On this weekend’s episode of NPR’s Ask Me Another, musician Jonathan Coulton used the tune and theme of Tears For Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and applied it…to people who really do want to literally rule the world.
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Among the genre favorites to show up in his songs? Lex Luthor, HYDRA, and Sauron.
You can check the segment out here.
Coulton is likely best known to comic book fans as the co-writer of last year’s Kickstarter-funded original graphic novel Code Monkey Save World.
Ironically, that project came about as a result of comic book writer Greg Pak, a college friend of Coulton’s, tweeting a note that the characters in Coulton’s songs (his original ones, not the NPR stuff) would make a great supervillain team.
Coulton tweeted back “DO IT.”
“There’s a song called ‘The Future Soon,’ where a young nerdy kid who’s in love with this girl Laura fantasizes about a future where he will win her love by creating robot army and taking over the world,” Coulton said at the time. “As Greg pointed out, that seems like it’s a prequel to ‘Skullcrusher Mountain.’ So that character – the boy in that song – could potentially grow up to be villainous genius in ‘Skullcrusher Mountain.’ What would happen to Laura under those circumstances? What would their relationship be like? That ties in very beautifully with “Chiron Beta Prime,” which is all about these robots, this robo-slave colony where robots have enslaved humans.”
The Kickstarter eventually tripled its goal, and one of the things that came out of that was an acoustic “soundtrack” to the graphic novel.
Check out the audio clip above, to see whether you can guess who all the Machiavellian maniacs of Coulton’s songs are — y’know, besides the ones we already spoiled for you.
Either way, I kind of want Coulton to release a longer version of the Lex Luthor one as a music video now…!
We originally misidentified Ask Me Another as its sister show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. We apologize for the error.
