the sampling i know of is the song that goes “another mc loses life tonight…” on the fugrees’ ’score’.

Also my first language is Italian so I know perfectly well what she meant.

Anne - welcome aboard, and please comment on other entries on this site.

Just realised I haven’t given my verdict on this record yet, so here it is - soporific. Sorry.

Greatest sentence EVER posted in Popular Comments!

I quite like it, but even now the one bit I don’t totally grasp is how it managed to do so well. That’s in no way a criticism, but it intrigues me that it could do so well when other versions had failed (commercially) and Art wasn’t a consistently popular singles act.

I post at a “Buffy” web site called The Cross and Stake, where we are re-viewing all 144 episodes in chronological order (a project not totally unlike what’s happening here with singles). This very day, we’re discussing - you guessed it - “I Only Have Eyes For You.” Rest assured I pointed out your site and this entry to my fellow “Buffy” lovers.

I love this phrase: “this big fuzzy oven glove of sound.” That’s perfect. And I’m happy to see you feel the same about the Flamingos’ version.

Also it has the greatest movie record geek ever in Daniel Stern’s character who can name the b-side of all his singles and tells his wife what record was playing the first time he ever saw her as a retort to her question “What’s the big deal? They’re just records”

Also YT-ed the Flamingos take on it, which has a dreamy poise that Art doesn’t quite manage. I like Art’s version all the same.

Where do things change? To some extent it’s all lines in the sand but there are times when you can point to significant points in history that changed everything. 1945 was one obvious such point - not only the end of the war but also the year of Hiroshima, Nagasaki (already alluded to recently) and yes, Dresden. The seismic shift in the nature of the charts around 1962/63 surely didn’t happen in isolation; it was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (the Cold War affected Britain much less than it did America until this point); the Kennedy assassination; Vietnam; but also the Chatterley trial and - most significant of all perhaps - the contraceptive pill. If you were sixteen in 1963 you were born in - 1947. Hmmm…

And then comes the mid 70s. The oil crisis which began in 1973 was really beginning to bite by 1975 and the properity that had hitherto been taken for granted now began to fall apart. 1975 is also the year of Jaws, which began a new era of mainstream Hollywood film production. I’d venture to suggest that the average age of the buyer of singles had come down too, and if you were just entering your teens in 1975 you would have been born in - 1962/63!

By the way, my favourite Baby Boom film, which is perhaps more liminal and illustrative of the transition rather than full-blown Babybooming, is Peter Bogdanovitch’s The Last Picture Show. The soundtrack to that features names from the very early days of Popular - Jo Stafford, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett…

also: there was a post-war pop’n boom in the us and a post-war pop’n boom in the uk, but did their ends coincide?

But only recently, I’d wager - if memory serves, there was a time when the “boom” finished up around 1958; I say that because I recall a swag of TV docos etc that surfaced around the time of “The Big Chill” which all seemed more aimed at my old siblings. I was born in 1960 and remember thinking that I’d just missed being part of this so-called boom…I suspect that it’s only after the rise and definitions of Generations X and Y that the boom period was sort of lengthened to take up the slack, as it were.

I could be wrong, of course.

(also of course teens had more disposable income and were being consciously targeted as a distinct market blah blah)

(which is possibly one reason koganbot sed it wasn’t a very clear term)

it was the combination of a new generation of film writing (american as well as french) with college film clubs — where you could actually see the films in question — that brought about the shift: the writing on its own would have made little difference i suspect (the power of the new wave as a critical force rose on the back of a very potent and canny film-club movement in france, agitated for by andre bazin among others)

this isn’t even that much of an off-topic red herring — i would certainly argue very strongly that the generational shift in taste, including an effacement* of all pop “before elvis” (more or less), is linked to a shift in recording technology — the vanishing of the machinery to play 78s; the vanishing (or anyway massive reduction) of a context for sheet-music to be plugged to dance-bands; both these meant that the music that arrived via such technologies had no way to continue to play a role in people’s lives

*there hasn’t been any such moment of effacement since — and this is because digital technology was explicitly geared towards the transfer of material record on earlier formats, this resale strategy was a central element in its sales pitch

This is where dates and generational labels start to mean nothing, if you could be a Boomer born as late as 1964 (are you sure about that?) that would mean I’m one and all the punks were.

And music itself is its own story, not in sync with the other arts. You don’t get “nothing exists before 1956 (or ‘51 or ‘48)” in movies or novels. In fact, it was the college film societies in the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s that played a huge role in the critical upgrading of the old Hollywood films, putting Casablanca and the Marx Brothers into the top echelon and getting the average student to take gangster films and screwball comedies seriously. Music is its strange story here: for better or worse you get the overthrow of classical music as the music of the intelligentsia, and you for a while you do get “the world begins in February 1964 and rock ‘n’ roll (beginning with Orioles in ‘48 or ‘Rocket 88′ in ‘51 or Elvis in ‘54 or ‘56) is just precursor, and anything else is ancien regime. And strangely, as for the (supposedly) sure-thing canonized Great Artists, the Beatles-Stones-Dylan plus whoever you add on, they don’t cover a swath of 18 years as you’d expect but come all concentrated in the mid to late ’60s. And even though near contemporaries (and even predecessors) like Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel and Fleetwood Mac and Elton John far outsell them in the ’70s (and it’s boomers whom they’re selling to) those performers don’t get the kneejerk citation as “Great Artists” that the Beatles do. And the critics and musicians who get the process going whereby now it’s standard to look beyond the rock canon to years before and genres despised were baby boomers themselves. (The stereotyped baby boom culture wasn’t made by baby boomers themselves, just consumed by them. Not baby boomers: Dylan, Lennon, Jagger. Baby boomers: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sonic Youth.) And presumably a lot of the people buying Basie and Armstrong box sets these days were born in the baby boom. So size of the demographic and its supposed self-centeredness aren’t in themselves enough to tell what’s going on. There was something about the circumstances and the ’60s hero story that was compelling, too, and probably remains so.