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Spike Jones

Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (1911-1965) was a legendary bandleader in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, and one of the first innovators of novelty music in popular culture. Spike was a master of musical comedy -- not in terms of the film genre, where one gets a comedy that happens to feature singing, but in comedy created through music. Like "Weird Al" Yankovic, Spike was a parodist, and, again, like "Weird Al" today, having your song mocked by Spike was viewed as a necessity before you could really consider yourself to have made it to musical stardom ... although their approaches were wildly different. "Weird Al" plays the music so straight that if you're not listening closely, you might not notice that it's a parody, whereas Spike would take the music out back and mug it. His 1944 hit cover of "Cocktails for Two", originally a nice, sweet song about how Prohibition was over and people could have alcohol on dates again, featured gunshots, gargling, slide whistles, and enough violence done to the musical instruments that he may have violated the Geneva Convention.

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