Sir Hugh Beaver loved to go hunting, and on Nov. 10, 1951, took a shot at a golden plover and missed. An argument arose within the hunting party: Was the golden plover the fastest game bird in Europe? If it was, Sir Beaver had his excuse. But someone else insisted that the true speed champion was the rest grouse, casting aspersions on Sir Beaver’s statement.
That night at the lodge, no amount of research could determine which bird was quicker. This was frustrating.
Returning to his position as the managing director of Guinness Breweries, he commissioned Norris and Ross McWhirter to compile a book that would settle all future debates about the fastest, slowest, biggest, smallest, highest, lowest, and all manner of superlatives of all time. Thus was born The Guinness Book of World Records.
I’ve had a similar idea for the world of music, but I don’t have an international brewery to finance it. Until such time, I present to you possible entries in my book, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Book of World Records.
The longest title for a song
You might remember Rednex, the Swedish collective that mixed country music with Eurodance, best exemplified by their completely unnecessary cover of Cotton-Eyed Joe. They also wrote a song called The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation. That’s 52 words and 254 characters.
The longest album title
There’s no point in logging the shortest album title because many records aren’t titled at all. As for the longest, some point to a Fiona Apple album from 1999 that begins When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts… and continues for 90 words and 355 characters. Some will point to a Soulwax album from 2007 that starts Most of the Remixes We’ve Done Over the Years… and ends with …Always at Our Studios in Ghent after 103 words and 405 characters.
However, the current champion belongs to England’s Chumbawamba. At the risk of blowing through my allotted word count for these columns, I present it in full here:
The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother’s Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don’t Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to ‘Guard’ Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It’s Over, Then It’s Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won.
You’re welcome.
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The longest song
This is a tricky one. You could point to As Slow as Possible, the John Cage performance art piece currently being perform in a German church. It’s designed to last 639 years, finally ending in the year 2640. But it, and others like it, either have to be played by multiple people or automatically by mechanical or electronic means. What about a single song that can be performed by a human?
The champion seems to be The Devil’s Glitch by Chris Butler, the composer of The Waitresses’ Christmas hit, Christmas Wrapping. The original version was 68 minutes and 53 seconds, which featured 500 verses, none of which were repeated, and with no reliance on instrumental breaks. Chris recorded it in one long take in 1996. It was even nominated for a Grammy in 1998.
He’s since created an extended version that runs two hours and 53 minutes. Here’s the, er, radio edit.
Longest band name
The most common winner in this category is a Mexican metal band that created their moniker by stringing together the names of a bunch of diseases. Behold Paracocidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis.
However, I beg to differ. There is a South African band (c. 2016) called XavlegbmaofffassssitimiwoamndutroabcwapwaeiippohfffX. We aren’t meant to pronounce that, though, because it’s an abbreviation (of sorts) to their official 50-word name. Because this is a family site, I’d better just give you a link.
The shortest song ever released
At the end of the spectrum, we have Storm Troopers of Death with their cover of the Joan Baez song. It runs about two seconds. They, by the way, call this the “extended version.”
Slightly shorter is this 1992 track by New York grindcore legends Brutal Truth. Their song Collateral Damage runs 2.18 seconds and spawned a video featuring 48 still images of an explosion with each image receiving 44/1000th of a second of screentime.
But not so fast! We must consider Napalm Death and a seven-inch from 1986 entitled You Suffer. The official time is 1.316 seconds. And yes, there’s a video for it, too.
The fastest song ever recorded
Song tempo is measure in beats per minute (BPM). Moby has a track called Thousand, which he performs live. If you try to dance to this, you’ll soon hit Max-Q and explode.
The largest personal record collection
My wife complains about my 7,000 records and 10,000 CDs. I counter by reminding her that I could be like José Roberto “Zero” Alves Freitas, a Brazilian businessman who has made it his life’s work to own a copy of every record ever. At last count, he’s filled a 25,000 square-foot warehouse São Paulo with around eight million records, most of which are completely unfiled and uncatalogued. However…
If you want something less chaotic, props to Paul Mawinney, a former record store owner in Pittsburgh. Staring with a single 45 entitled Jezebel from singer Frankie Laine in the 1950s, his collection grew to three million records and 300,000 CDs on every imaginable commercially-available format. Poor health prompted him to sell everything in 2008, but he was unable to find a buyer. That is until our Brazilian friend Zero stepped in and purchased the whole thing in 2013.
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