Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Record Shopping with Bizarro


Like many, in addition to collecting comics, I am also a casual record collector.

Anyhoo...

A few months ago whilst perusing my local record shop, my eye was caught by an album called Freaks in Sensurround by a band called The Freaks. What really caught my fancy was some of the imagery on the very distinct album cover, as I turned it around to see:




Not just a picture of Bizarro, but also a song about him! There was more:




Next to the handsome fellow in the Metallica t-shirt - Yes, it's Jimmy as Elastic Lad and Lana as Insect Queen, as seen in Silver Age Legion adventures! Next to them is Marlon Brando's Jor-El, which is an interesting and unconventional mix of mediums and eras. And of course there's Oompa Loompas, ya gotta have Oompa Loompas. The rest of the busy album cover is various images from pop culture (or simply culture, as I think of it), such as Charlie's Angels, Dee Dee Ramone, and Crispin Glover as he appeared in River's Edge. This eclectic mix was promising, and I took the record home with me and rocked out. It's a great album from the late eighties. I could not find out much about Freaks other than that they considered their style of music to be "Orange Rock". It's a bit like a stripped down glam metal, with topics more akin to punk bands. The Bizarro song is all narrated by Bizarro Number One and has fun lyrics like:

Bizarro baseball - strike out to win!

and

Me am Bizarro, Bizarro Number One,

Me not like earth, me think it dumb!


Evidently they were going with the style of Bizarro speech where he speaks badly, but not backwards. Bizarros were never really consistent about that, but it wouldn't be very consistent for Bizarros to be consistent.

Incidentally, there is a record label from Uruguay called Bizarro Records. I don't really know what kind of stuff they put out.

1 comment:

rob! said...

Bizarro prefer Pat Boone to Beatles!

(See, because everything's backwards...)