Breakfast with Amber

November 2020: Lollipop

It's occurred to me that in the chapter "REALLY Remote Learning," I didn't talk about the actual learning that much. That is, besides the art history midterm and the Japanese oral exam review where Dr. Wu commented on my accent. Let's get back to the learning, shall we?

So it's late October at this point, and our next project in electronic music was coming up. Technically, we had three major projects between the start of the semester and the final exam. The first was "Cannonball," the midterm project that Dr. Bondari liked so much that he still talks about it to his students. The second was cancelled because Dr. Bondari never got around to assigning it, and when he did remember, it was so close to project 3 that he'd have to choose between giving us too little time for project 2 or too little time for project 3. The third project is the one I'll be talking about in this chapter.

The idea is simple: make a music video. And the song that goes with it. I want to clarify that this is a music class. One of our more recent assignments was to score a short film, so I decided to slap together some footage from my video on the Chicken vs. Egg Splatfest (and reversed it for some reason; maybe because I had just found out you could do that in Premiere) and write a short minute-long tune that I'd had the idea for bouncing around in my head for the past year. It was supposed to be a solo track for Pearl on the SplaTOON 2 soundtrack, so the verses were just rapping about how awesome the singer is at Splatoon, but the chorus was just about the catchiest piece of music I had ever written:

Bop bop,
Climbing to the top top,
I ain't gonna stop stop,
I'm a lollipop pop.
Burning super hot hot.
Look cute, but I'm not not.
Go on, take a shot shot
At this lollipop.
Oh, lolli-lollipop.

I named the song "Lollipop" and uploaded it to YouTube on October 23 (we were required to upload our music to YouTube or SoundCloud for the class). In the description, I admitted I had first heard the melody for the chorus a year ago while volunteering at my church's VBS. That's right. I stole the melody from a song called "Whole Lotta Change" from a VBS program called Roar. You can find it on YouTube. It hits unbefittingly hard for a song written to teach children about Jesus Christ. In fact, I still think it's better than Lollipop. I think I included that in the description because you can't get sued for plagiarism if you cite your sources.

So that was the first Lollipop. Now it was time to make it into a longer song. I think the requirement was for it to be four to five minutes long because the song itself is about three minutes long. I could have beefed it up, but I had already added a bridge, a rap, and a dance break to Cannonball, so I was done with beefing up songs. "Lollipop" would just have to be three minutes.

Technically, I don't think I had to make it into a longer song. I think I just wanted to because I really liked the song. That meant I had to write even more rap lyrics about how awesome I am at Splatoon and also come up with a bridge because even though I wasn't doing the bridge/rap/dance break combo, I still wanted something between the second and third choruses. You know what I did? I took a leap of faith and went to YouTube hoping the original song was there, meaning I either remembered the title from a year ago or I spent several minutes putting in numerous searches hoping I'd find that specific song such as "really cool roar vbs song" or "song from roar vbs that goes bop bop climbing to the top top" or maybe I just searched "roar vbs music" and started scrolling through all the songs. Or maybe I remembered the title. I have very good memory.

And I was able to find that song, and it hit harder than I remembered (probably because the synth sounded like something from a professional production studio and not a bunch of saw waves stacked on top of each other by a 20-year-old). Either way, I listened through the song again and decided that the best melody for the bridge would be the part that goes "Whoa-oh-oh-oh." Or was it "He-e-e-ey"? I was listening to it this morning! How could I have forgotten already? Also, I was going to write some actual lyrics to it: