what is this "Like a Rolling Stone" parody about Roger Stone?

January 28, 2019 12:22 PM

The Jan 25 episode of "Today Explained" ( "The Man with the Nixon Tattoo" ) about Roger Stone ended with about a minute of a parody of "Like a Rolling Stone" with the lyrics changed to be about Roger Stone. Can anyone tell me who did this work and point me towards a more complete recording (if such a thing even exists).

The Jan 25 episode of "Today Explained" ( "The Man with the Nixon Tattoo" ) about Roger Stone ended with about a minute of a parody of "Like a Rolling Stone" with the lyrics changed to be about Roger Stone. Can anyone tell me who did this work and point me towards a more complete recording (if such a thing even exists). As an aside, I don't think "parody" is quite the right word for this since it's not really poking fun at the song at all. What would be a better term for this recording?

Here's a link to the episode

posted by metadave to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Best answer: The New Yorker, last March: "At other times, “Today, Explained” gets freewheeling. The show started its first meme (resulting in a Twitter Moment) in late February. The team was figuring out how to do its first piece on the Mueller investigation and wanted to provide a brief primer, Rameswaram told me recently. But how? The reporter they were talking to, Zack Beauchamp, said, “If we do the people one by one, it’ll start to sound a little ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ ” “I said, ‘Oh yeah? That sounds great!’ ” Rameswaram told me, and he wrote a parody of the Billy Joel song. (“Meeting at the Trump Hotel / Then director Comey fell / Dutch attorney van der Zwaan / Holy shit this list is long.”) “We all drafted it,” Rameswaram said. “My version was the one we eventually went with, because I seem to have the most experience writing parody music.”"
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:29 PM on January 28, 2019

Formally, it's called contrafactum.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:30 PM on January 28, 2019

if you like this sort of thing
posted by BungaDunga at 4:37 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]