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MASHATHON FIRST QUARTER UPDATE

So, it's been almost eight hours of the Monster Mash and I'm still doing pretty well, I think. I filled my mp3 player with some 30-odd copies of the file so I can move around without having to stop every three minutes and restart the song. My brain feels fine at this point, but there were definitely a couple of weird phases I had to pass through to get back to this base state…

For the first hour, things went as I'd expected: The song was good (as usual) for three or four plays, then really, really fucking obnoxious for the next 20 or so, and then I finally managed to block it out of my mind for a while. But coming into the second hour, there was this weird shift.

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I started getting majorly distracted again, to the point where I couldn't really focus on doing anything much longer than sending an email at a time. The thing is though, it wasn't so much from being annoyed, but from suddenly getting really back into the song. This was right around the time I reported that I was getting really irritated by that part at the end where Igor goes "RMMM, MASH COOOL" and Dr. Scientist or whoever calls him an "impetuous young boy." The reason it was bugging me wasn't the voices, but because of all the sudden inconsistencies in the song's logic--for instance, why does Igor speak like a Frankenstein? And after the entire world of the living is invited to the castle to do the mash, why does he get chastized just for calling it cool? I was pissed off at a Dr. Demento song for not making sense. No, worse than that--I was disappointed at the ending of a Dr. Demento song for failing to live up to its initial verses. I finally managed to get over it by focusing my attention on trying to figure out what Igor yells right after being told off. It sounds like he's saying "GANJ!" although I imagine he was just supposed to be making some sort of gnashing-type noise (for a little while, I was convinced it was "GOSH!"). Getting into the fourth hour, the song started to sort of decompose in my head. I began hearing the keyboard part that runs through the whole thing really clearly and prominently, as if it were the main instrument and all the vocals were just background. One of the sections in the verses sounds really discordant, almost as if it's out of tune, and this bugged the living shit out of me (it's the part where he says "For my monster from his slab began to rise…"). This went on until I left for home, which probably helped distract me out of my funk. As said, right now I'm in a pretty stable mood, which I think being able to switch between headphones to speakers helped considerably. So far so good, but I've got to head to bed soon and I'm a little nervous about what effect the Mash might have on me in my sleep. I'll let you know how it turns out…

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