The Bluegrass Intelligencer
Among the non-music web sites that I enjoy most regularly are ones that use satire and faux-news stories in humorous ways. Sites like The Onion and Stuff White People Like really tickle my funny bone, though with humor being such a subjective attribute, your mileage may vary.
Here’s one that mixes that sort of humor with the bluegrass and acoustic music personalities we know and love, The Bluegrass Intelligencer.
Recent posts have included parody stories like World Scientists Redouble Efforts to Clone Chris Thile and New Mitchell Report on Performance-Enhancing Drugs Names Mountain Heart, Kentucky Thunder.
The latter is simply hilarious, tying together the controversy in Major League Baseball over the use of human growth hormone, with the performance abilities of some of bluegrass music’s hot young virtuosos.
Greg Cahill, Chairman of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), has stated that each accusation will be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.
As the pressure to play faster, cleaner, more energetic solos has increased over the years, IBMA drug testing has failed to keep pace, and a culture of permissiveness has evolved.
"I mean, when you go to a festival and you see Cody Kilby playing those guitar solos with Kentucky Thunder, you know that it’s not naturally possible, yet everyone just looks the other way," said Thom Thoreau, bluegrass fan.
Indeed, the report has explicitly named more than half of Kentucky Thunder as well as the entire six-piece group Mountain Heart. Among others, fiddlers Andy Leftwich and Jim Van Cleve, as well as guitarist Cody Kilby have been subpoenaed to testify under oath during the next session of Congress.
Some of the language and subject matter is a bit outside of polite conversation, but everything I saw there was just plain funny.
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Longtime readers of The Bluegrass Blog will have noted my fondness for The Bluegrass Intelligencer, a news parody site - a la The Onion - that focuses on personalities in the bluegrass and acoustic string world.
I find the site to be clever and uproariously funny, though you might want to be wary...
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