SNS: Christmas with John Coulton

John Coulton is a singer who allows his work to be used by “the masses” to create homemade videos or other projects, without worrying about the Recording Industry Association of America suing them. (The RIAA is supposed to protect the rights of music creators.) You may have heard his song “Code Monkey” as the theme for G4’s Code Monkeys 8-bit animated series.  I’ve also heard some of his work used for the video game Rock Band, but that was at a group gettogether, and I didn’t ask if it was a fan-made track or officially produced by Harmonix. Mostly because I didn’t hear about him specifically before looking for Christmas videos for this year’s Christmas Spotlights.

Tonight’s post isn’t about Coulton’s work itself as much as it is what at least two fans did with his songs. The first one is “Podcast Christmas”. This version was made by “Spiffworld”, who uses Machinma and the World of Warcraft game to add video to what appears to be a spoof of the holiday favorite “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)”.

The song at the end was another Coulton song, “Chiron Beta Prime”, about a family trying to celebrate Christmas during the Robot Apocalypse we all know is coming someday. I actually found a few videos for this one, but my favorite comes from “jocopro” (even if he does blow up Santa!), which sounds like a Judoon soldier, if you ask me.

If you haven’t guessed from this and other songs, like “Re: Your Brains”, he’s something of a sci-fi/horror geek. Which is what I like about him, obviously. (Well, not so much a song about zombies sending e-mails to their victims to give up, but otherwise…) While I have no issues with the RIAA (as a would-be creator myself, I would like to maintain control over my creations, more for personal reasons than financial concerns that I would still have), I do support anything that leads to creative fun like this.