“Barbie” (2023) is becoming the box office wonder of 2023. A lot can be attributed to its success: great performances by the cast, the sets and cinematography, and the catchy songs and choreographies. Together with my fiancé, I went to a screening of the film at a mall in Malaysia. They have an amazing theater complex, and the tickets only cost 3 dollars per person. My review for this film is for another day, first I want to show my parody song that is inspired by the film.
Merciless Earworm
After seeing the film, I was stuck with the merciless ear worm “I’m Just Ken”, written by musical genius Mark Ronson, and performed by Ryan Gosling. The song got stuck in my head, and soon I noticed that I couldn’t go to sleep without the tune playing on repeat inside my head. At first, it was funny. But it didn’t take long for it to become torturous. After a few sleepless nights, I decided that, in order to get over this heinous ear worm, I had to do something creative with it. This way, I could squeeze all the power out of the spell and sleep again.
The Process
It all started with one boring day on my couch. I was giving one prompt after the other to an AI Image Generator to amuse myself. I put famous people in silly situations and Elon Musk was one of them. I gave the prompt of him being all nostalgic and melancholic while in a spaceship to Mars. When I revisited the images days later, I noticed that the image reminded me of Ryan Gosling’s Ken sitting on his bed while singing the aforementioned song.
I downloaded the lyrics of the song, and adjusted them to Elon Musk. After that, I found an AI Voice Generator that, after watching several ads to build up credit, let me insert my own lyrics and choose them to be sung by Elon. Unfortunately, it’s spoken word. The app didn’t let me download the voice, so instead, I had to hold my phone against my ZOOM H6 Audio Recorder, and import the file on my desktop. There, I was able to manipulate the voice with Logic Pro. I downloaded an instrumental version of the “Barbie” song and chopped the voice and placed it on the song. Some voice gaps lead to noise coming back and falling away, so I took a little snippet of only the noise from the voice recording, and put it under the moments where the voice recording wasn’t present. That way the absence of noise was bridged and the track sounded more coherent.
The Parody
The result is far from what I had intended, but of course, everything crumbled with the voice not being able to sing on the melody. Some cut and paste techniques tried to overcome this shortcoming, but it’s still nothing more than a creative waste of time. Still, I enjoyed myself making this. And that’s what’s important. Without further ado, here’s Elon Musk in “I’m Just Elon”.
