#oneaday, Day 38: Angry Jedi

In an attempt to stem the tide of people asking one of the most common questions on the Internet—”how did you get your username?”—I shall set out the story forthwith.

I’m a trained teacher, as some of you may know. This meant I spent an extra year at university following my practically useless but enjoyable English and Music degree studying a PGCE (a PostGraduate Certificate of Education, for those who like to know what their acronyms mean). It was an enjoyable but stressful time, and I was happy to make some good friends during that time, one of whom was my placement buddy for my second in-school assignment.

His name was Owen, and he was a good man that I’ve sadly fallen out of touch with in recent years, but we had some excellent times. He was also convinced that we were Jay and Silent Bob, an observation that was pretty accurate on so many levels. But that’s beside the point: the point is, Owen and I were the original source of Angry Jedi.

You see, sometimes when you get home from teaching practice all you really want to do is get absolutely trashed on cheap rosé and make music from approximately 48 CDs worth of samples. So that’s what we regularly did, with extremely entertaining results. We decided that we needed a name for our makeshift band, and decided that the oxymoron “Angry Jedi” was a fitting summation of our respective personalities and the bizarre music we created. Ever since that time, I’ve taken to using “Angry Jedi” or some variant thereof as my username, as it’s 1) a reminder of some very fond memories and 2) a name that no-one else ever appears to have thought of on the Internet… except someone on Xbox LIVE.

On Xbox LIVE, I’m called “sonicfunkstars”, which I believe we discussed the other day. “sonicfunkstars” (all lower case, that’s important) was a previous makeshift band that consisted of me and, occasionally, my good friends Sam and Edd. There was also a brief dalliance with being “Captain Gaspard and the Snarfriders”, but tracks under that name are all on a MiniDisc somewhere (yes! MiniDisc!) and I have no idea where. If I ever find them, you’ll be the first to know.

But you don’t care about personal history. You want to hear the ridiculous sounds we came out with, of course. All right. Here’s a selection of some of our finest moments. iPhone users, as ever, click on the song titles to listen. Everyone else, use the fancypants WordPress flash player thingy.

Bad Influence

This track was composed for two reasons: firstly, to have an excuse to use as many Harry Potter quotes as possible, including the titular “Bad Influence” extract. Secondly, we put it together while we were teaching a unit on “fusion” music at school. As such, there are some fairly diverse ethnic influences throughout the track. It also contains the line “It’s knowledge. It’s power. It’s not a fucking tractor.” And, as I recall, we used to find the “ta ta tippy tippy tum na” guy hilarious, though that may have had something to do with the amount of wine consumed.

Baching Mad

When creating this track, we decided it would be amusing to imagine what it would be like if J.S. Bach were having a piano lesson and doing very badly—so badly, in fact, that he ended up breaking his piano. (Let’s leave aside the historical inaccuracy of J.S. Bach playing a piano for a moment.) We then followed this by attempting to mix together as many inappropriate pieces of “classical” music as possible with some kickin’ beats. See how many you can spot. This is, to date, one of my favourite aural monstrosities. Particularly the key change partway through.

Kick the Dog

I honestly can’t remember what twisted path of logic led to the decision that we should create a track based on abusing small yapper-type dogs with a variety of increasingly-gruesome implements punctuated by drum fills performed by chickens. But I’m glad we followed it. Owen’s performance of all the verbs he wanted to do to annoying rat-like dogs took several takes, as I recall. There’s also a nice bit of Nirvana mixed in there, too. No actual dogs were harmed during the course of this track.

The Guff Rap

No explanation required.

Get Off My Ship Original Mix and Ultimate Mix

These two tracks performed two important functions: firstly, to provide a showcase for PATRICK STEWART, and secondly, to demonstrate the concept of remixing to impressionable sixth formers. Captain Picard gets increasingly frustrated at the people who keep invading his bridge and politely requests they vacate the premises.

The Judas Joint

Our crowning glory: mixing, if I recall correctly, five Judas Priest tracks together and including a break for Meg Ryan to have an orgasm. The evil laugh in this is performed by me. I was pretty impressed with myself.

There are other tracks, some of which don’t appear to have survived the move between computers and through time. The most notable absence is a brilliant song called “Today Fucking Sucked”, which I don’t believe needs any further explanation.

Anyhow. I hope you’ve enjoyed this window into the life of a trainee teacher, circa 2002-2003. And now you know why I’m called Angry Jedi. It is not because of the somewhat more offensive meaning of the phrase which my friend Amy discovered last year.

If you want to know that one, you can Google it yourself. (It’s quite amusing. And/or disgusting. I forget which.)