If I have
any interest in jazz or classical music, I'd have to attribute it to
all the hours I spent watching cartoons. Especially the Warner
Brothers stuff. It still amazes me how many times I can hear a piece
of classical music and recognize it from some cartoon I saw as a
child. At the 4th of July Pops concert this year, the San Francisco
Symphony included a piece of experimental jazz from the 30s. It was
used by Carl Stalling as the soundtrack for some of the Warner
cartoons. So who says this stuff isn't broadening?
Anyone remember Supercar? That was my introduction to
Gerry
Anderson, a man who based his career on a curious sort of
logic: since he couldn't make his marionettes walk convincingly, why
not have them stand on moving sidewalks? And how can you get away
with something as unusual as a moving sidewalk in the early 1960s? By
setting your stories in a science fictional universe. Supercar was
swiftly followed by Fireball XL-5 on Saturday mornings and many more
sci-fi epics full of (literally) wooden acting. Eventually Anderson
tried his hand at using real actors, with results that were frequently
even less animated. I found this CD at Harrod's in London. I think it
was the same trip that I found my Thunderbirds boxer shorts. Both are
long-wearing.
If you haven't seen Animaniacs yet, you have no idea
what you're missing. Think of it as Rocky & Bullwinkle for the
90s, only with much better production values. There are the usual
movie and literary references, historical references and lots of
musical references. Pinky & The Brain doing Where Eagles Dare?
Rita & Runt in Les Miserables? The Goodfeathers in Fiddler On The
Roof? This is not a kid's show. So what's it doing on at 4 in
the afternoon?
You have to admire The Simpsons if only for their chutzpah.
(Definition
available for the culturally challenged.)
After all, who else would make musicals out of A Streetcar Named
Desire and Planet Of The Apes or
use a Disney-inspired number to show off Mr. Burns's Cruella side? And how can you not love
Bart's rejoinder to George Bush's smarmy
pandering:
Why is mixing incompatible styles so funny? (Anyone
remember the tape Dr. Demento used to play of the Gilligan's Island
lyrics done to the tune of Stairway To Heaven?) These guys play pop
songs from the 70s and 80s as if they had come from an earlier
time. Check out their version of Like A Virgin in the style of
Venus. Or The Living Years done to Leader Of The Pack. Or Money For
Nothing done as 16 Tons. And what they do to Memory is no more than
Lloyd Webber deserves!
This is what happens when everybody gets the
same idea. Louie, Louie may just be the most recorded pop
song in history, with each performer putting their own unique twist on
the same incomprehensible original. This is a Rhino CD (can't you
tell?), with Louie, Louie done as heavy metal, easy listening and
marching band. There's even a Handel version by something called The
Hallelouie Chorus.
I was walking down a street in Kamakura, Japan when I
heard the oddest thing. It was a CD of popular music performed on
music boxes. Things like Last Christmas by Wham or Pretty Woman or As Time Goes By or
the themes from ET and Lawrence Of Arabia. I thought it was the most
novel idea I'd encountered in a while and wondered why no one here had
ever done it. Then I bought a couple of these discs. And after
listening for a couple of hours I understood. And also understood why
the music box isn't part of a concert orchestra: the sound is
terrible! Tinny beyond words! I guess the music box is the
dancing bear of musical instruments: it isn't how well it performs
that's the impressive part; it's that it performs at all!
I'm not a
big country music fan. (Hey, I'm a New York kid. We make fun
of those kind of people!) So when a friend from Dallas introduced me
to Riders In The Sky, I was expecting something unpleasant. But she
set me straight: these boys aren't country. This is cowboy music! And
fun stuff it is. Their slug-salting ballad is a folk classic. And the
one about how cowboys first began to yodel still makes me squirm. Nice
to know that people down in Texas have a sense of humor after all.
This is another of those "what were they
thinking?" collections: songs by artists who should never
have attempted anything near the songs they chose. Hearing Hey Jude
sung by Bing Crosby will bring tears to your eyes (and possibly a few
other organs). Or Sunshine Of My Life by Jim Nabors. Revolution done
as Easy Listening is too funny for words. Suffice it to say that Mel
Torme's rendition of Sunshine Superman is the best (as in most
musically acceptable) thing on this CD. What were they
thinking?
It was on a Virgin Atlantic
flight to London that I first encountered Alan Partridge, the
obnoxious and Abba-obsessed host of Knowing Me, Knowing You, the worst
chat show the world has seen since Chevy Chase left the air.
Partridge is actually a remarkably inventive fellow named
Steve Coogan, who seems to delight in personifying the sound of
fingernails on a blackboard. (Kind of makes you grateful that
Mr. Bean doesn't talk.) On another Virgin flight a year later I
encounted Tony Ferrino, Portuguese singer, winner of the Eurovision
Song Contest (yes, it really does exist!), egotistical jerk, sexist
pig and poster child for birth control. Yes, he's another product of
Coogan's feeble fertile mind. I shudder to think of
who else he has hiding in there.
You really do become your parents, don't you? When I was a child, I
dreaded sitting in the car with mom and dad and having to endure a
radio tuned to their idea of entertainment, generally some
combination of Musak versions of popular songs and the "all news all
the time" horror of public radio. Now I too find myself eschewing
modern rock for the pleasures of
NPR. Not all of it, mind; just
carefully selected bits. Like my Saturday morning ritual of tuning
in to Tom & Ray and Car
Talk, a show I love despite a complete lack of knowledge of or
interest in the workings of internal combustion engines. If you
haven't discovered Click & Clack yourselves, do so immediately.
Who knows how much longer they can con public radio into putting up
with them?
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