Blog: The Pop View

Frank Sinatra was not a big fan of the rock 'n' roll music. I suspect that, in part, he was threatened by it. He was just making his comeback in the Fifties and then this Elvis kid comes along and you think the bobbysoxers give a crap about Ol' Blue Eyes? No, sir. It's enough to make a man's blood boil. "My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly degenerate, vicious form of expression [...]

There are many memorable episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm . The one where Larry picks up a hooker so he can use the commuter lane to go see a baseball game at Dodger Stadium and then she gives him some marijuana for his father's glaucoma? That's a good one. Maybe my favorite, though, is " Krazee-Eyez Killa ," from Season 3, wherein Larry David advises a gangsta rapper on the finer points of personal expression. LARRY: I like it. I got one, tiny, [...]

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was one of the key figures of the bop movement. His most famous composition was the standard "A Night in Tunisia." Diz loved to clown and is known as much for his humor as for his playing. He was good at both, but often was criticized for "cutting the fool." He may have liked to goof around, but he was serious about his music and he knew the difference. Let's go to a story from Bill Crow's classic Jazz Anecdotes : [...]

I'm a big Orson Welles fan, even though I've only seen a handful of the films he directed ( Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil among them). I'd never seen The Magnificent Ambersons , because I had always heard that it had been butchered (Read about what happened here ). Ambersons was on Turner Classic Movies this weekend and I finally decided to take the plunge. It was great. The ending [...]

"There are a bunch of disaffected people who listen to the cassettes , are influenced by the ideology. It's sort of ideology that's holding it together, not some sort of command structure." Newsweek 's Fareed Zakaria on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart , July 21, 2005. Is he talking about Al-Qaeda? Or Tony Robbins ?

Two more summer songs. Just to be nice. First, the P. Funk All-Stars deliver one of those lovely summer songs in the vein of Sly & The Family Stone 's "Hot Fun in the Summertime." "One of Those Summers" is taken from the 1983 album Urban Dancefloor Guerillas , which came as a follow-up to George Clinton 's Computer Games album. Junie Morrison provides all the instrumentation on this track and gives it the appropriate lightness for [...]

The songs of summer - it's so true. There's something about certain songs that just mean summer. Over at Soul Sides , they've been running lists of summer songs (Check it out here , here , here , and here ). Certain songs bring back memories of particular summers. For example, TLC 's "No Scrubs" was the summer jam of 1999; they played the damn thing every ten minutes and I never got tired of it. Prince 's whole Purple Rain album brings back the greatest [...]

As long as I'm mentioning John Oswald , this is a good excuse to link to an article I wrote on the old TPV site back in 1999 about the legendary "Lessons" records by Double Dee and Steinski . As a bonus, here is an article Robert Christgau wrote for the Village Voice back in 1986 on the phenomenon. At some point, if y'all are good, I'll post the original three Lessons, plus the mix that played on Tommy Boy 's on-hold phone system, as well as Cut Chemist 's [...]

Panopticist had a posting this week on Akufen , the Quebec producer known for his technique of microsampling (Take a look at the post here , which includes an MP3). I found it interesting and immediately thought of another Canadian cut-and-paste artiste, John Oswald . I don't know if Oswald was the very first person to take music samples and re-contextualize them into another work, but he was certainly one of the key pioneers. Interestingly, sampling is best known as a hip-hop technique, but Oswald works an entirely different area of the art, [...]

Following up on yesterdays' post , here's another example. Björk 's "Hyper-ballad" is just that - a huge overblown love song. The most dramatic expression of love possible, complete with the throwing of one's self off a cliff. (Okay, it's also a very funny song.) The first version below (which isn't even the original version) is with the Brodsky Quartet . The string quartet really plays up the emotion of the lyrics and gives the song an almost operatic sweeping quality. Conversely, there is the Howie B mix, which [...]

I'm a big believer in the notion that it's the performance and the arrangement that makes the song. This is to say, I can take a song and present it to you in one way and it will fall dead and then I can present it in another fashion and you will clasp it to your bosom. All this ironically supports two diametrically opposed conclusions. First, it means that the singer is more important, since it is the performance that connects with you. Second, it means that the song is more important since its value can [...]

What would summer be without a slam-bang Michael Bay action movie? Especially a really derivative one? (Or is there any other kind?) I thought The Island was just a Logan's Run clone, but it's so much more. It rips-off other movies too! I love this quote: Drugged, enslaved, shaven-headed humans inhabit George Lucas' antiseptic underground world. "When you watch THX 1138 , you wanna blow your fucking head [...]

In honor of the opening today of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , I present two musical tributes to a pair of characters from the book / movie / re-make . First up is Veruca Salt . She's probably the most vivid child character in the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory : "Daddy, I want a Golden Ticket!" Small wonder that she provided the inspiration for the band Veruca Salt . Here, they sing a love song to a set of blinds - [...]

What can I say? I'm a big huge freakin' Tiki fan . Maybe it's because my father once managed a Tiki joint back in the Sixties. But love 'em, I do. Which is why one of my favorite attractions at Disneyland was always the Enchanted Tiki Room . In honor of Disneyland's 50th Anniversary, Disney has been rolling out souvenir merchandise that is totally cool and totally expensive. Today, the Adventureland merchandise went on sale, which includes a replica 1964 Tiki [...]

Mrs. TPV , at least, knows how much I've been enjoying the tremendously amusing sight of Tom Cruise In Love . It's the gift that keeps on giving. Here 's the latest installment. "I'm learning to celebrate my own spirit, my own being," [Katie Holmes] says. During the W interview, the actress wouldn't part from Jessica Rodriguez, who is described as her "Scientologist chaperone." Rodriguez's role in Holmes' life remains vague, though Rodriguez says they're "just best friends" since meeting around the time Holmes met Cruise. [...]

Comedy is such a subtle thing. One person's huge belly laugh is another's screaming outrage, for one thing. And comedy in pop music is a rare and endangered bird. I remember very clearly the first time I heard "Du Hast" by Rammstein , I laughed and laughed. It seemed like the ultimate metal parody song. You You hate You hate me You hate me You hate me to say You hate me to say You hate me to say And I [...]

Last night, Larry King did a program on the hit show Dancing with the Stars . At one point, Dancing 's host Tom Bergeron chimed in to reveal the secret to the program's popularity: it was because the show ? which features women in revealing cosumes, often grinding with their male partners, all glistening with sweat ? was "...sensual and sexy in a way that the whole family can enjoy." Uh, huh.

This has apparently been bubbling up since last year and has achieved more legitimacy but only now hit my radar . They're supposedly making a sequel to The Usual Suspects , possibly called Searching for Keyser Soze . Sounds kind of like a bad joke, but apparently Chazz Palminteri , Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer are all on-board. No word on whether screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie is participating. In recent years, McQuarrie has reportedly working on a number of projects, [...]

I am digging the solo debut from Inara George . She was formerly in the bands Lode and Merrick and is rock royalty, as the daughter of guitarist Lowell George of Little Feat. She lives in Topanga Canyon, in Southern California, and seems to be working the same sophisticated pop grooves as Jon Brion. I am posting the track "Genius," as a fine example of a classic pop. C'mon, you know how hard it is to reach for magnificence in two minutes? The album All Rise also includes a lovely languid version [...]