Mood Music XIII

The other day, Feministing had a post on an example of one of my favorite musical things (I don't know quite what to call it - subset? subgenre? sub-subgenre?) - male artists covering songs by girl groups.  The analysis of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" gave an interesting read on the role of tone and arrangement in communicating the song's message - the Grizzly Bear cover is hauntingly sad in a way that the Crystals original simply is not. 

I thought I'd share a couple of my favorites of these covers - 

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - I love this arrangement of the song.  Also, in my opinion, Valli's vocal comes across way needier than those of the Shirelle's version, or Carole King's from Tapestry, which I kind of love.

"Remember Walking in the Sand" by Aerosmith - To me, this emphasizes the kind of not-always-obvious influence that girl group music had on musical acts that followed in the later years of rock and roll.  In Walk This Way, Steven Tyler rhapsodizes somewhat at length about his crush on the Shangri-Las' Mary Weiss, who gets honored by this gloriously heavy cover.

If I knew more about looking at music from an academic standpoint, I would totally write about girl group music.  It's easy to write the songs off as fluffy, but many of the men who are credited as rock's greatest singers and songwriters cite them as influences and idolize their singers.  Heck, Please Please Me has three girl group covers.  At the very least, there's the potential for a probing analysis of the gender issues at hand, as is evidenced by Feministing's look at just the one song.

On a semi-related note, they should totally do a Carole King week on American Idol (including her songs written with Gerry Goffin). Between the pop fabulosity of the early songs and the singer-songwriter-y goodness of her seventies work, it would be awesome.

TV Thoughts

I have actively chosen to watch One Tree Hill instead of Heroes, which is just the latest indicator of this TV season's general suckitude.  Generally speaking, I usually give shows I like a lot of leeway when they have dips in quality, but this season I've basically given up on multiple shows mid-season, with only vague intentions of ever catching up. Brothers and Sisters is more or less spinning its wheels, and I have my doubts about the writers using the departure of Balthazar Getty in a dynamic, story-propelling way.  Ugly Betty seems to have regained some of its momentum, but the "Betty gets condemned by her family for having a job and a life of her own" storyline earlier this season was really kind of gross.  The fourth-season finale storyline of the tumor trial resurrected my faith in Grey's Anatomy, which was then squandered by the Denny hallucinations, which started to actively erode the goodwill Shonda Rhimes and co. built up with the stellar second season.  Heroes is just...boring.  

There just seems to be a giant gulf in quality between the really good shows and those that are...less so.  It certainly doesn't help that interesting shows like the cancelled Pushing Daisies or the low-rated, seemingly not long for this world Kings get astonishingly few viewers.  Cable's got most of the good stuff these days, but the narrative control that comes with shorter seasons is offset by months and months between each season.  This past season of Big Love, which concluded last night, was an amazingly multifaceted study of womanhood.  All I could do when it ended was hope that the time it takes for Season Four to come to the screen will be less than a year. (The same goes for Mad Men) ER's run up to its series finale has been history-honoring and heartrending, but that's only because the show is ending.  Similarly, Lost will leave its own void in the schedule when it ends next year.  I want to write about the Battlestar Galactica finale after I've had a chance to watch it again (unlike some critics, my read on it was positive), but again, it's another departure of a quality show. I don't know, I guess I'm just feeling pessimistic about my favorite medium.

On a lighter note (kind of), I've been catching up via DVD with the thoroughly excellent Veronica Mars.  The first season of that show is an unbelievable example of the mystery genre executed nearly flawlessly.  The penultimate episode of that season, "A Trip to the Dentist" is one of my favorite episodes of TV ever, if not the favorite:

Ignore the hateful fishstick commercial.  "A Trip to the Dentist" is show continuity firing on all cylinders, taking the universe constructed around Veronica throughout the season and bringing it all together.  The characters who reappear in the episode all come from their own great one-off Mysteries of the Week, but their place in Veronica's past and present in this episode grounds them in the world of Neptune High in this mind-blowing sort of way.  Additionally, I was a die-hard member of the small minority of the show's fans who preferred Duncan to Logan, and the scene where Veronica confronts Duncan remains amazing, even after I've seen this episode who knows how many times (it's also probably Teddy Dunn's best scene in his entire run on the show) Add to that the final creepy-video-room clue to the Lilly Kane mystery, and this episode just becomes legendary.  As good as "Leave It to Beaver," the finale that follows with the epic Aaron Echolls reveal, is, it pales in comparison to "A Trip to the Dentist."

This ended up much longer than I thought it would.  I'm trying to get back into writing semi-regularly - Spring Break caused an unfortunate complication since my computer and the wireless router at home don't get along with one another.  I've got plans, though. April, I think, will be good.

Quoted V

"Is that the devil?"

-Tina Fey, on Robert Pattinson, in a shot of them sitting behind Mickey Rourke at the Oscars

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, March 4

Random Film/Music Observation

This song came up on my shuffle this morning as I was waking up:

A fun wake-up, to be sure. However, it's kind of depressing to me that it seems quaint that only fifteen years ago, there was the perceived need to shield kids from the word "farted." Fart humor has become so prevalent these days that this joke seems unbelievably subtle.

Mood Music XII

Over the weekend, I was watching American Graffiti - a film with a seriously excellent soundtrack, which reminded me how bitchin this song is:

Right now I'm watching some concert special of the reunited Police on PBS (stalling instead of washing my dishes or reading for class) and trying to restrain myself from buying a greatest hits compilation - I'm really, really trying to curtail the impulse shopping. Even Sting sounded a little jumbled singing "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic," which just reinforces my feeling that it is not a good song for people to sing on American Idol. (I mean, seriously. Who thinks to themselves, "I must impress America with my vocal talents! But what song should I use to ensure my survival in this vote-based competition? I know! "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic!") Just because it's a good song doesn't mean that it will serve you in that capacity. Which is a long winded way of saying, I haven't heard this one yet, but I'm hoping to:

That one time a couple of years ago when the Idol weekly theme was something like "Gwen Stefani's favorite songs, and also some that she sang" and it was a seemingly random mix of No Doubt, the Police and, like, Cyndi Lauper songs, the one that stood out as well-chosen was whoever sang "Every Breath You Take." (Phil, the bald one who was in the military, whose last name I can't remember and can't be bothered to Google) The "ohhhh, can't you seeeeeee" actually does work as a vocal showcase.

Commercials

It's a little ridiculous, but the line "I'd get it myself, but I don't have thumbs!" cracks me up every time I see this.

On February

All in all, I think I did a pretty fair job. Out of twenty-eight days, I missed posting on two calendar days, but ultimately ended up with more than twenty-eight posts for the month. I think for the future, I'll try to stay consistent, but won't beat myself up about missing a day. I have high hopes for the pop-culture ramblings yet to come.