I really like U2 and have seen them live a few times, but on the other hand, the band Stump is the band that make me proud of my Irish family roots. I just came upon this video for the song Charlton Heston, and, well, it's bloody genius.
This band, and its Captain Beefheart-esque music, were part of the musical soundtrack to my life, back in the mid to late 1980s, when I was grappling with Chi-Squares and qualitative data sets as a master's degree student at University of Wisconsin, and listening enthusiastically to Stump's A Fierce Pancake.
Their music was, and is, delightfully quirky, catchy, and full of wit and energy. You can clearly hear the Irishness in the vocal inflections of lead singer Mick Lynch. The song/video is great, too, in how it comedically and absurdly deconstructs spectacle, such as movies like the Ten Commandments - and religious spectacle even, i.e., as a kind of cross between Samuel Beckett and the Three Stooges. Sadly, they chose to break up soon thereafter rather than slog it out in the music world. Happily, though, their music lives on, via ITunes and in the memories of fans of the quirky and original.
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