“I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone,” Salvador Dalí famously wrote in his 1942 autobiography. Similarly, as the A.V. Club reports, comedian Neil Cicierega apparently didn’t understand why, when he asked for the lyrics to Lenny Kravitz’s 1998 single “Fly Away” on the internet, he was never served a video alleging that the song was mostly about Milky Way candy bars and contained the disturbing line, “I wanna fuck Milky Way®,” registered trademark sign very much included. So he fixed it. Now, if you google “Lenny Kravitz Fly Away lyrics,” the top result is now a custom “lyrics video” by Cicierega that goes off the rails six words in. (In his version, the first line is still, “I wish that I could fly,” but then things get dodgy.) It’s accompanied by a skillfully manipulated recording of Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” in which Kravitz sounds like he’s singing Cicierega’s lyrics. The video came out in 2014, but a Redditor noticed two days ago that it’s made its way to the top of the Google search results.
This kind of prank only works with a straight face, but Cicierega manages to keep from winking too soon. He perfectly duplicates the anti-aesthetics of internet lyric videos, from the Ken Burns slideshow of badly compressed photos to the video’s accompanying text on YouTube (“This is my first video, hope you enjoy!”). But even with a finale that includes Kravitz devouring the sun, it’s hard to deliberately create something that is more amusing than the unintentional absurdity the internet churns out constantly. For example, here is a video with the complete lyrics for Jamster advertising mascot Crazy Frog’s 2006 World Cup–themed cover, “We Are the Champions (Ding a Dang Dong)”:
Somebody spent hours making that! Still, the unfathomably strange fact that fans of Crazy Frog can google “Crazy Frog We are the Champions Ding a Dang Dong Lyric video” and get exactly what he or she is looking for (several times over) should not detract from Cicierega’s achievement: Fans of Lenny Kravitz who google “Lenny Kravitz Fly Away lyrics” will not get what they’re looking for, ever again. Now let’s see if we can convince future generations of Googlers that Cicierega’s version of the Cheers intro is canonical!
