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Ernie Wade vs. Jonathan Coulton?
About an hour ago I received a very odd email:
Here’s the text if it’s too small to read:
Dear Miss Belmont,
I have noticed that you are a fan of the musician Jonathan Coulton, but you should know that he is a fraud!! My cousin Ernie wrote the song Code Monkey (as you can clearly hear from the music file I have sent you) before he passed away from liver disease (rest his soul). Please tell your readers and don’t let this lie continue!Cory
He also sent along an MP3 of his cousin’s version, and his webpage . I grabbed a few screenshots of the site because I thought it was so funny, although it seems like it’s been up and down all day. I’m reposting the MP3 for you guys so you can take a listen:
Click to embiggen!
What do you guys think? Does Cory have something here, or is it some kind of hilarious hoax? Len from Jawbone Radio also had a similar email sent to him, so who knows! I wonder if Jonathan has anything to say about it.
UPDATES:
Cory Wade has a Twitter!
Lusis did some research into Ernie’s background, and the parallels with Coulton.
NEW UPDATE!
Coulton is obviously still trying to cover this up. When will he learn that the truth must be known?! Besides, everyone knows Tom can’t sing.
No related posts.
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2. Ernie Wade – April Fools! You all know that by now, and most of you knew it pretty early on. I meant to juice up a little more doubt and controversy, but when it came down to it I couldn’t keep a straight face. Also there were enough people in on the joke tweeting and blogging about it that I enjoyed watching it all unfold. In case you missed it, the idea took shape in Vegas (erm, I guess there are a lot of things that do NOT stay in Vegas) when I was at the New Media Expo playing the Coverville 500 concert. At the table were me, Len, Patrick and Tom, and I hope nobody else that I’m forgetting because I’m an insensitive jerk. We thought it would be funny to manufacture a scandal in which it is discovered that all my songs are stolen. Because he is crazy, Tom actually followed through and created a site and recorded a couple of songs: Code Monkey and Warrior Robot Revenge. Say want you want about these kinds of April Fools Day pranks, but there are some really nice touches on the site, in the photos, the cassette labels, and especially in the songs. My favorite is the photo on this page captioned “Here is a picture I had of Ernie driving his truck…” And the songs have a perfect bizarro-world-JoCo quality to them – poor Ernie really loved Jan.
(From Coulton’s own site!!)
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Nice to have the perpetrator’s confirmation of a hoax. Even without it, I have one reason for not believing the accusation that trumps all my others: namely, that JoCo is far too capable to need to rip off someone else, especially at that point in his songwriting career. Even a casual listen to previous “Thing a Week” entries should provide ample demonstration.
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#59 written by bob 1 year ago
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My unprofessional image analysis on the Huber’s garage pic on the “Remember Earnie” web page reveal to me that it is a fake photoshop job. http://sites.google.com/site/remembererniewade/Home/ernie-s-tapes/HubersGarage.JPG?attredirects=0 The gamma on the white portions of the ‘fake’ sign exceeds that of all of the other hotspots in the image, the CCD noise in the red field of the ‘fake’ sign does not match that of the other real-world samples in the photo, and the black areas in the ‘fake’ sign are darker than any other dark area in the photo. Fun while it lasted. (Is this controversy even still alive?)