Female Vocalist Roulette


Let's play female vocalist album roulette. I've pulled 6 out of various crates. I'll shuffle them around and pick a number for tonight's review. Will i like it, will i hate it, who knows? The suspense might malfunction and kill us all!

It won't, guns and women are both perfectly safe so long as you don't pretend they are toys.

If nothing else, i am a man of my word. Chamber 3, Barbra Streisand's What About Today, is locked and loaded. Fire at will.

Google tells me 58% of people who told google whether or not they liked it didn't. Wikipedia tells me it's 33.33% of Babs' unranked albums (meaning anybody who did buy it told 12 friends not to buy it), and the phrase "first attempt at recording contemporary pop songs," confirms that nobody likes this thing. So, i should find loads of things to compliment....

I know exactly why people didn't like this album. It has nothing to do with Barbra, the song selections, or the message. It's the same problem The 4 Seasons had. It's 1969, and nobody has any idea how to process this material coming from big showbiz insiders. Is she making fun of the Beatles, Paul Simon, and Bacharach/David? Is she just grasping at a market trend? Am i supposed to suddenly like Vaudeville/Cabaret because it's topically relevant to my life? How dare she express an opinion about war being bad, and question the value of purely material wealth! How dare she implore us to stand up for what we believe in and argue for peace, tolerance, and social equality!

Bah humbug, I say. This is as good as any other Barbra Streisand album (i do have more, you know). Like i was saying about Billy Vaughn, this isn't about Barbra trying to win over new fans, it's about telling the people who already love and listen to her that these ideas and the songs that convey them are legitimate. She's just taking the prevailing musical attitude and incorporating it into her own highly refined persona. Millions of people hate her, but she's still famous, successful, and surrounded by personal and professional praise. I don't like a couple of her interpretations, but i'm pretty sure the 10 highly successful albums before this one (and the 40 something more yet to come) will do her just fine.

Whether you love it or hate it, it's fascinating to hear her try to interpret them (they are real interpretations, not just mindlessly singing pop songs). I don't hear it as mockery, i hear it as acting. She's putting on a little musical with songs from the radio in everybody's living room. The story they build is completely familiar: why is it so strange to be kind, to love one another, and to stop blowing each others' brains out while calling us the bad guys for refusing to participate?

Seems like a reasonable question, even coming from an out of touch diva.

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more