My favorite columns are inevitably when Tom tells these personal sagas that end on a higher note than you expect.
I couldn't place the song until I listened, and even then I only vaguely remembered it. It's pretty, they sing well, I'm good with the 6, which for me means pleasant side of neutral. But the saga was great. I was expecting at least one tragedy, as so often happens for young musicians even without the difficult backgrounds two of these women had to deal with. To hear that they all survived, thrived, and are back to working together was a really nice start to the day!
I've heard the song- it got a bit of college radio play here, and I really liked it- but never saw the video until now. Oh, my. I remember someone in the "Take on Me" days saying that in plenty of bands Pal Waaktaar would have been the looker, in just about any band Magne Furuholmen would have been the looker, so what were the odds they'd join up with someone like Morten Harket?
Mildly irritated more than distressed. I've seen so much energy-creature weirdness in the years I've been online, and honestly, downvoting everybody is nursery-school stuff. I've seen some things that genuinely harmed people, or tried to.
You're eight years older than my daughter but definitely in the same wheelhouse here. She played in band and now she directs the school musicals. She still remembers all the songs from her childhood videos- "Once Upon a December" brings back memories!
I think you can posit that Elvis was most likely racist in the way that's endemic to the culture and often unconscious. I don't think, from anything I've read, that he was *A* racist, a hateful bigot. For Chuck that may be a distinction without a difference, which is his prerogative.
Living in sight of the city I knew what they were by the time I was in school, but this was early- I must have been about three!
I too have always seen it called the underground or the tube in English books, and I googled to see if perhaps the songwriters were American, but no, they're also British!
"Dock of the bay" is monumental; it's an icon. Yet I love lots of other Redding songs more. "Chained and Bound," "That's How Strong My Love Is, "I've Been Loving You Too Long," and above all "Dreams to Remember"- just devastating.
Wow. I don't ever recall hearing or hearing about this one. My biological mother, who is English, also had a brother who was a paranoid schizophrenic, and he committed suicide by jumping off the back of some kind of ferry or pleasure boat. I wonder if she knows the song.
I think it's very well done, and it's important to me because although I'd commented on TNOCS a few times I really delurked on "Cat's in the Cradle" day, to tell about how this version made me realize for the first time how real the song was to a whole lot of people.
I keep wanting to do these and then getting mixed up in the options. Here we go, finally:
Week 1 – “Little Bird,” Annie Lennox
Week 2 – “Nuthin’ But A “G” Thang,” Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg
Week 3 – “Man On The Moon," REM
Week 4 – "Easy," Faith No More
Week 5 – "Two Princes," Spin Doctors- this is a great group, with INXS and RuPaul and Dolly, but I love "Two Princes" no matter what anyone says!
Week 6 – I didn't remember any of these, so it was fun to check them out.
"Comforter" sounded vaguely familiar- it's a somewhat Boyz II Men-ish romantic youthful harmony slow jam, pretty but sleepy.
I remembered the Elton John as soon as I heard it, from my days working in the doctor's office- it's the one with the rather Stevie-ish harmonica hook and the chorus that goes "And I won't break, and I won't bend." Not on my desert island list but a nice song.
Go West did a better job than I expected covering Bobby Caldwell.
"Closer" is another romantic youthful harmony slow jam, and even sleepier.
The Sybil song is in a related vein, but has more energy- more midtempo dance.
Dina Carroll's is more of a classic r&b ballad, and her style is nice, a bit like Vanessa Williams' or Toni Braxton's.
I don't hate or love any of them. I'll go with Elton simply because he does call up memories of a time when my son was small.
Week 7 – there's no way I can choose between Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" and 10000 Maniacs' “Candy Everybody Wants."
I stopped what I was doing the first time I heard "It Was a Good Day." I couldn't tell you the exact date or anything, but I do remember that I was cooking and I set everything down and just sat and listened.
This. And I think we can note that the mass white audience is often more receptive to white performers in genres that originated in the black community, and acknowledge the issues there, without necessarily pointing a finger at the specific performer.
I was extremely confused until I googled. I thought youse were talking about Jeremy Jordan the Broadway guy. who apart from anything else would have been awfully young in 1993.
I can tell you why it's interesting to me: the verbal flow is mesmerizing. The lyrics are bleak; they paint a portrait of people building up their defensive fronts to the point that they subliminate fear and take pride in a life of constant jousting for dominance (I won't say compare it to Mercutio and friends, but certainly to Riff and the Jets in West Side Story. The beat is hypnotic; it suspends you in the moment. And then there's the synth line, which is oddly light, pretty even, but unsettling the longer it goes on:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/13/gangsta-rap-history-nwa-ice-cube-dr-dre
Another quick breakdown of the song's and album's significance within hiphop:
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/dr-dre-the-chronic-album/
As a small child I loved that song, which often played on my mother's beautiful music station. However, I hadn't yet learned what a subway actually was. I thought it was an underground walkway. This was probably because we often passed the entrance to such a walkway, which allowing one to get to the downtown junior high school without crossing a busy highway, and my mother had said that she used to use it when it was the high school, and I was obsessed with this and would beg to see it, which she refused because she said troublemakers went down there. So every time I heard the song I imagined the beleaguered husband sacked out in a sleeping bag under Route 46, getting stepped on by the tough kids from Christopher Columbus.
Please tell me you put on a John Gielgud voice and said "Why do you ask?" Miss Manners says that's the most subtly insulting way to respond to rude, inappropriate questions.
Comments