The Bobs

The Bobs are an a cappella vocal group founded in San Francisco, California in the early 1980s. Now based in Seattle, Washington, they have been recording, and touring throughout North America and Europe ever since.

Background

Founding members Gunnar Madsen and Matthew Stull decided to form an a cappella group when they left their jobs as deliverers of singing telegrams in San Francisco. Instead of covering more traditional doo-wop songs, The Bobs started out with original arrangements of their own songs and songs like "Helter Skelter" and "Psycho Killer" . Although two of their albums are dominated by cover versions, the overwhelming majority of their repertoire is original, with songs discussing diverse subjects like lunar cattle farming, sleepy bus drivers, bumper stickers, laundry, hurricane-related flooding, graffiti, Oliver North, shopping-mall security guards, celebrity autographs, synaesthesia, post office violence, heart transplants, Heaven's Gate, spontaneous human combustion, turtles, rebellious footwear, tattoos, nicknames for genitalia, and felines intent on ruling the world.

The BOBs (weblog award)

The BOBs (Best of the Blogs) is the world’s largest international weblog competition, founded in 2004 and sponsored by Deutsche Welle, the German International Broadcasting Service.

Through the BOBs, Deutsche Welle focuses attention on the promotion of freedom of information and the press around the world. In cooperation with Reporters Without Borders, Deutsche Welle has presented a special award to bloggers promoting these specific ideals since 2005.

Weblogs, podcasts and videoblogs from all over the world can be submitted for the BOBs in one of the following 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, German, English, French, Indonesian, Persian, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Hindi and Spanish.

Award categories

The BOBs consist of 6 prize categories (all languages) and one award in each language of the competition (14 languages).

How the competition works

The BOBs presents prizes for both Jury and User's Choice awards. The User's Choice winners are chosen by worldwide online voting. The Jury prizes are awarded by a jury of international bloggers.

The Bobs (album)

The Bobs is an a cappella album by The Bobs, released in 1983. The group's music is sometimes referred to as New Wave A Cappella. The vocal arrangement of "Helter Skelter" was nominated for a Grammy award in 1984.

Track listing

All songs written by Gunnar Madsen and Richard Greene except as indicated:

LP

CD