The other night, I found myself twitting, in that old school sense of “gently teasing”, a friend of mine about some filk she was in the middle of perpetrating with the help of my partner.
Filk, for those who only consume the mass media, is the term for taking a tune and putting new lyrics to it. Sometimes this is wholesale replacement of lyrics, which might make Weird Al Yankovic the consummate filker. More often these days, some or most of the original lyrics are retained to improve recognition of the original source.
In the middle of mockingly blaming her for leading him into bad habits, I realized somewhat shamefacedly that this is a bad habit I have myself. I do it allllllllllll the time.
I just call them snowclones.
Seriously – what else are snowclones, if not taking an existing tunephrase and tweaking it with some new lyricswords? They’re just the ultra-short-form version.
This fits in with my other bad habits, like multi-tasking and writing flash fiction. In fact, one might even say that snowclones are a form of flash filk.
Yeah, I’m gonna go with that. Flash filk is the new snowclone.
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I wholeheartedly agree. Hee hee hee. (we need more flashfilks. And snowclones.)