Pretty Fly For A Rabbi (lost official remix of "Weird Al" Yankovic song from Yahoo! Music Beatnik GrooveGrams Contest; 1999-2000)

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Running with Scissors (Weird Al Yankovic album - cover art).jpg

Cover of "Weird Al" Yankovic's Running With Scissors album.

Status: Lost

As part of the Yahoo! Music Beatnik GrooveGrams Contest from November 18th, 1999 to January 10th, 2000, "Weird Al" Yankovic released an official remix of his song "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", a parody of The Offspring's "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)" from Yankovic's 1999 album Running with Scissors. This remix was released only on the Yahoo! Music Beatnik site as part of the contest promotion and has never appeared elsewhere.

The software used to remix the song was made by Thomas Dolby's sound company Beatnik, which became defunct in 2011. In January 1999, Beatnik partnered with Yahoo! for Beatnik GrooveGrams [1].

Fans could use the Beatnik plugin in a web browser to create their own remixes. According to Yahoo! Music's media release about the contest: "Each instrument of a particular song is on a different track that users can boost, mute, solo or adjust. The result is a unique rendition of the original tune, personally created by the user. Links to GrooveGrams can be sent through email and are not downloaded by the recipient, but saved with instructions to a secure Web address (or URL), which will recreate the recorded mix from the GrooveGram sender." [2]

Beatnik's authoring tool, Beatnik Editor, is used to create music in Beatnik's RMF (Rich Music Format) file format, but could also export in WAV, Sound Designer II, MP3, AIFF, and RAW formats. The web version of the editor used for the contest, however, could not save songs. [3]

As part of the partnership, the Yahoo! Music GrooveGram Contest was born. U.S. residents were eligible to remix a variety of songs from artists such as Britney Spears, Puff Daddy, and "Weird Al" Yankovic, among others. Available prizes included signed albums, event tickets, and in the case of “Weird Al”-- a signed accordion.

The contest timeline for remixing "Weird Al"'s song was November 18th, 1999, 12:00 p.m. PST to January 10th, 2000, 9:00 a.m. PST.

Due to the functionality of the Beatnik software, users did not end up with a hard copy file of their music creations, and thus any Beatnik remixes were lost when the contest page on Yahoo! Music was pulled down.

The Beatnik Player is still available at CNET Download, so if an RMF version of "Weird Al"'s original remix does resurface, it can still be played. [4]

See Also

References

  1. ↑ Beatnik's Remix Wired Article. Retrieved 09 Feb '18
  2. ↑ Yahoo! Music Press Release: Fans Can Win Prizes By Remixing Songs From Britney Spears, Puff Daddy, 'Weird Al' Yankovic, Lou Bega, and Others. Retrieved 09 Feb '18
  3. ↑ Beatnik Editor 2 Info Sheet. Retrieved 09 Feb '18
  4. ↑ Beatnik Player. Retrieved 09 Feb '18
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