Ichabod F.N. Herstal

Pharrell says ‘Happy’ based on lesser-known ‘Crappy’

August 18, 2014

As Pharrell Williams continues to bask in the success of his global hit single “Happy,” he reminisces with the Dandy Goat entertainment team about more difficult times.

“The original, lesser-known version of the song was called ‘Crappy,’” laughs Williams over a pitcher of Cadillac Gold margarita at a swanky Manhattan brasserie. “It was a lot slower, so l guess you couldn’t really dance to it, so that was the first big mistake.”

He remembers it was raining the day the song was recorded. “I’d had a row with my girlfriend the night before, and l hadn’t slept well,” he says. “I hadn’t had any breakfast.”

Williams recalls that when the sound engineer turned up, he’d just been ticketed for running a red light while taking his sick pet rabbit to the vet to be euthanized; and he’d spent the previous day cleaning out his basement, which had been flooded by a burst water pipe.

“So the lyrics pretty much wrote themselves,” Williams chuckles ruefully.

He continues, “As for the melody — if you can call it that — l remember we were just bouncing these negative vibes off each other in the studio. There was this amazing synergy of hopelessness. We started messing around fretfully on the mixing console, and we were mashing up these breaks from ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Sisters of Mercy.’ The sound engineer layered in the bass line from Eva Cassidy’s version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ — the song that was released after she died of cancer — but he felt it was too light and optimistic, so he had to take it down a couple of keys. And run it backwards.”

In the end it all came together. “We really felt that we’d captured a unique moment of despair,” says Williams.

Pharrell Williams 'Crappy' album cover - spoof — ‘Crappy’ was very popular amongst goths, emo kids, Satanists and other depressive types.

The video to accompany the song was filmed on a dark winter morning in an abandoned steel plant in Syracuse, New York, featuring as extras local homeless people and mental patients, shuffling aimlessly in stagnant pools of industrial slurry. Williams was excited when he was told by his record company that the video for “Crappy” had gone viral, but it turned out that it was mainly amongst goths, emo kids and Satanists, and many of the posts were accompanied by people planning school shootings or threatening to commit suicide.

But looking back now, Williams can see the bright side. “l heard that a Lebanese kid from Dearborn, Michigan who had gone to fight in Syria used the song as the background music for his martyrdom video,” he says, wincing. “It’s horrible when you think about it, to be associated with something as awful as that. But on the upside it gave a real boost to my name recognition the Middle East, and that helped to contribute to ‘Happy’ becoming such a big global hit later on.”

IRS chief says chihuahua ate missing emails

June 27, 2014

WASHINGTON — Appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a hearing into alleged targeting of tea party groups, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen claimed that hard copies of thousands of emails that apparently disappeared from Lois Lerner’s hard drive had in fact been “eaten by his dog.”

In a testy exchange, Rep. Trey Gowdy confronted Mr. Koskinen with a picture of the 74-year-old commissioner’s dog, a tiny Chihuahua named Che, and pointed out that such a small animal could not have digested multiple reams of printed A4 pages. Mr. Koskinen then told the committee that now that he thought about it, the dog had not in fact eaten the emails, but had torn them up into such small pieces with his tiny chihuahua claws that they could not possibly have been reassembled, so he had thrown them away.

When pressed by Rep. Paul Ryan, who called his claim “cute, but frankly unbelievable,” Mr. Koskinen sheepishly admitted that he had in fact been in possession of the emails only that morning, but had accidentally spilled coffee over them at breakfast.

Challenged by Rep. Jason Chaffetz as to how one cup of coffee could have ruined so many emails, and asked why he hadn’t mopped up most of the coffee with paper towels and then dried out the emails with a hair dryer, or perhaps laid them on a radiator, Mr. Koskinen confessed that he had just remembered that he had in actual fact left the emails on the bus.

A spokesman for Mr. Koskinen’s office told reporters he had intended to call the DC Metro Transit Authority lost and found office, but the battery on his cellphone was dead. Asked why he couldn’t have used his office phone, the spokesman claimed that actually he had, but he had been given the wrong number, and anyway nobody was picking up the phone. And the line was busy.

Questioned by reporters as he left the hearing, Mr. Koskinen claimed that he wasn’t the IRS commissioner at all, and that they must be thinking of someone else.

Carney resignation: friends cite health fears over ‘trying to keep a straight face’

June 2, 2014

WASHINGTON — Sources close to Jay Carney have told The Dandy Goat that the White House press spokesman’s decision to resign came amid fears he would be permanently disfigured by his efforts to keep a straight face while answering questions from the White House press pool.

While the issue has apparently been been a long-running concern for Carney and his family, friends say the immediate spur for his resignation came when he was rushed to the hospital last week after injuring himself while telling reporters that a recently uncovered memo about the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was not about the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. He underwent an emergency operation at Walter Reade medical center to reattach ligaments connecting his lower jaw to the left side of his skull.

This latest scare follows an incident in October 2013 when Carney permanently damaged nerve endings in his right cheek while trying to suppress a smirk after stating that people with private health insurance plans prior to the the passage of the Affordable Care Act would be able to keep them.

It’s not only Carney’s countenance that has been affected by his exertions. In April 2012, his efforts not to burst out laughing when he addressed a lunch hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association and stated that “When I go stand up at the podium in front of the White House press corps, I never lie” caused permanent damage to his spleen and left him with a hernia.

Oprah’s butt searched for missing flight

April 8, 2014

PERTH, Australia — Australian and Malaysian authorities have announced that they are widening the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 to include Oprah Winfrey’s butt, following media reports that the massive American celebrity was vacationing in the Indian Ocean at the time of the ill-fated flight’s disappearance.

Royal Australian Air Force spokesman Captain Roy Chivers told reporters at a hastily arranged news conference yesterday that, “Given the lack of any other promising leads, we’re not going to rule anything — or anyone — out.”

Senior FAA investigator and former U.S. Air Force pilot Gary Wagner confirmed to reporters that a Boeing 777, at its normal rated landing weight, could land safely within a distance as short as 1,900 feet — comfortably within the dimensions of Winfrey’s butt. “We’ve already searched remote landing strips on dozens of islands in the region which are considerably smaller than Ms. Winfrey’s posterior,” he said.

“We’re talking about someone who washes herself with a cloth on a stick,” he added.

Mr. Wagner said that even if recent reports that Winfrey had been dieting were correct, her butt would still be more than large enough to accommodate the landing of a 777 fully laden with passengers and fuel.

“Obviously, the heavier the aircraft, the longer the stopping distance required,” Wagner said. “However, based on the last pings received from flight MH370, and the confirmed radar tracks, if the aircraft had indeed landed safely it would have been at the maximum extent of its endurance, and thus would have been only lightly laden with fuel.” This means that the landing could easily have been accomplished within the space of just one of Winfrey’s butt cheeks.

Another reporter asked whether Winfrey is suspected of being complicit in diverting and landing the aircraft.

“Not necessarily,” Chivers said. “A landing could have occurred with Ms. Winfrey only feeling a faint tickling sensation,” said Chivers. “After all, this is a woman who hasn’t seen her feet in years.”

This is the second time Winfrey’s butt has been involved in a large-scale search. In June 2012, a troop of boy scouts from Syracuse, NY went missing for five days after inadvertently straying into the butt area while on a hiking trip in the Sierra Nevada. They were only located after an unprecedented search-and-rescue operation involving thousands of military and law-enforcement personnel, backed up by hundreds of civilian volunteers and dozens of aircraft.

When challenged by a CNN reporter as to whether the Australian authorities had enough resources to expand the search area to encompass such a daunting additional expense, Chivers conceded that Australian and Malaysian maritime search capabilities were already at full stretch, but he said that they owed it to the families and friends of the passengers and crew to not rest “until every fleshy fold of Ms. Winfrey’s substantial behind has been comprehensively searched.”

A spokeswoman for Winfrey refused to comment on the latest developments.