Armed livestock

May 31, 2021 6:48 PM

In the dim internet pasts of 1996/7; well before we were wondering "What the Fox Says" or were Hamster Dancing Dana Lyons had an insane hit with "Cows with Guns". This is the story of how it went from divinely inspired dream to life sustaining hit.

Previously but linked site required flash so.... Also previously "What Does the Fox Say".

posted by Mitheral (28 comments total)

It really is hard to grok the insane penetration of this song. Dana writes:

Within a week 6 Seattle Radio stations were playing COWS WITH GUNS simultaneously. The first Seattle stations to play it were KYCW Young Country on the morning show with Dent and Burns, KISW 99.9 - "Seattle's Best Rock", on the morning show "Twisted Tunes", with Bob Rivers, Joe Bryant and Spike on Sports, and KMTT - The Mountain, on the 5:20 funny. Zach brought CDs around to stores in the Seattle area, and in early October COWS WITH GUNS moooved onto the Cellophane Square Top 40 charts in the Seattle region.

That was certianly my recollection as well. All the local radio stations were playing it regardless of nominal format including the CBC.
posted by Mitheral at 6:51 PM on May 31, 2021 [2 favorites]

Dana Lyons is a funny guy, this story is great.
posted by subdee at 7:23 PM on May 31, 2021

Surprised I've never heard of this video; in 1996 I would have just been starting grad school in Boston and heavily plugged in to early Internet culture. Huh.

The MeFi post frames this in terms of the Internet but was that really a big part of this song? The article doesn't say much about it, just a couple of DJ websites and some early Internet sales.

It's hard to remember just how hard sharing video on the Internet was back in the late 90s. Even if you had the bandwidth to download a video you still had the challenge of having the right codecs and a computer that could usefully display a video. And your reward would be some 8 bit 320x240 thing with, if you were lucky, stereo sound. Once you upgraded your Linux sound drivers you might even be able to play it!

The first really successful Internet video I remember is soxmas.avi, the original South Park demo reel. I mean there were other videos on the Internet by then of course but not much of impact or a trajectory to mainstream culture. Dancing Baby, maybe.
posted by Nelson at 8:01 PM on May 31, 2021 [2 favorites]

Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger...
posted by Windopaene at 8:11 PM on May 31, 2021 [12 favorites]

"Don't kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone else you care about."
posted by darkstar at 8:12 PM on May 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

I believe you mean the #1 Napster download "Cows With Guns by Weird Al Yankovic".
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:19 PM on May 31, 2021 [16 favorites]

I'm not surprised that Australian sales and airplay saved the bloke financially. This song was a rash on Triple J, the Australian national youth radio network, which has had a single constant aim, as fixed as the stars, never changing throughout decades of broadcasting: to water down natural youthful coolness by playing novelty songs.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:23 PM on May 31, 2021 [2 favorites]

I loved this bit about his conversations with Penguin Publishing:

A week later he called. “I got an agent and Penguin will publish the book.” I was impressed.

Penguin wanted to make a few changes. “Cows are female, so the committee thinks that Cow Tse Tongue should be female. And we want this to be sold as a children’s book so we’d like you to change the lines “pissed in his eye” and “cow well hung”.

Fortunately I had no idea I was talking with one of the most important publishers in the country. Sometimes ignorance can work in your favor. My back was killing me, my romance was disintegrating and I was in a really fowl mood.

“Tell the committee that Cow Tse Tongue’s gender is a secret to create confusion around who the real Cow Tse Tongue is: And for purposes of security we’ll have to keep Cow Tse Tongue male in the book. Also explain to them that “pissed in his eye” is the four year olds’ favorite line; and the line “cow well hung” will give parents a chance to be creative when asked about its meaning. Besides, the song is on the top of the charts in Australia, and I’ll never be able to show my face over there if I wimp out on these lines.”

“And by the way, if Penguin has a problem with a word referring to urination being seen in a children’s book, have they considered the issue cows running around with automatic weapons?”

They hadn’t.

Next week I got a call. “The committee had a change of heart. No changes!”

:D
posted by darkstar at 8:31 PM on May 31, 2021 [12 favorites]

Penguin wanted to make a few changes. “Cows are female, so the committee thinks that Cow Tse Tongue should be female. And we want this to be sold as a children’s book so we’d like you to change the lines “pissed in his eye” and “cow well hung”.

🎶Cow dung flung🎶
posted by azpenguin at 8:59 PM on May 31, 2021 [9 favorites]

I absolutely remember the song and animation from back in the day! When exactly "the day" is, I don't remember. At first read of the FPP, I was shocked that this was as early as 1996, but the animation must have been post-2000 as it references President George W. Bush. From the article it sounds like Cows With Guns the song was a slightly pre-Internet phenomenon. I suspect Cows With Guns the animation must have come a bit after Hamster Dance the website.
posted by biogeo at 9:33 PM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]

I remember a friend telling me that he knew Dana Lyons through environmentalist activism (dude was popular with the ELF crowd) and was amused and pleased to see him gain popularity with regular folks.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:36 PM on May 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

Despite being online in 1996 (perhaps still via Prodigy) I totally missed this; glad I finally learned about it. And it gives me one more reason to dislike Cick-Fil-A; the whole “eat mor chikin” ad campaign seems awfully ungrateful.
posted by TedW at 11:22 PM on May 31, 2021

I was introduced to cow's with guns played on the big screen at Wholefoods restaurant at Monash Clayton. Definitely suits the vibe.
posted by freethefeet at 12:04 AM on June 1, 2021

It's a nice thought that the chickens would provide air support, but I think we all know that there's way too much animosity there.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:16 AM on June 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's likely I conflated the 1997 and 2000ish time periods.
posted by Mitheral at 5:05 AM on June 1, 2021

One of the only reasons I was sad to see flash go was that it meant an entire catalog of early internet was gone. Cows with guns, Napster Bad, Money good, gonads and strife, mushroom mushroom, all of camp chaos, just a vast archive of what the net was like in the beginning.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:49 AM on June 1, 2021 [9 favorites]

(For the sake of pedantry, I mean "pre-Internet" in the same sense of "prehistory", as in, obviously the Internet existed in 1996, but it hadn't yet penetrated culturally everywhere, and the initial spread of Cows With Guns as described in the article seems to have relied largely on pre-Internet media like radio.)
posted by biogeo at 6:55 AM on June 1, 2021

Huh. I didn't realize that the song had a life/was a hit outside of said animation. Didn't make it onto any of the DC-area stations I listened to, but then I only really listened to them when commuting.
posted by tavella at 7:01 AM on June 1, 2021

It's likely I conflated the 1997 and 2000ish time periods.

I do this all the time. I think it's because the technology upgrade cycles of the era always unlocked a new Internet frontier to experience for the first time and produced similar feelings of discovery and potential which now make it tough to remember what happened when.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:29 AM on June 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

The minor league baseball club in my town played the HamPster Dance on the PA at the last game.

That took me back.
posted by hwyengr at 7:33 AM on June 1, 2021

Dating the early internet stuff is much more difficult in retrospect than I expected. Here are my biggest memories of funny videos and sites from the early internet days. (Full disclosure: I have never heard this "Cows with Guns" song.)

1997 - Brunching Shuttlecocks
1998 - Hampster Dance
2000 - Homestar Runner
2001 - All Your Base (Are Belong to Us)
2001 - Yatta! (Irrational Exuberance)
2002 - Viking Kittens
2006 - Shoes (oh my god shoes)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:58 AM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

2002 - Viking Kittens

Viking Kittens and the SpongeMonkeys were turned into extremely unpopular ads for Quizno's Subs.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:33 AM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like Charlie Brown Hey Ya belongs on this list somewhere, but not sure where that truly was on the viral spectrum relative to my own cultural context.
posted by mykescipark at 12:07 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

how it went from divinely inspired dream to life sustaining hit.

Come on now ... bovinely inspired is more like it ...
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:11 PM on June 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

HamPster

Alternative form of hamster.
posted by biogeo at 3:20 PM on June 1, 2021

And today I learned that my local karaoke joint has “The Fox” in its lineup. People are going to be so sorry I discovered that.
posted by gelfin at 3:36 PM on June 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

Viking Kittens and the SpongeMonkeys were turned into extremely unpopular ads for Quizno's Subs.

I like to think these contibuted, in some small way, to Quizno's downfall. Well, that and the mafia-like way they exploited their franchisees.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:53 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

On the paradox of President Bush Jr. appearing in this “animation from 1996”: the sympathetic comparison is to Shakespeare presenting well-known Italian folk tales as new plays.

Imagine: it’s 2002, you’re starting out experimenting with Flash animation, you need some structure to animate under. You remember a novelty song from a few years ago and think “oh, right, the cow song, that’ll be fun!” You bang it out in a few days and share it with some friends for a laugh. You don’t secure any rights because it’s 2002 and Napster has institutionalized the idea that copyright doesn’t mean anything. You don’t communicate with the artist because why would the artist care about your crummy hand-drawn animation project? But the animation escapes onto the part of the Internet that Never Ever Forgets, and now twenty years later we have people saying “I had no idea this song had a life apart from the animation” and “maybe I have mixed up these two time periods.”

This is why history is hard.

I have been trying to remember for a couple of days another case where a late animation displaced some older original, in a hard-to-research zeitgeist kind of a way. It was when I started to tell someone a joke and got partway through when they asked, “are you doing the Duck Song?” Which I totally was, but I had never heard the Duck Song. I heard the joke in 1996, give or take a year. (And the way I heard it was funnier than the way it’s animated in the Duck Song, but that’s part of the normal evolution of jokes.)
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:23 AM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]