Not news about music but music about the news; a weekly half-hour news show with songwriters instead of newscasters. "And now, with the latest report on the mid-east crisis, here's Randy Newman." "There was another riot in Dublin last week, here's what U2 have to say about it." "What about that hurricane in Florida? Here are the Beach Boys."
In order to ensure that MUSICAL NEWS looks like no other news show that has ever appeared before, there will never be a man in a suit sitting at a desk in front of a blue screen. There will be no host at all. There will be no live footage at all. The introduction to each song (if one is necessary) will go across the bottom of the screen like a Teletype. The whole show is the leftovers of some News Network (or the actual broadcast footage) plus whatever else is stock footage simply re-edited to music. MUSICAL NEWS is entirely post-production, composed of nothing but existing footage plus public domain news footage that we can colorize and own anew.
There will be a staff of six multi-talented songwriters and a house band capable of any sound on earth. They will record the songs each week, either with the individual artists, or by themselves as satires of popular songs. Each show will contain at least one new song by an exploitable celebrity and one classic song revisited. The rest will be original material written by the staff and owned by the production company. Material that can be re-packaged as annual home video cassettes - MUSICAL NEWS '96, '97, etc. (Don't laugh. Motown has a hit with their home video releases of public domain '50s and '60s footage edited to '50s and '60s Motown hits.)
MUSICAL NEWS will be satirical, offbeat, clever, enlightening, entertaining, informative, and you can tap your toes to it. With creative and illuminating intercutting of stock footage and new footage, the only commentary is visual. Essentially, the editors are the writers. It's a show that can easily change the course of TV news, the one that's not only aimed at teenagers but the one that teenagers actually watch, the 60 Minutes of the teenage world.
Demo tape available with original songs by Michael Dare & Richard Goldman
See "The
Fuse is Getting Shorter" for musical news about OJ.