Drifting off to sleep last night, I found myself in nightmare territory: the music from Microsoft's SongSmith ad was looping in my head.
By now, you've probably seen it, too: Four minutes and 17 seconds of wince-inducing promotion for a new Microsoft application that says it can create a whole song once you've sung a verse or two into a microphone. Great concept; horrible execution. The sample tracks are so weak, they make Muzak sound like death metal.
This was one of those occasions when the Internet really came through on the ridicule front. Within nine minutes of watching the clip on Monday, I'd read an excellently scathing review at VideoGum and other blogs (with headlines like "MS ad starts off year with a bang...and that year is 1991") and discovered MetaFilter's ingenious backwards-engineering of "Runnin' With the Devil."
What's amazing, though, is that two days after that initial hurricane of commentary, the SongSmith ad's awfulness still haunts me. New and disturbing moments keep popping into my head.
"Microsoft, huh? So it's pretty easy to use?" An actor speaks this line upon seeing SongSmith in action. It's about as convincing as, "Molten lava, huh? So it's pretty easy to drink?"
The epic fail of the video and the product bring to mind one of the better movie pans of 2008, a scorcher in The New York Times of Mike Myers' "The Love Guru." "A whole new vocabulary seems to be required," critic A.O. Scott wrote, searching for the words to capture his horror. "To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious ... [It] does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, 'The Love Guru' is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."
Antifunny. The analogue here is "anticool." And it inspires in me such a depth of despair that I may just need to express it in song -- one that I think I'll create in GarageBand.
