happy new year, y’all. nursing that hangover? well, if you want more pain, feel free to peruse my magical month of blatantly bad 70s songs. it will make your ears bleed.
but seriously, it’s a new year. it’s time to turn over a new leaf. one of the leaves i am working on is being kinder to the people out there in blog land. you know, the patient people who manage to endure my blatherings. (the people who probably wanted to smack me back in november.) hint: YOU.
and you know, all wasn’t horrid in 70s pop music. in fact, i have quite a few guilty pleasures. maybe you’ll like them, too? (then again, maybe you’ll laugh me off the face of the internet.)
so, all this month, i will try to feature songs i actually LURVE from the 1970s. of course, i run the risk of having people hate those, too.
we just returned from a trip to NJ to see family and friends during the holiday. it was a great visit; but when we woke up in the hotel this morning, BC started experiencing barf-fest 2008. the poor darling; she barfed all the four hours home; she barfed while home; she’s just starting a teeny bit of ginger ale right now, which i expect will come back up shortly.
this is just not the best way to have a holiday.
whenever girlfriend feels sick — which is fairly frequent if you count her breathing issues and all the tough luck she has had the past few months — i always feel terrible. as a mom, i want to wave a magic wand and make it all better. that’s my job as a mom, you see. and of course, there are so many, many things i will not be able to make better.
one of the things i can’t make better is the fact that i get sick. when i became seriously ill two years ago, the one who really bore the brunt of it (besides BS, of course, who had to do everything) was girlfriend. hellboy was so little that, while he missed me when i was in the hospital, he truly didn’t understand as much about what was going down. girlfriend did. and there was a period of time thereafter where, whenever i went to a doctor, i ended up in the ER. it may take years, if not forever, for girlfriend to not freak out whenever i have a doctor’s appointment — which, as many of you know, is frequent enough. it makes me sad that i am actually the cause of her pain.
so whenever i hear message to my girl, i think about all the things i wish i could do for madame. i want so much to be less self-involved, but being so ill has required that i actually stop being selfless and start taking care of myself. it’s a tough balance, believe it or not.
but then i hear these lyrics, and everything becomes clear:
No more empty self-possession
Vision swept under the mat
It’s no new years resolution
It’s more than that
No there’s nothing quite as real
As a touch of your sweet hand
I can’t spend the rest of my life
Buried in the sand
i have my new years resolutions all ready. many involve things i need to do to make myself healthier. and i have to remind myself it’s okay to do them — i need to do that in order to be there for my family.
but i will still need to take the time to be there during the journey, too.
(what the hell is going on at 2:44 in the video, though?)
between sometime in 1973 and 1975, sir elton john could do no wrong on the pop charts. even his albums that were less-than-loved (like one of my true guilty pleasures, rock of the westies, which i love in spite of the fact that critics everywhere panned the hell out of it) went platinum in nanoseconds. songs that will spend eternal life on both classic rock stations and lite elevator stations got their start during these years.
i suspect sir elton, overwhelmed by his crushing success (goodbye yellow brick road) in 1973, composed this lovely ode to christmas. one reason i love it so much is while it is completely a-religious, it is about being thankful. sir elton realizes that he has made a mountain of money doing what he loves best, and it’s only because people applauded and bought his music that he could continue making music.
a mystery: how the hell does one step into christmas? just like one falls in love?
but no matter. the song rocks; it’s cheery and peppy but never sacharrine.
to those of you who celebrate christmas, happy christmas to you all. to my fellow red sea pedestrians — have a groovy chanukah, however you spell it. and for everyone who celebrates other days or a combination of them (as we do in wreke-land), i ill quote my best bud murph with what she wishes me every year:
this one will cause neither shock nor awe for anyone who has been reading my blog for awhile.
consider the complaints choir project, started in 2005 by Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen. apparently, there is a phrase in finnish (not a language i’ve tackled yet, btw) Valituskuoro, which literally means complaints choir, or lots of people complaining at the same time. the two artists thought it would be a hoot to organize a real complaints choir.
the first group to take up the call was in birmingham, england (featuring immortal words like: i want my money back, my job is like a cul-de-sac, and the bus is too infrequent at 6:30.) the song is amusing but not terribly musical or moving.
the next group taking up the call was the helsinki choir. i have to tell you, i voluntarily listen to this. my kids actually like hearing this (and attempt to read the english. whenever we pass the metro on Route 66, BC likes to randomly note: tramline 3 smells of pee.)
these poor folks: they lose to sweden at hockey and Eurovision each year. metre pizza is only a half a metre long. their tights always fall down. they are plagued by people with annoying ring tones (a very clever part of the song.) and their ancestors could have chosen a warmer spot. among many, many other things.
On se niin väärin! (it’s not fair.)
many other places have started a complaints choir, but helsinki’s choir remains the very best. the lyrics balance the picayune with the poignant: my flat is tiny yet it eats up all my money. so i’m left with nothing to save the world with. the music is superior to most of the others i’ve heard, and i’ve heard most of them.
i would love to start a complaints choir, though i don’t know if anyone would be willing to participate. i suspect i’d get a lot of entries that mirror the complaints from the helsinki group, but it would be fun nonetheless to attempt this.
i love me some holiday music. and i always, and i do mean always, love me my chrissie hynde.
i may not have grown up with christmas in a big way, but i always love songs that evoke the holidays in a meaningful way. and this song is a sad but meaningful meander into hynde’s soul. and what a soul that must be. hynde has been a part of rock for most of her life: she has been linked to everyone from the sex pistols to the kinks (well, ray davies, to be precise) to the mccartneys to simple minds.
i love her swagger; her talent; her independence, even her animal rights activism. a boyfriend once told me i was irritating because i liked to hide behind my chrissie hynde bangs. yes, i think i always wanted to be a lot more like chrissie hynde when i grew up. the lady has balls.
and even so, you can hear a tenderness in her voice, the way it breaks, all through 2000 miles. a creaky loneliness is evident, brushed with hope.
it’s World AIDS Day; and it’s also a return to Guilty Pleasure Mondays around my little world. i’m sure you’ve OD’d on your fair share of blatantly bad 70s songs; and i promise that the only bad songs around here for the next month or so will be bad only because you don’t like what i like. i realize i set off some nasty earworms. here’s hoping your minds return to their regularly-scheduled programming. and soon.
anyway, what you didn’t see over the past month is the fact that we’ve had some pretty crappy times here in wreke-land. in fact, when i think about it, it almost sounds like a monty python skit gone very, very wrong, like G-d was trying out new and improved plagues and we were the test kitchen. death; lice; floods; surgery; bronchitis… it’s just unbelievable how it all went down.
there are moments in life when you just feel alone in the world. and this song, for me, is always the soundtrack, in spite of it’s dated ’60s sound.
nevertheless, whenever i think about how it is for others in the world, i am always reminded that we are blessed.
donna summer’s first hit, to my memory, was love to love you, baby, a song i loathed mostly because it was rumored that she was actually having sex while recording the song, a concept that just was too incredibly repulsive for my ten-year-old mind to wrap around…and something which she wasn’t doing , of course. but just as i hated hearing certain sounds through dormitory walls in college, i certainly have no interest in secondhand sex. i still hate the song. (for all i know, that youtube link above may be cut off. i heard two seconds of it and shut it down. and then, i washed my hands.)
so why, you may ask, am i thinking about donna summer? well, recently, i put together a playlist for a disco bat mitzvah that my synagogue is putting together as a fundraiser. it won’t be my bat mitzvah, even though i actually was bat mitzvah’d in 1978 (and have the hideous pictures, complete with thick, plastic, rectangular glasses to prove it.) i suppose you could say i have a certain level of expertise in this area: i was the DJ for the disco club that year in my intermediate school. (can i get any dorkier, please?) but it should be a fun time. making the playlist allowed me to dip into the magical world of disco, a world i avoided in 1978 — at least around the cool people — because it just wasn’t done in my family.
and one of the songs i’ve rediscovered is i feel love, perhaps one of the first disco songs to be completely backed by synthesizers. it sounded very futuristic to my young ears, as it still does today. in fact, i would boldly note that it almost hints of the new wave music to come. it’s impossible to talk about this song without mentioning giorgio moroder, the producer of many of summer’s hits (including the loathed love to love you thingy above.) he has worked with some of the most famous names, probably disco-fying or electrifying their works. whether or not you like this stuff, he was especially influential during the ’70s and ’80s. (i have him to blame, apparently, for ruining the band berlin, giving them the song take my breath away, a song which essentially took my band — and the contents of my stomach — away. how could he do this to the band that made sex (i’m a) — with HIM?)
anyway, i feel love is not a terribly complicated song. but you hear summer sing, you are lifted up by the chord progression, and the chorus makes you feel joy. pure and simple.
i’d rather feel the joy myself than listen to someone else’s joy. so to speak.
Note to the six people who read GPM faithfully: Guilty Pleasure Monday will be on hiatus during the month of November so that we can bring you Blatantly Bad ’70s Music ALL MONTH LONG as part of National Blog Posting Month (aka NaBloPoMo)! So think of it as a month of really awfully guilty pleasures. If you’ve a tin ear, that is!
any movie that could inspire me to iron and press my long, straight hair… any movie that could convince me that i could — and should — actually sing… any movie that could fill me with awe that there were kids out in the world actually living a far more grown-up existence than i was at the time… well, it’s got to be a film great, right?
damn. i spent hours bemoaning the fact that i somehow never even thought to get into julliard or NY PA (never mind that i was living in the wrong state at the time to even qualify.) my high school’s talent show never looked like this:
though we did have a very out-of-tune girl attempting to sing this:
to be sure, when i saw the movie, my 15-year-old-self did not fully understand the plot. in fact, recently, when i read a summary of the film, i scratched my head: that happened? wow, how did i miss THAT? (i suppose i shall have to find a copy and try again.) but i remember the urgency i felt to be living a more creative life, once i saw these kids singing, dancing, and leaping their way into the world. (it took me until i was nearly 40 to get there, but hell, i never was a prodigy like these kids.)
i always thought irene cara had a voice that could lift a truck in the air and throw it to earth many miles away. i always wondered why she never became huge.
there are so many unsolved mysteries in life. how was the world created? how will we get out of our national financial crisis? is there really a G-d?
and why the hell do i like this song?
one day, my old pal leifer, the first boy i became friends with who shared my passion for music (but not for each other, which is why we’re still friends, nearly 30 years later), smacked my exhausted college brain: who sang naughty naughty? he asked. (leifer does this to me from time to time; he’s been a little bitter with me over the years, only because i whipped his sorry butt every year in the rock trivia competition at camp in high school. heh.)
shockingly, my little mental musical encyclopedia drew a blank. i couldn’t tell. and it took me awhile to get my head around it: john parr. john parr, later of st. elmo’s fire (man in motion) fame. who later, i learned, wrote roger daltrey’s under a raging moon, another guilty pleasure of mine that is riddled with 1980s musical cliches (not to mention those imitative keyboards, so evocative of, uh, i dunno, who are you perhaps?)
i don’t remember whether i ever answered him; he may be laughing at me to this very day for not answering his question. i don’t recall (though i suspect he’ll remind me. and soon.) but i do love this song. yes, in spite of the fact that john parr looks like the mulleted love child spawn of mel gibson and billy ray cyrus; despite the fact that the scary, she-men women in this video could probably beat me senseless in a dark alley; and that the words to the song are relatively filthy, i can’t help myself.
the chorus kills me every time, especially the point in the song where the song seems to melt for a second.
i’m so grateful i don’t have to go up against my dear pal leifer in any more rock trivia contests. i’ve killed far too many brain cells to be able to compete.
but at least, 20+ years later, i can finally answer this one.
