JetBlue's Steven Slater memorialized in song

​Undoubtedly you've stumbled across one of the stories about flight attendant Steven Slater, the disgruntled JetBlue employee who tendered his resignation by telling everyone on board a recently landed airplane to "go fuck themselves," grabbing a beer from the galley, pulling the emergency chute, and peacing out in grandiose and jaw-dropping style.

The next day, on a MetaFilter thread about the flight attendant's stunt, local writer and Dirty Curls band member Max Sparber penned the lyrics for a folk ballad about the notorious Slater, with lines like "He cursed her on the intercom/So that everyone could hear/And he then bid his adieu/And he grabbed himself a beer."

Because the internet is a magical place fertile for meme growth, songsmith and MetaFilter moderator Josh Millard picked up Sparber's lyrics and worked them into a piano-driven pop song in the matter of a few hours. "There's just no time at all between an event happening and it getting turned into a piece of pop music, I guess," Sparber says.

The resulting song is "Ballad of Steve Slater," which you can listen to here.

"This is the second time he's done this to me," says Sparber. "A year or so ago he adapted a poem I did based on the true story of a Louisiana boys who lost his arm fighting an alligator." Sparber says he suspects Millard's tune will go viral, as the internet continues to fixate on extravagant and redemptive resignation stories like Slater's and a young woman's maybe-real, probably-faked whiteboard tell-off posted on the Chive yesterday.

The song was even featured on CNN last night during a segment about Slater:

The Ballad of Steven Slater on CNN's Situation Room from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.