This Used to Be My Carnival of Horrors

It’s America’s birthday today, and what’s more American than baseball?

(This post is only tangentially about baseball.)

The newest episode of We Are Not Young Anymore has Chris and I — plus special guest Michelle! — talking about A League of Their Own, the 1992 baseball movie that asks the question “What if with girls this time?” Listen to the episode at your leisure.

I’m writing this post to tell you about something that got cut out of the final version of the episode, however. You may have noticed that we open and close each episode with MIDI renditions of popular songs. In making the League of Their Own episode, the obvious choice was Madonna’s “This Used to Be My Playground.” And that’s what I used, in the end, but it took a little bit of searching to find a usable version. It turns out that the most popular MIDI version of this particular song sounds… wrong.

Because this is something the world needs to hear, I’ve made it listenable in video form. Here, take it in.

Around the 13-second mark, it starts sounding like the soundtrack to a horror movie. I’m not sure what’s happening here, exactly. It could just be that this composition was made a long time ago, and the program I’m using to read it today isn’t doing so correctly — or is maybe selecting the wrong instrument to play. However, what I’d prefer to imagine to be the case is that whoever created this rendition really did choose a thudding piano in the style of every old slasher movie where the killer is approaching a victim and death is imminent. They listened to the final version and said, “Yes, this is right. This is good enough to share.” And it’s been kicking around online ever since, making anyone who has reason to download a MIDI version of “This Used to Be My Playground” to get 13 seconds in and then say, “Wait, what the fuck?”

And I like that.

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