DUA LIPA!!!

 

Glitter in the sky/Glitter in my eye/Glitter in all the places, including Nashville.

Think P!nk

A few things about one of my favorite popstars and modern divas.

Catching Up at The Movies: The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector.

Ah, the sheer madness of it all.

The Genius of Ellie Greenwich III: The Shangri-Las - "Leader of the Pack."

Teenage opera, sadly quieter...

We lost one of the greats today.

Ellie Greenwich, one of the finest songwriters who ever lived, died today, and it makes me several different kinds of sad.

The Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and "Baby I Love You"
The Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love"
The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack"
The Crystals' "And Then He Kissed Me"
Freddie Mercury's "I Can Hear Music"
Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy Diddy"
Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"
and, of course, the best song ever written, "River Deep Mountain High."

She wrote and/or cowrote all of them. Any one of those would be reason enough to celebrate her life and career. But she helped create ALL of them, as well as countless others.

It trips me out merely to think about what a guiding hand and voice Ellie Greenwich was in modern popular music, and she will be missed.

Our frontrunner for Song of the Year, 2009.

Forgotten 80s Classics: "Irgendwie Irgendwo Irgendwann."

And now, a glorious pop music break before the madness.

Election Day here in the U.S. I'm ready to be past it, and I'm cautiously optimistic. Eight years of subterfuge and shenanigans will do that to you.

Regardless, here's my current fave-rave pop song. Written by the Pet Shop Boys and produced by Xenomania. Simply magic.

The fifty best Prince songs of all time. Part II: #15-#11.

It seems this project is taking much longer than I anticipated, and for that I apologize. So here's a few more to keep appetites whetted and panties wettened.

15) IF I WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND – Camille (1986)

It's a suitably fitting achievement when Bitch Magazine calls this song "one of the most genderfuck songs ever recorded." I remember hearing it in 1987 and thinking I would need a few years before I could figure it out for myself. But it remains one of Prince's most original and unique pieces, from its origins on the Camille record and bizarre patient endurance as a single (!), past the weird cover by TLC and being used as Demi Moore shook her groceries in front of Burt Reynolds in Striptease. Truly something special.



14) THE QUESTION OF U (1990)

The kind of ballad that Prince does better than anyone else (see also "Joy in Repetition," "The Grand Progression," "When 2 R in Love"). One of the more amazing efforts from the scattershot Graffiti Bridge, and one of the more achingly endearing of His Purpleness' seductive jams.

13) THE DANCE ELECTRIC (1984)
I'm going to try to avoid getting into the whole 20/20 hindsight "Here's where Prince went wrong" theorizing, because at this point it just serves no purpose. But for some reason, Prince took an amazing extended cold funk apocalypse with The Revolution turning the place upside down, stripped his own voice from it, and gave it to Andre Cymone for his album AC. That is the gesture of either a truly gracious individual or someone not thinking clearly, because "The Dance Electric," as performed by The Revolution, would have been a great single-only release between Purple Rain and Around The World in a Day. It would have anchored down a slightly revised Around the World in a Day on its own, for that matter. This is one of the few 12+ minute Revolution jams that never gets boring or overly frenetic, and that its only extant version is as an 'extended' five and a half minute version with Andre's vocals just doesn't cut it.

12) LETITGO (Sherm Stick Edit) (1994)

One of the two instances in recorded history where someone else's remix of a Prince song is actually better than Prince's own take on it (the other being Shep Pettibone's remix of "Glam Slam"), this is J. Sw!ft's masterful rethinking of one of Prince's more seemingly autobiographical tales. It's the messed-with "Ballad of Dorothy Parker" loop that anchors everything together, and it sounds wonderful and timeless.

11) THE GRAND PROGRESSION (1990)
Another exceptional ballad, this one originall meant for Graffiti Bridge, but in the end replaced by "The Question of U." Dammit, though, there could have been room for all of them. Of note as one of the few Prince songs that expresses the Divine in a conditional sense, which is pretty radical for him. Maybe that's why it got left off the final configuration...

At the movies... Mamma Mia!

The plot is simultaneously simple ("who is the father of the bride?") and complex (three different trios of people, mistaken identities, subterfuge, possible divine intervention), pulling equal amounts of inspiration from dinner theatre revue and Greek tragedy. Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, best known as the sweetly dim Karen in Mean Girls) is getting married at the hotel her mother Donna (Meryl Streep, who seems to be having an insane amount of fun) runs on a picturesque Greek island. Having been raised without knowing the identity of her father, our plucky heroine (thanks to a purloined diary) has narrowed the object of her paternity down to one of three men: architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan), adventurer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and banker Harry (Colin Firth), each of whom she has invited to the wedding. It's both flimsy and overwrought, but it's as close to an immovable force of effervescence and poppy regret as one could hope for.

Mamma Mia! is certainly the most democratic of big screen musicals. One of the aspects of last year's similar jukebox musical Across The Universe that torpedoed its possible success was how it kept the Beatles' songs at a distance from the audience, tying them to sweeping social movements and operatic character arcs that at no point allowed the audience to identify with what Lennon and McCartney were saying (notable exception: "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"). In direct opposition to Julie Taymor's high-minded, high-concept approach to the Beatles, director Phyllida Lloyd approaches the Abba catalog with the gusto of a drunken karaoke night with friends and lovers past and present, and it works like gangbusters. There's very little art to be had here, other than Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus' immortal and majestic pop songs (and let's not forget Stig Anderson, who helped out on "Honey Honey," "SOS," "Mamma Mia," and "Dancing Queen"), and the end result is a film that is lovable in its bright and frothy madness. When Christine Baranksi and Julie Walters show up as Streep's lifelong friends/band members/Greek chorus, the film has committed to a sensibility that feels like a combination family reunion/drag show fuelled by heartfelt Swedish pop and vats of stout Greek liquor.

The only serious misstep carried over from the stage show involves taking "When All Is Said and Done" (which may very well be the best pop song ever written about divorce) and giving it to Pierce Brosnan (who gives it his all but really has no business singing in public) as a happy wedding song, which runs counter to the heart of the song. But even that can be forgiven, such is the film's manic zeal and festive atmosphere.

But jettisoning "Under Attack" from the film entirely is a catastrophic mistake, and it manages to undo one of the sly achievements of the stage show, which is exposing audiences to some of Abba's lesser-known material- just witness Streep and Seyfried wringing every somber moment out of the masterful "Slipping Through My Fingers," and you'll get a feel for how powerful Andersson and Ulvaeus' work can be. Even as it is, there's a lot of pleasure and daffy fun to be had here, and I find myself gleefully recommending the film with a big, slackjawed grin on my face. It's not for everyone, but a timeless melody and Oscar winners shaking it to the hits is entertainment money well-spent.