Howard Stern might have been the first to sample Dean–he put the speech to some AC/DC early Tuesday morning. Right Magazine, an online political journal for students at Wheaton College, outside Chicago, also posted a two-minute clip Tuesday morning, called the “Dean Goes Nuts Remix.” (Thanks for inventing the Internet, Al!) Jonathan Strong, 20, the song’s creator, had been doing homework, but abandoned that after listening to Dean’s speech. He estimates that the tune he mixed instead got downloaded more than 7,000 times between Tuesday morning and early evening. The music is from an Aphex Twin song called “Wax the Nip,” says Strong, who complied with a request to take the copyrighted material down from his site. “It took me two hours in the middle of the night, until 2 or 3 in the morning,” he says. “I came back from class Tuesday afternoon and it was all over the Internet. I purchased seven more gigs of bandwidth, took a nap, and, when I woke up, my site was down again.”
James Lileks’s version is simply named “Yeagh,”
(http://homepage.mac.com/lileks/.Public/Yeagh.mp3) and it’s a minute long. For sheer dance value, his track might be the best. (“Are we sick of the Dean yelp yet?” Lileks, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist, asks on his Web site, The Bleat. “We are.”) If you just need a quick fix, however, Jonathan Barlow’s clip (http://barlowfarms.com/howarddean.wav) is considerably shorter–just 15 seconds. Barlow says that he picked up the Dean audio from The Drudge Report. The music is his own. “It’s got a funky, hip-hop-type beat with an acoustic bass line and jazz horns,” says Barlow, 29, a grad student at St. Louis University who is getting a Ph.D. in the history of religion in America. “I’m not a Dean fan, but it’s not nasty. He just looked real cheesy. The thing that cheesed me up the most was when he rolled up his sleeves and threw his jacket to [Iowa Sen. Tom] Harkin.” Strong says he used a software called Cubase to produce his clip. Barlow says he used Apple’s new GarageBand audio program, which has only been available to the public in the last week. Lucky you, Howard Dean!
