You may recall late last year that Twitch, the Amazon-owned online games streaming service, struck a deal with music game developer Harmonix to create a game specific to Twitch. Well, they did, and it works! Twitch’s karaoke game is available now for free, and this weekend it added a couple classic Lonely Island tracks to its growing sing-a-long library.
Twitch Sings is super fun, even if you sound like a squeezed walrus when you try to sing along with Bruce Springsteen on your car radio like I do. Getting the rhythm and intervals right results in powering up stars and earning achievements, and you can always jump in with a duet partner online if you’re willing to put yourself out there to a degree that I am not just yet.
If you’re on the bubble though, the service has added two songs from Andy Samberg’s musical comedy group Lonely Island that may be just the thing to get you singing, both being hit songs that involved partnerships with big-time celebrities.
The first is “Jack Sparrow,” which for my money is the funniest Lonely Island bit ever produced. It has the Lonely Island crew teaming up with legendary crooner Michael Bolton, but while the LI guys want to do a hip hop club anthem, Bolton is obsessed with a billowy-shirts-on-the-beach paean to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Here’s the video from that song, which absolutely is worth a re-watch because it’s hilarious, and because Bolton can legit still belt it:
The other Lonely Island song Twitch Sings added this weekend is arguably the track that put the group on the map outside Samberg’s SNL stint: Their 2009 Grammy-nominated collaboration with T-Pain, “I’m On A Boat.”
It’s a song that makes fun of the materialistic excess of most music video stars, but when it came out ten years ago it quickly became a thing unto itself – the references to “flippy floppies” and T-Pain’s trademark auto-tuned vocals marked it as theater of the absurd well before most of the internet had accepted that format as its stock in trade.
In any case, Twitch Sings is a ton of fun, and these two new Lonely Island songs can only work to make it more so. Have some friends over, fire it up, and do some singing. We’ll let you know when “Dick In A Box” comes out.