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Saturday, September 03, 2005 ( 9/03/2005 07:38:00 AM ) Bill S. "IT'S THAT SMELL AGAIN!" – Reading about the film on kiddie.matinee.com, a ginchy website devoted to the Golden Age of Children’s Cinema, I learned this week that there is more than one version of Barry Mahon's Santa And the Ice Cream Bunny. In some parts of the country, apparently, the two-in-one movie was shown with a different Mahon short subject in its chewy center. In place of Thumbelina was the busy exploitation director's Pirate's World production of Jack And the Beanstalk (1970). So let's take a quick look at that one, okay? Just so we can have the full Ice Cream Bunny Experience. . . Unlike his take on Hans Christian Anderson, Mahon's Jack doesn't open and close with an ad for Pirate's World: it begins on its story, though the viewer might immediately assume otherwise since the characters we see appear to be modern day 70's Americans in an ordinary tract house, dressed in godawful poly clothing. Hero Jack (Mitchell Poulos, looking like he'll someday grow up to be bass player for the Knack), for instance, wears a polyester shirt with a big-assed collar. We plunge into an exposition-heavy dialog between Jack, sister Rosemary and his depressed affect mother ("Is it true that we had a hen that lays golden eggs and a harp that would play beautiful tunes by itself?" Jack asks – as if he'd never heard the facts before) and learn that the family is living in poverty because their money-making goods had been stolen from 'em years ago. Sister Rosemary still has memories of the good ol' days, though, when she would sit in the house and count the golden eggs laid by their mechanical hen (very Scrooge McDuck-like, no?) Both hen and harp were inventions of Jack & Rosemary's late father, but nobody has been able to duplicate his marvelous inventions. Though Jack and his family are poor, their home doesn't look that bad – a little light on furniture and knickknacks, but it's comfy and the window looks out onto a beautiful green painted backdrop of the hilly countryside. Jack, too, seems to be pretty happy-go-lucky: he sings a song by the fireplace which asks, "What's the use of being sad?/It won't help you or me!" and we have to admit that the guy has a point. In any event, mom sends him to the village to sell the family cow, and before he gets there, we jump ahead to meet Honest John, a cow salesman who (satire alert!) talks like a used car salesman. When one of the villagers (wearing – my hand to God – checked flair trousers!) storms up to HJ to complain about the fallow cow he's been sold, the con man answers, "How would I know the cow would stop giving milk after the 5,000 mile guarantee ran out?" Mahon regularly returns to Honest John for more of this comedy gold. After he swindles Jack by buying the cow for a handful of magic beans, he later changes his occupation to singin' magic bean salesman ("Honest John, yes, that's my name/Magic beans, that's my game!") after word of Jack's unexpected good fortune hits the village – and even later has a soliloquy where he complains how he has been "cheated" out of the riches that Jack had garnered from his magic beanstalk. But for all his time-filling posturing, he doesn't really do much. No, the story is Jack's who, true to the original fairy tale, climbs a fantastically towering magic beanstalk that has instantly (and conveniently) right grown outside the set's one window after mom disgustedly tosses 'em out of the house. As he ascends the giant beanstalk, using green rope loops that fortunately are attached to the stalk for footing, Jack stops partway to take a look around at the unseen vistas beneath him – which is something he'll do every time he climbs up or down the beanstalk, even when he's being pursued by a pissed-off giant. The stalk takes our hero up to a land in the clouds, which are solid enough to walk on, though apparently kinda squishy since Jack starts bouncily striding as he proceeds toward a painted castle in the distance. Said castle is, of course, home to a giant – the same thief who stole the family hen and harp, lo those many years ago, though, considering his size, we have to wonder how he was about to sneak about and get away without being seen. The giant is a burly sort with a faint Southern accent, married to a giantess wife who mainly exists in the movie to bring him his supper and bicker with him. Each of the three scenes featuring the creature revolve around his eating something icky ("There's nuthin' like a good meal of creepy-crawlies to make a man feel good!") and his wife showing disgust at his dining habits. After watching this and Thumbelina, I'm starting to think that Mahon had Women Issues. Our hero Jack sneaks into the castle, holding up in the same type of closet that Jamie Lee Curtis used to hide in Halloween (only here, of course, the closet's folding doors are mounted into castle walls), as the Giant faintly sings abut smelling the blood of an English-mun. He sings a variation on this tune (composed by George Linsenmann and Ralph Falco, who did all the numbers in this flick) every time Jack sneaks into the castle, but the song never gets any better. Jack steals the golden egg-laying hen – which appears to be made of papier maché and painted gold – and returns it to his family. You'd think the family's financial troubles'd be over, but they ain't. Turns out Jack's sis is engaged to a Hispanic-accented lothario who is pressuring her for a sizable dowry. Jack's brother-in-law to be has dreams of buying the local inn and becoming an innkeeper, but the mechanical hen doesn't lay eggs quickly enough to suit him. So Jack re-climbs the beanstalk to steal the bag of golden eggs in the giant's castle. After he returns with these, the couple-to-be purchase the inn, only to discover that a competitor across the street is pulling in all the customers with live entertainment. (Must be a Shakey's Pizza!) "We should've spent the money on a farm - or some business that's easy to operate," the idiot girl sez. They prepare to coerce patsy Jack into climbing up the stalk a third time, so he can retrieve the magical harp. But this time Jack has anticipated their request and gone up the beanstalk before they can ask. What follows is inevitable: the giant, concerned about the sneak thieves roaming around his house, has set up a Wile E. Coyote-style booby trap over the harp that consists of a 500-lb. weight attached to the harp with a thick rope. Our observant hero (who'd need to have forgotten his tri-focals to've missed it) unties the rope from the harp and safely dashes away with the loot. The giant catches him in the act, but as he rises from his chair to pursue the boy, he bonks! his head into the hanging weight. Jack makes his way to the beanstalk before the giant rouses himself – which is fortunate because otherwise Mahon might've had to actually shoot a scene showing the giant running, and Lord knows we don't want this thing to be too exciting – and returns to Earth where a wedding party is taking place. Jack chops down the stalk while the giant is still hangin' on it and taking a look around, then he joins the wedding party to sing a song about happy endings. "Wasn't it worth waiting for?" he rhetorically asks the audience. (Dumb question, Barry.) To show off his compassionate conservative side, he tells the wedding party that, "I feel sorry for Mrs. Giant; she wasn't so bad! She just got mixed up with the wrong kind of man!" Oh, and like your sister didn't? Of the two inner movies, Jack arguably edges out Thumbelina as the more entertaining entry – though, admittedly, this is a bit like debating whether a boot or a bat to the crotch is the less painful experience – if only because its non-stop anachronisms are so much fun to parse. I really have to wonder about those children whose parents actually dropped 'em off for weekend matinees of this stuff, though: what did these kids grow up to be? Spoiled whiney brides? Use car salesmen? Worm eaters? If they grew into average ordinary folk, than I've gotta wonder about all these adults who spend so much worrying about kids' entertainment. As a grown-up viewer, I'm still feeling stunned from watching Jack in the Beanstalk; perhaps kids' psyches are more resilient than we give 'em credit for. . . # | Friday, September 02, 2005 ( 9/02/2005 09:02:00 PM ) Bill S. NO MORE ROLLIN' AND TUMBLIN' – Nik Durga has a good appreciation for bluesman R.L. Burnside, who passed away at the age of 78 Thursday in a Memphis hospital. The singer was probably best known outside bluesfan circles for a blues/electronica track, "It's Bad You Know" (from Come On In), which was used to strong effect in an episode of The Sopranos. His signature sound was often sparer and darker, but even a ton's worth of remixery couldn't bury the essence of the man – which was raw and honest in the best country blues manner. I first noticed R.L's music on "The Delta Doctor" blues show on WGLT, our local NPR station. Deejay Frank Black played a lot of the remixed tracks from Come On In, and it encouraged me to seek out several of Burnside's Fat Possum CDs. I was never disappointed in any of 'em. One of his more recent albums (and a personal fave) was entitled Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down. Hopefully, the man now is. . . # | ( 9/02/2005 07:14:00 AM ) Bill S. WRAP IT UP, I'LL TAKE IT – Savannah Cat gets all tangled up in green & red. . .  # | Thursday, September 01, 2005 ( 9/01/2005 02:41:00 PM ) Bill S. WALKIN' TO NEW ORLEANS – With so much chaos surrounding the evacuation of New Orleans, fans of the city's music have started wondering about the many singers and musicians who've made that city their home. I received an email from blues deejay Frank Black this afternoon with worrisome news about one of the city's biggest rock-'n'-roll legends, Antoine "Fats" Domino. Per Frank's email, the 76-year-old musician lives with his wife, Rosemary, and daughter in a three-story pink-roofed house in New Orleans' 9th ward, which is now under water. On Monday afternoon, Domino reportedly told his manager that he would "ride out the storm" at home. At this writing, the whereabouts of Domino and his family are unknown. Damn. UPDATE: About four hours after the abovewritten post, Cap'n Spaulding directed me to this Fox News feature which indicates that Domino (along with another city native and classic R & B great, Irma "Time Is On My Side" Thomas) is no longer missing. Good to know. # | ( 9/01/2005 11:46:00 AM ) Bill S. WELL, I WAS AN ENGLISH MAJOR – Haven't played with one of these Quizilla dealies in a while, so let's see what kinda Indy Kid I am: You're an Indie Pop Kid. You like songs about relationships and the prettiness of nature. You're sentimental, but not certainly not emo. Oh, and if you aren't an English Major, you should be. You Know Yer Indie. Let's Sub-Categorize. brought to you by Quizilla ( 9/01/2005 11:34:00 AM ) Bill S. WHERE MY MIND SOMETIMES WANDERS AT LUNCHTIME – Back in the days when X-Files was still riding high and it was still considered okay to fantasize about monolithic government conspiracies ('coz the presidency was in the hands of the Democrats at the time, don't ya know), the Federal Emergency Management Agency played a role in the feature film X-Files: Fight the Future as one arm of the shadow government conspiracy that was either in league with and/or combating a sinister alien invasion. In '98, F.E.M.A. was so concerned about the p.r. issues arising from this film that they apparently prepared a Public Affairs Guidance document for answering questions that might arise from the movie basically saying that, contrary to what the movie asserts, the agency does not have the power to declare martial law and give us over to the our new E.T. overlords. But per this Independent story from 2004, X-scribe Chris Carter's conspiracy theory wouldn't fly these days since our present Chief Exec (no conspiracy theories now, folks – he's Republican!) pretty much disemboweled the agency. . . # | ( 9/01/2005 07:24:00 AM ) Bill S.  "JUST BECAUSE MY COLOR'S SHADY. . ." – Lookin' back once more at my music list from 1968, I keep honing in on a bolded item quite a bit different from the other big pop hits of the day: #86 – the Mills Brothers' "Cab Driver."Though the era is generally characterized as a peak period for rock 'n' roll, you still saw a certain amount of this in the 60's: an earlier generation's hitmakers (see also: Louis Armstrong & Old Blue Eyes) periodically popping up on the charts, like the last grasp of our parents' hold on pop radio. As a teenager, I wasn't much interested in this music: I'd grown up on my father playing Sinatra and the like – and they'd pretty much been relegated to the category of Easy Listening/MOR in my mind. Old Fart's Music: I knew it didn't have much to say to me. I was wrong, of course, but considering the way so many of these singers and musicians were being packaged and produced back then, it's understandable. I mean: Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World" may be one of the man's biggest sellers – knocking the Beatles off the chart in its day – but it's weakly sentimental tea compared to the dynamic jazz and rhythm-y blues that the man invented in the 30's and 40's. Same goes for the Mills Brothers: their '68 hit "Cab Driver" is a smoothly laid back slice of pop vocal harmonizing honed from four decades of singing together as a vocal group, but there's also an air of quaintness about it that keeps it from being anything more than a Really Likable Track. Listening to the Bros.' early work is a much more energizing experience. For this, let's look to the Sony collection, Four Boys And A Guitar: The Essential Mills Brothers. (For the record, the potentially racist CD title actually refers to the name that the Bros. first went by when the first started out.) Released in the mid-nineties as part of the label's "Art Deco Series," the 18-track disc looks to the quartet's earliest recordings from 1931-33 for its material – a selection that's just plain wonderful. The early Mills Brothers were jazz vocalists supreme, and in their best early tracks they typically didn't bother with any instrumentation beyond John Mills Jr.'s guitar. Instead, John bopped the basslines (you can hear the birth of doo-wop in these cuts) while brothers Herbert and Harry impersonated muted horns over lead tenor Donald's vocals. Group-fostered legend has it that the foursome originally played instrumentation with kazoos, but when they forgot them for a performance they decided to just make the sounds with their own mouths and, happily, preferred the results. True or not, makes for great pop history. The Mills Brothers' repertoire in that era was divided between vocal and instrumental jazz: "St. Louis Blues" and "Bugle Call Rag" both appear on this collection, along with sprightly nonsense numbers like "Diga Diga Doo" (done with Duke Ellington's band). They were meant to be dance songs, and even the slow cuts ("Dirt Dishing Daisy," Hoagy Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair," "Sleepy Head") have a sweetly loping rhythm to 'em. Four Boys also contains a trio of enjoyable vocal collaborations – two with Bing Crosby ("Dinah," the borderline condescending "Shine") and one with Cab Calloway ("The New Low Down.") In each track you can hear the quartet holding back to let the solo vocalist shine, but once they step up, they take their place right alongside 'em: no mean feat when you contrast the foursome's low-key vocal style against a dynamic belter like Calloway. The group underwent a major change in 1936 when guitarist John Jr. died and was replaced by John Sr. As their early scat style grew less fashionable, the quartet refashioned themselves as a suave pop vocal group. They had some big hits in the forties ("Paper Doll" most notably), but none of it matches the swinging energy of Four Boys And A Guitar asking us "How'm I Doing?" It's a familiar pop music tale: inventive and dynamic young popsters start out strong and grow more professional, losing some of their spark along the way. The Mills Bros. of "Paper Doll" and beyond are smooth to the Nth degree – their harmonies yield plenty of pleasure to those (like me) attuned to the sound – but the energy and invigorating vocal gimmickry which make the early tracks so much fun are in short supply. The Four Boys And A Guitar had clearly become Men – more's the pity. . . By the time the quartet had its '68 hit, they were primarily remembered for their forties sound. The early funky jazz stylizations were so out of radio fashion that the only way most Baby Boomers knew anything like 'em was from Betty Boop cartoons that we'd watched as kids (two songs on this collection, "How'm I Doing?" and "I Heard," were also sung by the Boopster on a pair of Fleischer 'toons). It's no wonder that I pooh-poohed the Mills Men when they had their final big chart-climber. I didn't know, back then, all that the group could really do. . . # | Wednesday, August 31, 2005 ( 8/31/2005 02:50:00 PM ) Bill S. HMM, THAT MOTORCYCLE BETTY LOOKS LIKE A NED SONNTAG – Just read on Mark Evanier's blog that Betty Boop has been selected to appear on a series of pins connected to the Hooters chain. (Story here.) As a big fan of the Fleischer Bros.' raciest creation, I'm unsure to make of this. I mean: Betty had a lot of different careers throughout the course of her movie run, but Hooters Girl ain’t one of 'em. Perhaps it's a sign of the times that a cartoon babe like the boop-boop-a-doop girl could be anything she wanted during the Great Depression – but has to settle for Hooters Gal in 21st Century America. . . # | ( 8/31/2005 11:25:00 AM ) Bill S. FAREWELL TO FLETCHER – Late last weekend, we received a distressing email from Becky's old college roommate Chris, indicating that her friend and lover, Fletcher Farrington, died Friday from a sudden unexpected heart attack. I met Fletcher for the first time last year when my wife and I took a trip to Savannah, Georgia. We stayed with Chris and Fletcher for a week – and I found the man to be a wonderful host: charming and friendly in a way that most Yanks think of as the Southern Manner, but also in love with a good political debate. He spent much of his career as a respected and active civil rights lawyer, doing a healthy amount of pro bono work. (As a pop culture sidebar, he also studied under satirist Neal Pollack.) Though my time and personal knowledge of Fletcher is primarily limited to that one enjoyable week in May, my heart goes out to Chris and anyone else who'll no longer have regular contact with the man. I know that he is already missed . . . # | ( 8/31/2005 07:52:00 AM ) Bill S. DAMN – I'm one of those people who needs an actual face to go with big number tragedies before they ring home to me. Thanks to Sean Collins' prompting, I've been reading the Live Journal of horror writer and New Orleans resident Poppy Z. Brite, a writer whose fiction I've enjoyed, though I'm not as fully versed in it as I'd like to be. Reading her post about being forced to abandon her home, taking only her dog and one cat out of a pride of twenty-something rescued felines, really brings the simple awfulness of Hurricane Katrina into terms I can recognize. There will be – and rightly so – a lotta posts in the blogosphere over the next week or so encouraging folks to contribute to relief efforts. One that I'd like to mention is the Humane Society U.S.A.'s Disaster Animal Response Team, which has already been sending in volunteer workers to help in animal rescue and assist pet caregivers. At the risk of coming across like one of those people more concerned with the plight of poor dumb companion animals than actual human beings, I'd recommend checking 'em out. # | Tuesday, August 30, 2005 ( 8/30/2005 08:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  "OTHER CHILDREN MAKE ME FEEL SO SMALL!" – The other morning we were watching part of a PBS series on religion & ethics: a segment on the new software being marketed to conservative religious families that gives parents the ability to block "objectionable" content found in modern family fillums. Earlier that a.m., I'd viewed a flick from 1972 sent my way by obscuro movie buff Aaron Neathery – the wonderfully titled Santa And the Ice Cream Bunny – and as I watched the company of 21st century Bowdlers describe how their spiffy new software'd protect impressionable young minds from Jim Carrey fart jokes, I found myself thinking, "Wouldn't be a whole lot edited out of the Ice Cream Bunny movie!" Unless, that is, there was a button for blocking out Total Incompetence.Produced by Barry Mahon (who also gave us the inimitable teen pic, Musical Mutiny, as well as the nudist horror outing, The Beast that Killed Women), SATICB is really two flicks in one. A not-so-prime example of the kind of low-rent kiddy fare hacked out in the 60's and early 70's for weekend matinees, the feature is so laggardly paced that you can't help but feel for the poor ushers who had to clean up afterwards. I'm thinkin' a lotta Jujube fights broke out during the slow parts. The opening film stars Jay Clark as St. Nick, an unfortunate thespian forced to emote in the hot Florida sun in a beard and Santa suit (that grows progressively more pit-stained as the flick progresses.) Our hero has gotten stranded in his sleigh on the hot winter beach, stuck in the sand while his reindeer have dashed away to the North Pole. (Years of handling a sleigh, and the guy makes a rookie mistake like that!) Clark's Santa, who's prone to grand hand gestures, bemoans his fate in song while director "R. Winer" gives us shots of the hot sun and regularly aims his camera at the front of the sleigh to remind us that the reindeer ain't there. Exhausted from all his emoting, Santa sits back down and falls asleep, where he appears to telepathically call out to all the neighborhood children (played by members of Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse). They dash across town to his aid, running through amusement parks and city dumps, passing Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer who are rafting on the Mississippi River, which now appears to be adjacent to the coast of Florida. Mssrs. Finn & Sawyer follow the gang, but never do anything further; they hide in the bushes to watch the proceedings from afar and are quickly forgotten by both moviemakers and kid audience. Our gang of neighborhood moppets attempt to help St. Nick by leading a series of animals (donkey, pig, sheep, cow, horse, man in a gorilla suit) to his sleigh, but none of the beasts are able to pull the sled out of the sand. The animal sequence drags for almost ten minutes and is so poorly structured that the man in the gorilla suit (perhaps a relative to the Beast that Killed Women?) is the first creature we see, not a wacky punch line. What to do now? Why, our sweaty Santa sits back down and tells the kids a story. . . At which point, the second of our two flicks commences: Thumbelina, directed by Mahon. We even get a second set of movie credits for this film-within-a-film, which opens at the Pirates World theme park (lots of shots of happy kids on rides – many of which I swear I'd already seen in Musical Mutiny!) and follows a Partridge Family-style hippie chick (mini-skirted Shay Gardner) as she ventures into the park's Hans Christian Anderson Playhouse. She enters a room with a series of cheesy dioramas and a speaker box recounting the story of Thumbelina. As she slowwwwwwly moves from display to display, our visiting hippie chick imagines herself in the role of the tiny little thing. So to recap: Santa is stranded on the Florida beach, and to while away the time, he tells a buncha kids a story about a girl who goes to an amusement park and hears the story of Thumbelina. How very Borges-ian. (And don't forget to ask yer parents to take you to Pirates World, kids!) Mahon's segment is marginally better than its framing sequence. If nothing else, its limited sets are more visually arresting than that dreary beach, and, besides, we get to see a lotta characters in outlandish animal suits. On the debit side, the Thumbelina short is as turgidly paced as the Santa sequence, and whenever the story comes to a potentially exciting moment, Mahon takes us back to the Pirates World theater and has the speaker box tell us what happened next! Thus, when tiny Thumbelina gets kidnapped by a Frog Prince and his mama Queen Frog, we only see a couple of snippets of two actors in brightly spotted cloth costumes – and don't even get to watch our heroine escape her captors. Poor Shay Gardner is cute in an I'm-A-Pepper kinda way, but, unfortunately, that appears to be the limit of her talents – in one scene, she "sings" one of the movie's thoroughly forgettable ditties and dances around a walnut shell with even less grace than Lisa Simpson in tap class. Santa's inner movie follows Thumb as she is raised by spinstery mother (Ruth McMahon, sounding as incongruously Florida matronly as June Forey doin' a "Fractured Fairy Tales" fairy godmother), then gets lost in the woods and rescued by a kindly mole named Mrs. Digger (who, we learn in one of Mahon's cutaways back to Pirates World, is also the voice on the speaker box narrating this tale). Missus D. attempts to marry Thumb off to a rich elderly mole named, um, Mister Mole, but our proto-feminist heroine is having none of it. "It's a big and cruel world," the lady mole advises her, "unless you have a man to look after you, cruel things can happen to you!" One can only hope that every little girl in the audience tossed their popcorn at the screen at that moment. Thumb ultimately ditches the marriage-minded moles – after much time-filling hand wringing, of course – and with the aid of a once frozen blue bird flies away from that part of the forest. This time, amazingly, Mahon actually gives us a brief action scene: showing the two as they soar through the skies and the blue bird's wing casts a visible shadow on the white sky backdrop. As they fly, Mahon retells the whole story with filmclips and a voiceover from Thumb summarizing all that we've already seen. They land in a part of the forest populated by people just as tiny as our gal: turns out our girl is destined to become Queen of the Flower People, but instead of giving us, oh, Scott Mackenzie singin' "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair," we're treated to another of the movie's lame-ass original "cute" songs, as the camera pans from neat-cut Flower Child to neat-cut Flower Child. Then it's back to Pirates World where our visiting hippie chick takes us through another collage of rides, then meets someone we assume is supposed to be her boyfriend. He looks exactly like the Prince of the Flower Children. This digression over, we return to Santa, who is now apparently on the verge of heat stroke. With his story concluded, the seemingly ungrateful kids dash off, so Santa finally doffs his coat (apparently, he's been shy about letting the young 'uns see him in his skivvies) and collapses for what we suspect will be the final, fatal time onto his sleigh. Then, true help arrives! It's a guy in a giant bunny suit, driving an antique fire engine with the kids riding in the back. "The Ice Cream Bunny!" Santa tells us, though where the ice cream part of this comes from is anybody’s guess. (My own theory is he originally was meant to be the Easter Bunny, but they changed the name so as not to offend any Christian backers.) ICB rescues St. Nick by basically kicking all the kids off his fire truck and driving off into the sunset with Santa in the passenger seat. As the kids stand and dumbly stare at the now empty sleigh, it disappears "like magic" as a voiceover informs us that Santa has now returned to the North Pole. "Hey!" you can imagine some smart-ass punk in the theater audience shouting, "if Santa's able to transport his sleigh like that long-distance, what's he need his reindeer for?" All in all, a thoroughly mind-numbing movie experience, though, like I say, in terms of family friendly blandness, Santa And the Ice Cream Bunny strikes me as just the thing for today's concerned repressive moms and pops. If you have an overly imaginative tyke, this thing'll undoubtedly leech all the fantasy out of 'em. Perhaps that was the true pernicious intent behind this feature? . . . (Thanx . . . I think . . . to Aaron for sending me a tape of this flick. Next up: one of goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis' kid flicks!) # | Monday, August 29, 2005 ( 8/29/2005 12:00:00 PM ) Bill S. "DO YOU REMEMBER MURRAY THE K, ALAN FREED AND HIGH ENERGY?" – A buncha bloggers have followed up last week’s music meme with entries of their own – and it looks like the more recent you go, the less chance a rock 'n' roll lovin' listener has of finding much worth bolding in their senior year's Top 100. My first response on reading this was to indulge in some superior dancin' (coz, you know, my year's so much cooler than yours!) But then I started getting pissed at the dullards in the music industry. And I began thinkin' about the Hewlett-Packard teevee commercials. I love these ads: they're just about the only ones today that I'll stop to watch, instead of dashing off to the bathroom or kitchen. You know the ones I'm talkin' about: snappily edited images of smiling clean-cut young folk holding up morphing pictures that we're supposed to believe they've printed up on their HP gear – edited to the beat of an infectiously catchy pop-rock song. The ads have featured great tracks by the Cure, the Kinks and, most recently, Apples in Stereo. Apples in Whosit? Most pop music listeners will recognize the Cure or Kinks (even if the individual tracks being utilized weren't either band's most familiar tracks). But unless you're a fan of cultish poppery – or a parent who happened to catch the band's "Let's Go" video at the end of an episode of Powerpuff Girls – chances are you haven't heard of this supremely inventive band of power powers. To my admittedly biased ears, this single fact exemplifies what sucks about modern American pop radio. When teevee commercials are hipper (and possess a better ear) than the folks programming today's Pop Muzick airwaves, we've gone way past the point where the demands of demographics have stultified the pop world – we've truly entered the Land of the Cloth-Eared. . . (And for the record, the AiS song being used is "Rainbow" from The Discovery of A World Inside the Moone.) # | |
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