How ‘Glee’ and ‘Pitch Perfect’ Paved the Way for a Jewish Music Tradition
There’s an obscure old song from 2006 that starts like this:
There’s a funky bass line
Could really tear the roof off the place
But it would sound much funkier
If you played it with a bass
They’re singing all of the background
Rocking as hard as they can
The harmonies are tight, the rhythm is alright
The only thing they need is a band!
The song is called “I Hate A Cappella,” and the joke is that it was composed and performed by an a cappella group, The Richter Scales.
The group, comprised largely of Ivy League tech workers in San Francisco, is now defunct, but their pointed parody lives on. “Here Comes Another Bubble,” their 2007 satire of Silicon Valley’s excesses set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” not only predicted the tech-stock collapse of 2022, but anticipated the antics of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk with the rhymed riposte, “Build yourself a rocket ship, blast off on an ego trip.”
For its part, “I Hate A Cappella” is both a hilarious send-up of the genre’s conventions and an apt encapsulation of the challenges facing vocal music in the mainstream. “Nine Inch Nails, Frank Sinatra,
