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America.” 1  You know, the folks! the rural folks!

Yeah, we know. Appealing to these archetypal rural folks—the volk! Volkisch!—has been a tactic to build support since early 20th Century Germany.

On the surface these appeals to Americana looked like it was all apple pie and Chevrolet but I could feel that undercurrent of resentment. The othering of anyone who disagreed with them. The delegitimizing of people who weren’t in their in group. That was the unspoken implication in the GOP’s message.

So as a satire I wrote a song that blatantly spoke that unspoken implication. My hope was that by calling out the underlying worldview of those folkish appeals the general public would see the dark direction in which that worldview pointed. I thought it was a pretty good satire. Salon even called it “Funny, and bold.” (emphasis theirs)

Well, here it is 2024 and this song is basically the Republican party platform. I listen to it now and think, “this is what they’re saying out loud.” The die-hard right wingers saw the dark direction of those folkish appeals and said, “yep! That’s for us!”

This is what we mean when we say irony is dead.

My video-making skills have improved in the intervening 16 years, check out my latest work in my special “The American Songbook: Redacted!” 11 music videos inspired by US History and culture.

Chapter Guides for the New Special!

Chapter Guides!

Did you notice that my new special has helpful chapter markers? The times are listed in the description and they’re linked so you can click them and jump to that section!

Or, even easier, when you’re on a computer you can hover your mouse over the timeline to view the chapter names and a preview screen. On mobile the chapter names will show as you scrub the timeline.

And below I’ve made a handy table of contents with links to the different sections if you want to get to your favorite section right this very minute! It also makes it easier to send your favorite part of the special to your friend! Think they’ll like the cowboy song? Boom, link straight to it! Want them to hear the background on William Miller and his failed Bible prophesy predictions? This link is here to help!

And please do keep sending the special around to your friends and colleagues! It’s truly the best way to get the word out on the special and for more people to know the weird backstory of things like Muscular Christianity or how much Henry Ford hated jazz!

Song Genre Subject time
Prologue intro 0:00-1:30 link
Were Those Really the Days? Brill Building Pop Nostalgia and revisionism 1:30-3:45 link
Satanic Panic intro The Satanic Panic 3:45-6:04link
Satanic Panic Heavy Metal The Satanic Panic 6:04-9:34 link
William Miller & Prophesy The Great Disappointment of 1844 9:35-12:35link
The Great Disappointment Emo The Great Disappointment of 1844 12:35-16:06 link
National Anthems Star Spangled Banner 16:06-18:37link
Alternate Anthem National Anthem Burning of the White House in 1814 18:37-20:55 link
Adam Smith and economics 20:55-21:43link
The Invisible Hand Spy Movie Theme Laissez-faire Capitalism 21:43-24:46 link
Henry Ford and Jazz Henry Ford’s anti-jazz anti-semitism 25:00-26:51link
Beep! Beep! Outta the Way! Early Jazz Henry Ford’s anti-jazz anti-semitism 26:51-29:12 link
Stephen Foster “Plantation” Songs 29:12-30:58link
Plug Your Ears and Sing! Stephen Foster White Fragility and Education 30:58-33:28 link
The Frontier Myth The Frontier Myth 33:28-34:26link
The People Who Were Already Here Western/Cowboy Song The Frontier Myth 34:26-37:24 link
Sunshine Pop! 37:36-38:00link
Corporations Are People Too! Sunshine Pop Corporate Personhood 38:00-40:34 link
Muscular Christianity masculinity crises 40:34-42:57link
Work That Bod Disco Muscular Christianity 42:57-46:45 link
1990s Nostalgia 46:45-48:51link
The Ballad of Lou Pearlman 90s Boyband Pop Lou Pearlman’s Ponzi Sceme 48:51-52:12 link
Remember it Better Heartland Rock Closing Credits 52:12-56:53 link

The New Special is Here!

The new video special is out! It’s available on YouTube right this very second and I’m super excited for you to see it!

It’s just over 2 years to the day since I first performed this set of songs to see if there was anything to this idea of doing a whole show of satirical comedy songs based on U.S. History and culture. The show went well and inspired me to do a fully-arranged studio album of the songs and to create a solo theater show around them.

Taking that show to the Edmonton Fringe last summer allowed me to really tighten and punch up the monologues and to perfect the overall flow of the set. At the end of the fringe run I knew I had to create a version of the show that could live online for everyone to see.

And now, it’s here!

Using the full arrangements of the songs from the album and some fun animation, graphics, and live action, I have what I think is a really solid comedy special. It’s not a live concert video like most standup specials, but being a musician in the comedy world has always led me to do things a little differently. A friend who’s a huge movie and TV buff said it sounds like it’s my Elephant Parts, which was a sketch/music/video comedy film by former Monkee Mike Nesmith, and if you know it, it’s a perfect comparison.

Give it a look, I think you’ll like it! And if you know any comedy and/or music nerds, pass it along! Word of mouth > algorithms!

New Special Premieres May 22!

We have a date!

My new comedy music video special The American Songbook: Redacted will be premiering on YouTube May 22! At 9pm eastern the new special that’s part Schoolhouse Rock, part The Daily Show, and part Friday Night Videos, will premiere on YouTube with an online watch party kicking off an hour earlier.

The night before, Tuesday, May 21, there will be an in-person premiere party where we’ll watch the special, have a few beverages, and enjoy some swag at Crystal Lake in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The party starts at 7pm and we’ll start the screening at 8.

I’m really excited to present this project in this form, it’s the culmination of the work on the album, the live shows, and a few of the individual lyric videos from the album. I think this video and format is the best way to experience these songs and stories, and it’s the perfect distillation of two years of work. I can’t wait for you to see it!

In fact, here are a couple of trailers I made to give you a feel for what’s on the way:

Comedy Special coming this summer!

The American Songbook: Redacted Comedy Special will be coming out this summer!

I’m very excited to be putting all of the work from the live show and the studio album together into one cohesive film available to anyone who can click on a video. Soon everyone can see the material as I envisioned it: funny songs—with intricate, genre-specific arrangements—and joke-filled monologues giving background and context on the topics covered!

I’ve been working diligently on the project all winter, putting together new animated characters, new videos, and the monologues that were honed over the festival performances last year! I’m happy to report that I’m in the home stretch, or at least the home stretch for completing the video. Getting the word out will be an entire project unto itself, but I’m excited about the possibilities of self-released comedy specials and I’m optimistic the special will find a receptive audience.

It will be a little bit different from traditional standup specials, the ones that are shot in a theater or comedy club with an over-hyped crowd. This one is going to be filled with music videos and in-studio intros and monologues—it’ll be part Schoolhouse Rock, part The Daily Show, part Friday Night Videos. At first I was calling the project a “video album” but after consideration I think “comedy special” is more accurate. It is, after all, nearly an hour of comedy presented as a cohesive whole. A friend of mine said it best: “it’s a comedy special. It’s a weird special, but it’s a special.”

So stay tuned for my weird special featuring a set of satirical songs inspired by lesser-known history and cultural trends. And here’s a sneak peak at a couple of the new characters!

Crowd work clips are all the rage!

If you, like me, follow a lot of comedians on instagram or tiktok, you’re seeing tons of clips of comics doing crowd work at their shows. It’s almost to the point that anytime someone in the audience coughs the comic rushes to react so they can post the clip on their socials, just to keep the flow of ‘content’ going.

Crowd work clips are so prevalent the Washington Post even mentions them in their article about tiktok and standup! (That’s a gift link to get you through the paywall, because I’m a giver!)

Crowd work has never really been my thing but I can’t resist making fun of a trend so I wrote a song called “Crowd Work” and left it at that. Enjoy!

Great Big Beautiful World guitar tutorials

Jazz Guitar tutorial

One of my favorite songs on the new album is Great Big Beautiful World, a bossa nova inspired mellow ballad that I really like playing. I like playing it so much I want to teach people how to do it!

This is the jazz/electric guitar version, which is the featured instrument on the recording. I also made a tutorial for an acoustic guitar version, which is a little simpler and has more open chords that sound good on acoustic. That’s below.

To help with the chords I made lead sheets that have guitar chord diagrams, here’s the jazz guitar lead sheet, and the acoustic lead sheet.

This is my first attempt at a legit guitar tutorial, let me know what you think!

Acoustic Guitar tutorial

Great Big Beautiful World live in studio

One of my favorite songs on The Opposite of Afterglow, the new album from The Green L.E.D.s project, is the bossa nova infused ballad Great Big Beautiful World. It’s probably the one I’m the most proud of too. I really like the chord progression and I think the melody weaves through it and ties it together nicely.

I’m also really happy with the lyrics. Not only do they match the feel of the music, they express something I’ve been feeling a lot the last several years—a peaceful awe of being in the moment infused with a dose of melancholy from being aware of the absolute shit-show we humans make of this place.

Anyway, enough of me talking about it, lemme play it:

Learn how to play the song here!

Back in the day whenever I would post a clip of me playing something, someone would inevitably comment “tabs,” demanding guitar tabs for whatever I played. Since I like this song so much and would be beyond flattered and thrilled if anyone else wanted to play it, I made not 1 but 2 guitar tutorials for it! The first tutorial is for the jazz guitar version I play here, the second is an acoustic guitar version that uses more open chords and is a little simpler. (It’s the acoustic guitar part layered in the background of the studio recording). Check ’em out and play along!

It Begins! (pre-sales, that is)

Pre-sales for The Opposite of Afterglow, The Green L.E.D.s second full-length album, are now live on Apple Music and bandcamp! Any orders between now and the release date of Nov 17 come with immediate download of the preview single “Celebrity’s Kid” and count toward release day purchase stats, which is important to all the algorithm bots and such.

To celebrate, I posted this video of me doing a 4-part a cappella version of “Celebrity’s Kid!”

I’m also excited to announce that instead of being a digital-only release, I decided to get a limited number of actual CDs made!

The good people at Atomic Disc do such good work (and they do it frighteningly fast) I couldn’t resist getting a few actual CDs made. It’s just so much more fun to have a tangible product in hand after all of the work I put into the album. They’ll be available at my online store starting the week of Nov. 17!

And with the pre-sales officially started over at bandcamp, you can stream Celebrity’s Kid right now! I’ll even embed a player right here!

I can’t wait for you to hear the whole album, I’m really loving how it sounds and proud of the writing and arranging. Let me know what you think!

Masters have been delivered!

The Green LEDs logoThe mixes have been mixed, the masters are mastered, and the files have been sent through the net-o-sphere to all the digital music sites in the known universe! That means The Green L.E.D.s’ new album will be available to everyone on Nov. 17, 2023!

And did you notice that link above, on the name The Green L.E.D.s? That’s right, to celebrate the new album I put together a new website [ooh, aah]. I figured that with a second full-length album coming out I might as well make the project web-official and secure a domain. And thanks to the ease of WYSIWYG cloud-based design tools the site was up and running lickety-split!

If you’re a Spotify user and want to support the album right now, you can pre-save it to your library with this link.  That way the album is automatically added to your library as soon as it comes out, and since first day numbers really impress the algorithm bots, pre-saving is a huge help.

And if you’re curious what the new album sounds like, check out the advance single that came out this summer on the Shake It Down Tonight EP. In fact, I’ll embed it below so you can listen to it right here.

I’ve been working on this album in the background since late last year, taking my time to get it right, and it’s been a really fulfilling and satisfying process. It provided me a nice escape from all the work I was doing on The American Songbook: Redacted videos and festival run, and allowed me to stretch out and explore some musical ideas away from comedy. I’m really happy with the songwriting and the way it sounds and I can’t wait for you to hear it, so smash that link (as the kids say) and add it to your library toot sweet!

The 1-year Anny of The American Songbook: Redacted!

It’s been a full year since the release party/show for The American Songbook: Redacted studio album! In the year since the album’s release I’ve created 8 lyric videos  and refined the live show into an intelligently silly powerhouse that showcased at the 2023 Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival. I also made buttons!

The release show took place at the lovely Caveat theater in NYC on October 12, 2022, which was the 530th anniversary of Columbus’ ships arriving in the Caribbean. What better day to launch a project that digs into the myths and beliefs of the culture that’s developed here on this continent? This October 12th is a perfect time to a look at the project as a whole and appreciate the creative journey it took me on.

The lyric videos were a lot of fun to put together and working on them helped me refine the monologues and intros in the live show. And the 7-show run in Edmonton not only gave me the opportunity to tighten and punch up the script, it featured a new opening song that really set up the tone and theme of the show. That song, “Were Those Really the Days?” has been added to the album exclusively on bandcamp, give it a listen, we’ll embed it below for your convenience!

And check out the lyric vides, they were a ton of fun to work on, especially the collaborations like The Invisible Hand, with the hilarious video-making team of Steven Rosenthal and Peggy O’Brien, and Corporations Are People Too!, featuring the wonderful artwork of Dan Pavelich!

And don’t forget the merch! You can still help support the project by picking up some merch! I really love the way the 4-button pack turned out, there’s a cool patch, a keychain, or a sticker sheet!

So what’s next for The American Songbook: Redacted? I hope to shoot the monologues and intros and create lyric videos for the remaining songs, putting them all together into a visual album/comedy special. But that will have to wait until after the release of my next project, a new album by The Green L.E.D.s.!! 

Yes, I’m doing something completely different again, but I’m very excited about it! I even have a new website for the project! Thanks for supporting and helping me pursue all of these ridiculous ideas!

It’s time to DISCO!

This month’s Odd Rock Comedy Hour at QED happens to land right on my birthday! And since my impending age will be the same number as in the name of a legendary disco club (Studio 39, obvi) we’re having a disco party!

There will be comedy! There will be disco songs! Sometimes simultaneously! Anyone wearing 70s or disco attire will get a prize! I am so leaning in to this whole thing!

And lest you think this is merely an ironic or kitschy tribute to disco, let me point out that my 2nd full length studio album American Cheese (released on my birthday in 1998) featured a disco song called Disco Nights, and my latest album The American Songbook Redacted features the disco track “Work That Bod.”

Not only that, one of our guests, Goodbye Charlemagne, just released an entire album of disco songs! And one of our other guests debuted a new disco song at the Odd Rock Comedy Hour earlier this year!

So get ready to boogie on up to Q.E.D. in Astoria for a feverish Saturday night of good fun, great music, and hilarious comedy!

Tickets are LIVE for the Edmonton Fringe!

Ticket links are now LIVE for the American Songbook: Redacted at The Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival!

Edmonton Fringe Theater Festival LogoI’ll be doing 7 performances of the show at the lovely Chianti Yardbird Suite, a jazz club in the heart of the Old Strathcona Neighborhood, not far from the epicenter of the fest. Here are the dates and times:

Friday, Aug 18, 2:30 pm
Sunday, Aug 20, 4:30 pm
Monday, Aug 21, 9:45 pm
Tuesday, Aug 22, 12:30 pm
Wednesday, Aug 23, 11:15 pm
Friday, Aug 25, 7:15 pm
Sunday, Aug 27, 5:15 pm

Tickets for all shows are available here.

I’ve been honing the show for this festival and I’m really excited about it. There’s even a brand new song! And don’t forget the merch and swag! So much merch and swag!

I even have a button giveaway exclusively for this festival! The fest is a “no handbill zone,” meaning no flyers! So I’m giving away buttons with a QR code for the show’s website. Track me down at the fest and I’ll be happy to give you one. And if you ask nicely I may even be able to give you a comp ticket to the show, just let me know you read this post 🙂

See you in the wilds of western Canada!

© Paravonian