Public radio listeners know it’s that time of year again, time to interrupt your favorite public radio programs for the spring pledge drive. But today I saw a tweet from one of the folks at APM’s Marketplace with a link to a YouTube video that’s sure to bring a smile to the face of any regular public radio listener.
Greg Studley (yes, that’s his real name) has put together a take off on Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire that replaces the names of celebrities in the original song with the names of people you hear across public radio networks (definitely NPR and APM, and I think even PRI although I don’t catch any PRX names). He even drops in Donnie Baseball, although I’m not aware of anything he does with public radio. [My bad. I'm always confusing Don with Dave on NPR.] (If you go to the YouTube page for the video you can see all the names he drops.)
After hearing it many times I have to admit it’s kind of lame and the singing isn’t the best, although it still beats some of the vocals I had to record as a studio engineer back in New Orleans. What do you guys think of it? The only other problems I have with it is that after repeated plays of the video (I really want an MP3 of it one of these days) I had to go see Billy Joel’s original as well as the cover by Guns N’ Moses. Although it’s pretty ironic that I found the video yesterday, the day that WBUR, my local NPR station, officially started their spring fundraiser. Please consider supporting them as they try to completely do away with their summer pledge drive for the second year in a row. If you do you can get chances to win some pretty nice swag.
