MADONNA – “Who’s That Girl”
With The Immaculate Collection, Madonna was able to remix and edit her history as well as her songs, jumping triumphantly from the True Blue singles to the Like A Prayer ones, from superstar consolidation to next-level persona building. She took the opportunity to erase her 1987, a messy year creatively as well as personally as the string of underdone singles from the Who’s That Girl soundtrack showed. The title track is better than the clattering, SAW-ish “Causing A Commotion” or diffuse ballad “The Look Of Love”, but this is still a barely engaged Madonna. It’s only on the “light up my life” bridge that she seems at all bothered, and there’s no real emotional connection between that and the rest of the song – the whole thing is marking time. Since I like ‘latin Madonna’ I think it marks time very pleasantly, but we’re still in the departure lounge of San Pedro airport here, waiting resignedly for something to happen.
5
bowie singles charting in the top 10 in the u.s. – fame (#1), golden years, let’s dance (#1), china girl, blue jean, dancing in the street
bowie albums charting in top 10 in the u.s. – diamond dogs, young americans, station to station, let’s dance
bowie i hear alot on classic rock, oldies, AAA, or 80s format radio – space oddity, the man who sold the world, changes, ziggy stardust, suffragette city, jean genie, diamond dogs, rebel rebel, young americans, fame, golden years, under pressure, let’s dance, china girl, modern love
next in the glee pipeline: britney, with zep, billy joel, courtney love possible down the line (don’t hold yr breath on zep giving permission)
I will watch Glee when they start doing their own songs (see also X Factor). yrs, massive rockist.
⌗52 I could see them doing an all Elton John show – in the US he’s had 56 Top 40 hits including 9 number 1s and I would imagine he’d be up for it.
⌗53 something more like The Monkees maybe?
ryan murphy did use ‘rocket man’ on nip/tuck
I stand by my remark at #47 that Glee really needs to settle down and work on its characters and story-lines a bit.
That said, Steve M., #53′s (implicit) idea: that the show try in-house composition as part of the mix could work well, esp. if you could get someone like a Jens Lekman or Stephin Merritt or Aimee Mann keen to contribute. In general, though, 20+ hours of tv per year, so ~100 songs per year is a huge challenge even to perform well, let alone write many of them from scratch. The Conchords’ found they couldn’t write 20 new quality songs quickly enough for their second season (i.e., for just 6 hours of tv)!
Well the Buffy musical was quite, quite brilliant so no reason why it wouldn’t work again.
So far I’m only going to have to write about Glee once on TPL and I would have been a lot happier if they’d gone with the amateurish, fluffed covers you hear (and see) in the actual show rather than cleaning/glossing it all up for the record so it could literally be anybody. To me that’s sort of missing the point of the entire show, but I didn’t come up with the idea and don’t executive produce it so what do I know?
I am very happy with no original music on Glee thanks very much AND the super buffed up versions. I think there is a place for transition, but the balance between diagetic and non-diagetic music in the show is deliberately blurred to make it more interesting. Sure we could have endless sequences of the band / the singers learning the songs, but then the closer the musical sequences get to having rules about its reality, then the conceit of the show then falls apart. It has managed to be a weekly TV musical, which a fair few of its audience (ie most) do not consider to be a musical because the singing in it is justified by the premise. But when you actually look at the numbers, they conform to the rules of the old fashioned musical – that whilst the numbers are running any feat of singing, musicianship, choreography and fantasy are fair game.
One Buffy musical, two decentish songs. I am not saying Glee couldn’t or shouldn’t do an “original numbers” show, but I think it is much more interesting as a way of contextualising what we already knew about how extant pop music soundtracks our lives. It is everything I wanted Moulin Rouge to be, and Moulin Rouge fluffed up.
one of the reasons the buffy musical works so well is that it not only acknowledges that the ethos of good weekly TV programme-making clashes with the ethos of good musical writing, but turns this clash into the objective correlative of the mounting tensions in the characters’ lives, between who their are and their roles in the drama — so as a one-off it not only advances the story, but acts as a crux point in the story, a kind of salad of all the crises
glee is a weekly musical, not a weekly serial with a musical episode: so the workability is not transferrable — the compositional musicality within the story is strictly borrowed and or mimicked
(which gibes with the story itself; actually giving any of the characters’ music-writerly or improvisational ambitions would i suspect make it insanely complicated and ambitious) (it makes it less realistic, of course, in that within any school context there will be budding bands and songwriters also: but musicals respect different rules of realism from the get-go)
i have to say i would like one day to see the insanely complicated and ambitious project undertaken by someone — but i am not surprised or dismayed that it has not yet come to pass
(possibly because i want to script it!)
As far as the records are concerned it’s not so much “deliberately blurred” as deliberately cleaned up for CD so as to placate the industry rather than take a real risk and go all Christian Wolff (since ultimately I want Glee to turn into Escalator Over The Hill but accept that I’m probably the only person on the planet bearing that forlorn wish).
Also “not having rules” is the most stifling rule you could have.
“Contextualising…” is wishful projection, I’m afraid; what does Glee say about how “extant pop music” (is there such a thing as “non-existent pop music”?) “soundtracks our lives” other than being essentially a smartass variant on the end sketch in Crackerjack with ill-formed ideas above its station? Haven’t we long since worked that out for ourselves?
(“that” being how “extant pop music soundtracks our lives”)
i.e. I want to know what happens and how it happens when the Glee people are forced to stand still, as must inevitably happen. How they respond to the silence of brewing thoughts.
My judgement of Moulin Rouge – other than I went to see it at the cinema at a time when I really shouldn’t have done – is likewise clouded by its damned timidity and suffocating earnestness (especially from McGregor).
i think my dream project is a kind of “Xcalator Factor Over the Hillo Bongo: a Scratch Die GleesterSingers”
(certainly that’s the title sorted)
The cleaned up aspect does throw the show into a bit of a dilemma, and did so in the shaky early episodes. How could we judge that Mercedes has an awesome voice if everyone’s voice is going to be beefed up? Note they haven’t had an episode yet where someone gets kicked out for being rubbish – clearly this plot has to happen (if only because Glee eats up plot ridiculously) and then how would we know? It would be nice to have an episode where they feel confident enough to take off the stabilisers, most of these kids were picked because they were good performers and there is more than enough material for the albums already. But then there is the earnestness of the Glee Unplugged season which I imagine will be less fun. But there is something about Glee as the melancholic High School musical that we could all live, because we have access to the same music they do.
I think the interesting thing it has to say about how music soundtracks our lives is how most songs, given the right spin, seem to be applicable to any situation and plot. Indeed Glee doesn’t seem to often rely on the lyrics of a song beyond its title to ever open up subtext. In that way it covers the idea that Ring Ring by Abba could be the saddest song in the world to someone who connects it with personal tragedy heard over a telephone.
Wasn’t “Ring Ring” the saddest song in the world already?
I don’t believe Glee is telling me anything about the relationship between individuals and cheap music that Dennis Potter hadn’t already told me.
Oh! This exchange has just given me the idea I needed to finally* write my post on STUNT MUSIC which i have been semi-planning for ages (because this — and the curious but very long-established** notion of music-as-competition — IS an element explored in Glee)
*Disclaimer: this does not mean it will get written any time soon!
**It Is No Accident*** that the first important Wagner**** opera is about a music competition!! :D
***Translation: “I have a theory…”
****[Insert "Ring Ring Cycle Cycle" joke here heh]
Insert ‘Wagner is better than he sounds’ joke here. Now, should Glee ever need to invade Poland….
Out of the musicals I’ve written about so far on TPL I note that virtually all of their plots turn on a competition. As indeed do the ones I’ve yet to write about.
Ring Ring is pretty tragic, but not the the reasons mentioned. And while Dennis Potter may have already done much of the schtick, they aren’t showing Potter to ver kids these days. That said Potter’s examination of this was usually for much more ironic and/or metatextual effect, and latterly almost straight up nostalgia. One thing Glee does not seem that interested in is the fetishisation of classics, until the Madge episode it seems that very little consideration was made of the songs age or canonical pedigree. Which again is all for the good.
do glee clubs in the uk sing pop hits? also i have avoided glee (i’m in neither the cbs nor the bravo demo) but how much is it basically what i imagine it to be – a version of its creator’s first show spiked w/ its leadin?
The problem with the Buffy musical was that the songs were all naff – but all the Joss fans I come across are so caught up in the idea of “Hey! It’s a musical!” that they don’t seem to notice.
fwiw: my review of the buffy musical back in the day
taDOW: i’m not sure that there ARE glee clubs in the uk, and — not JUST to wind the lex up — i think this is a reason why R&B is more minority than it ought to be over here: i think the glee ethos* is basic to understanding a layer of the R&B ethos
*by which i meran the ethos of the social practice, not the ethos of the show qua show
UPDATE: link shd now work (moral, don’t hypertext when boozed up :) )
btw – an episode of Glee directed by Joss Whedon is due soon
I liked the Buffy musical – I wish Mark’s link above worked
@73 I get that there are performative similarities but in practice I’m not sure there’s much crossover between Glee and R&B audiences.
Pete @65 basically sums up my deep and ever-increasing hatred of Glee with “Indeed Glee doesn’t seem to often rely on the lyrics of a song beyond its title to ever open up subtext” – I’d go further, when I hear Glee covers it sounds like they’ve never actually listened to the original songs. It’s exactly like those bank adverts where they get their staff to sing a pop song except with different lyrics about Halifax or whatever. Has about as much worth, too, ie none.
I strongly dislike musicals generally, though.