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Imagine this: George Bush raps with John Lennon


KiwiCoromandel

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George Bush has been keeping musical company with John Lennon this year and it's been entertaining thousands.....Yes, it's true, the former Beatle is long dead and the US President, unlike his sax-honking predecessor, confined his "tooting" to wild parties during his youth. But thanks to the efforts of a Sydney musician-cum-political activist, this unlikely duo has had one of the most requested tracks on radio for several months, here and overseas.

The song, Imagine This, features the cut-and-spliced voice of Mr Bush seemingly repeating segments of Imagine, Lennon's 1971 plea for secular harmony. Over modern dance beats and the original Lennon piano, Bush can be heard saying things such as "imagine there's no countries, it is not hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, and that's a good thing".

Although the song has had no commercial release, until a week ago it was in the top-five requested songs on Triple J, turning its creator, Tom Compagnoni, into an unlikely pop maven and his site, www.waxaudio.com.au, inundated by people downloading his tracks for free.

Compagnoni is a leading light of the musical form of "mashing"- where incongruous material is paired digitally, without permission, to make a new track. It's seen such combinations as Kylie Minogue and New Order and rapper Jay Z's Black Album lyrics paired with the Beatles' White Album music for the underground hit, The Grey Album.

The mashing comes with a political edge for the 31-year-old Comagnoni, who travelled through the Middle East in the late '90s and returned home to the post-September 11, post-Tampa world believing the media wasn't getting out the whole story. Apart from one track featuring the expletive-laden diatribes of Ray Hadley and Alan Jones, the topics cover refugees, war in Iraq and war on terrorism, and are constructed from recordings of his old band And.

Compagnoni and his wife, Ishbel, are leaving in a few weeks to live overseas - not to escape irate right-wingers but for "a total change in lifestyle" now that he has achieved his aim. "Instead of being frustrated by it [the media]. I turned it around the way I wanted to hear it and then managed to hear it through the same machine."

http://www.waxaudio.com.au/download_the_mp3s

source:smh.com.au

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