Listen here. Follow along here.
This week, in addition to forty awesome pop songs, I’ll be looking at songs with misguided concepts about gender and gender roles. I’m not sure I’m awake enough for this, but yay!
Bea Arthur died today at the age of 86. She had been fighting cancer and passed away at her home.
She’s best-known these days for her Emmy-winning role as Dorothy Zbornak, the younger half of television’s most stomach-churning parent-child relationship. But I actually prefer watching her on Maude, the Norman Lear sitcom that ran from 1972 to 1978. Maude, played by Arthur, was a no-nonsense liberal that supported abortion, racial equality, and tolerance, even though she usually came across as noisy and over-opinionated. (Maude was a spin-off of All In The Family, but was a lot less annoying to watch.) My favorite episode is the one where she hosts a children’s birthday party, but there’s many, many good episodes. It used to be on TV Land and according to Wikipedia isn’t anymore; also, though it ran for six seasons, only the first is around on DVD.
The boyfriend and I went back and forth all night, mainly working off our laptops which was new for both of us. The kids had a good time, although there were so many of them and they all wanted so many different styles of music that I think we got kind of overwhelmed. But overall it seemed good and they all thanked us afterwards, even though we did “forget” about all of their Flo Rida and Katy Perry requests.
Jazmine Sullivan, Bust Your Windows [immediate faux ballroom dancing ensued]
La Roux, In For The Kill
Anita Ward, Ring My Bell
Annie, Chewing Gum [Complaint at this point that everything sounded the same]
Ian Carey Project, Get Shaky
The Knife, Pass This On [And the dancefloor clears.] (more…)
Tonight’s the big night, where the BF and I DJ a dance for queer teens. I imagine this being high school drama topped off with gay drama and smothered in dancefloor drama. Luckily it’s also an early dance, because the space the dance is in is upstairs from this uber-icky 30+ bar and the kids need to be out before the thirtysomethings move in. We’ll be (hopefully) out by nine.
Since I only have a really vague concept of a) what’s currently popular with the kids, b) what’s retro-popular with the kids, and c) what high school dances are like, this is probably going to end in tears. But the organizers said the kids are into really campy trash, and also that we can’t play anything too explicit, even though the kids are going to ask for it. Here’s my preliminary playlist so far, which is a mix of campy trash and what I would have wanted to hear at a high school dance if I had actually wanted to go to high school dances:
Alphabeat, Boyfriend
Girls Aloud, Untouchable
Madonna, Live To Tell
Ghost Town DJs, My Boo
Teena Marie, Lovergirl (more…)
Filed under: music | Tags: gene pitney, helen shapiro, poopchutes, the sixties
My itunes randomizer just popped up with Gene Pitney’s Not Responsible, a song that’s wonderfully catchy and has amazingly weird backup vocals, despite the fact it’s also very creepy in the “ha ha this is actually maybe about date rape” sort of way that was alarmingly common in sixties pop music. That’s why I’m much more at ease listening to the 1963 version by the fabulous Helen Shapiro. Shapiro was a white Jewish soul singer who had her first hit when she was fourteen. (I’m surprised there wasn’t any revival of interest in her when Amy Winehouse got all popular, actually, because visually they’ve got a lot in common.)
On Shapiro’s first headlining British tour, the Beatles were the opening act, but Melody Maker declared that her a has-been at sixteen and, chartwise, she was. Her biggest hit was called Walking Back To Happiness and finally somebody uploaded a performance of it to Youtube last month:
Filed under: copouts, music, personal | Tags: freda payne, kari ferrell, magazines, print, stupidity, the internet
I spent most of the last two days re-reading everything I’ve ever written, more or less, and decided that I’m getting dumber. This will be important in a minute.
Joe from Joe.My.God just updated his Facebook status and mentioned that Freda Payne was on American Idol tonight. I had no idea, and don’t really know why she was there since this was disco week and Payne’s last hit was in 1971. However, she is awesome. I haven’t mentioned my love of Freda Payne much–though her excellent Easiest Way To Fall was on one of the mixtapes sixteen months ago–but she’s really fabulous. Reviews of her performance tonight aren’t so good, though I refuse to acknowledge the opinion of anyone who starts off an article in the misinformed style of whoever wrote this thing. (It was the first story when I did a Google news search.) Not that I’m pursuing journalism jobs or anything, but how is this nonsense acceptable in an era with so many unemployed writers? (His getting the song title wrong bugs me, too, because I just spent an hour thinking I had missed Payne singing Since U Been Gone, which was sort of blowing my mind.)
Payne’s appearance is sort of funny to me because this morning I reread the one other post here where I mentioned her, the one where I used Band of Gold as an example of why pop is just as valuable, if not more so, than the Rolling Stone-endorsed canon of rock is. (It was a pre-emptive defense of why I thought that Mary J Blige’s Real Love, and not Smells Like Teen Spirit, is the best single of the nineties. Which it is, by the way.)
Anyway. As I was saying before, I’m getting dumber. These days I rarely write anything longer than two pages, I don’t read books criticially, and I can’t remember the last time I actually tried to argue a point in any kind of meaningful way. I mean, I’m also not in college anymore, and that’s obviously a huge part of it. But rereading older stuff I’ve written, a lot of it’s really pretty okay and not nearly as pretentious as I would have expected.
Filed under: this very blog
Lots of hits from Twitter today, but no one I know linked here lately… Interesting… Anybody know who did?
There was an anti-trafficking rally held at the Rhode Island State House yesterday, which worries me. Once again, people seem completely oblivious to the fact that consensual sex where money is exchanged is not the same thing as human trafficking.
It keeps happening here. People try to criminalize prostituion on the grounds that the women are victims, they propose laws that would send the prostitutes/victims to jail, and then they don’t understand why people think that’s a bad idea. There are currently multiple bills in the state legislature to ban indoor prostitution, and all of them seek mainly to put the prostitutes in jail.
That this rally took place just days after an escort was tied up and robbed at gunpoint is also very inappropriate. Was the message of the rallyers that she was the one who should have been arrested? That it was wrong of this woman to have called the cops? That she should go to jail for possibly finding a murderer?
It’s true that Rhode Island is full of brothels thinly disguised as massage parlors. But the argument of the anti-trafficking people seems to be that, except for the sex act itself, these places are fully untouchable by the law right now. Do we know that? Are all workers properly documented? And over the age of 18? Are any of these women living in the massage parlors? Are the businesses filing fully legit taxes every year? Are the buildings even up to fire code, or OSHA standards? My guess is no, and probably a visit from the Health Department could solve lots of the state’s problems. Also, I don’t think making prostitution illegal is going to make anything better for anyone, particularly for the trafficked women, who will have even fewer rights than they do now.
[Photo via the Mount Hope Neighborhood Association]
Or, how people found the blog this week. I think the first one is my favorite:
Today
u are a dream come true
grossest porn ever
joe rogan muscles
2008 songs for preteens
‘show her sole”
mtv “well hung”
guy takes naked pics of himself
mixtapes of the year 2000
“deborah cox” “rhode island pride” 2009
renderers “million lights”
Yesterday
nerdy glasses
mixtapes for hookers
n.e.r.d naked
“synthetic pubes” sucker
arpad miklos
Or: When is the world just going to end, already?
[via Ted Leo's Twitter]
