Posts from 25th September 2006
25
Sep 06
THE ARCHIES – “Sugar, Sugar”
How much sugar are we dealing with, exactly? Here’s an itemisation of the hooks in the last minute of “Sugar, Sugar”:
More
OH NO IT’S BANKSY
Banksy the comedy vandal casts a wry eye on the pop scene!
BOBBIE GENTRY – “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”
Like a lot of songs from musicals, “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” sounds incomplete somehow, a stage in a particular journey. The bitter lyrics and the warm, whimsical delivery stand in such sharp contrast that you know there’s going to be a resolution one way or another. In the context of the pop charts, though, we never find out the ending, so Gentry’s song has to stand on its own as a confused, rueful moment.
I’ve never seen – or heard – Promises, Promises, so it should be easy for me to hear it like that, but the song still seems awkward. Gentry, sounding like she has a heavy cold, plays it pretty straight and sweet, and doesn’t put any special stress on Hal David’s cleverer couplets – specifically the “pneumonia”/”phone ya” rhyme, the artifice of which jumps out even more as a result. Stripped of context, what I get is some lovely hooks in service of a record that’s too cute for its own good.
Woodland Propaganda
As we all know, second-hand bookshops are dangerous places. Most fall into two categories: 1) evil-smelling dungeons guarded by Bernard Black where the books don’t even have any writing on the spines 2) cosy treasure-nests that you cannot bear to leave without spending half your weekly salary on a children’s book you can recite by heart anyway but that was lost forever when your parents moved house/got flooded/burned it as heresy UNTIL NOW.
More
Loading ...