'Powerless Ballad': Trio Records Ode to Pepco
YouTube video song goes viral as musicians play in the dark.
A group of local musicians has gone “unplugged”—not by choice.
Now the group's YouTube video song railing against Pepco, the major electricity utility in the Washington, DC, region, is going viral.
The song has many obscene lyrics and a name that is unprintable here. (Think the Cee Lo Green hit that was edited for radio as “Forget You.”)
The more printable lyrics include the chorus: “What the hell, you guys?/Stop telling us these lies/All we want at this point/ is air conditioning in our lives.”
The less printable lines are a mix of angst, anguish and sing-song profanity that—after nearly a week without power for some in the region—likely strike a chord with the “powerless” in and around DC and Maryland.
(Not to be upstaged by Pepco, BGE has won its share of irate customers, including Patch editor Doug Donovan, who earlier this week offered up tips on “What ‘Not’ to Say to Neighbors Still Without Power.”)
The ode to Pepco, previously reported by the dcist blog, is by Katie Zacharkiw, Kelly Harris and Dwight Rundle, according to the description below the video. The trio goes by the name “Acoustic by Circumstance.”
Rundle’s Web site includes some demo versions of what appear to be original songs and the mention that he’s relatively new to town and apparently has played at an open mic at Ebeneezers coffee house on Capitol Hill.
Serena Golden, whose Twitter account lists her as an associate editor at Inside Higher Ed, posted the video.
“My housemates, ‘Acoustic by Circumstance,’ wrote a little song about our experience with Pepco since the storm,” which devastated the DC, Maryland and Virginia area Friday night, she wrote.
The trio is scheduled to appear on the NBC4 network affiliate, according to one tweet on Twitter.
The video has generated the typical comments to which YouTube is prone. One of the less obscene portions of an otherwise profanity-laced screed said the song was full of “First-world problems.”
You can find the video here.
A word of warning: Tipper Gore would want the “Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics” label all over this one. The lyrics are “not safe for work," for children or those with sensitive ears.
Jerry
4:36 pm on Saturday, July 7, 2012
My street had power restored around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, but it took active participation by myself and a neighbor to get it done. We noticed that the top wire, called "the primary" by the repair crew, had snapped in the wind and was lying on the street. Falling trees had nothing to do with it. We found a Pepco repair crew, imported from Louisiana, performing repairs a few blocks away. We told the foreman about our snapped top wire, and within an hour the crew was on our street and fixed it in about 30 minutes. The lesson: The challenge and the cause for the delay is not so much the time required to fix the problem, but to locate it. To that end, visual inspection of your street during an outage might do much to speed things along. I'm not big fan of Pepco; however, they deserve some credit from drawing in repair crews from as far away as Canada, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana.