Listen to Billy Joel's "Piano Man" Remade as a Cthulhu-Summoning Anthem

H.P. Lovecraft was a virulent racist who also happened to pioneer one of the most influential forms of genre fiction in history: cosmic horror. Without him, we would have no tentacled beasts with unpronounceable names making unsuspecting explorers go insane by the mere mention of said names. We would have no Cthulhu, the muse of not one, but two Metallica songs. We would have no Bloodborne, and that would suck because Bloodborne might be the greatest video game ever made.

Anyways, Billy Joel is not as totemic in the world of music as Lovecraft is to horror writing, but people know the words to "Piano Man" as well as they know "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," right? Right. Well, these two worlds combined and became a thing that should not be when someone pointed out that the Lovecraft poem "Nemesis" could be reasonably sung in the same swaying metre of "Piano Man."

Via Polygon, we now have the results of some foolish mortal who attempted to make this recording a twisted reality, presumably without succumbing to the madness that comes with knowing one's true place in the universe. Here is the song, as performed by said foolish mortal, YouTuber Julian Velard:

Obviously it doesn't sound that much different from the original, and some of the more out-there, mythologically grandiose lines could pass for like, early Bob Dylan or something. But as the song's familiar melody drones on for the fifth minute (you ever notice how long "Piano Man" is? the 70s were wild), lyrics about "beating the wings of unmerciful gloom" and haunting tombs until the end of time become unavoidable, and—inevitably—consume your mind. Again, heavy metal bands have written Lovecraftian lyrics for decades, but summoning ageless elder gods over blastbeats and riffs is one thing; couching it in radio and karaoke fodder makes it all the more insidious. Listener beware, then.

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