I love music. A bold take, you must be thinking, made possible only by deep reserves of courage and conviction.
The problem is that, as I’ve mentioned here at least once before, I can’t easily read
or write or hold a conversation aloud if there’s chatter going on around me — other conversations, television, etc., sadly including music with lyrics — because my brain foregrounds all of it and I’m unable to focus on any one bit to the point of utter exhaustion.
The record that won its namesake 2001’s Grammy for Best New Artist, I Am Shelby Lynne wasn’t actually her first album but her sixth.
Now a little ditty to celebrate the return of Doctor Who.
(He pronounces his name “shoo-tee”.)
Ncuti Gatwa
Would you take me by the hand
Ncuti Gatwa
Would you take me by the hand
Can you hear me
Riff on Steely Dan
Play it on your juke box
Can you hear me
Ncuti Gatwa
Ncuti Gatwa
Here, appropriately enough for the day, is a labor of Questlove that opened his excellent documentary about Saturday Night Live’s musical legacy. You can watch the mashup montage directly in his Instagram post or as embedded a couple of paragraphs into an article on the NBC website. The entirety of Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music re-airs tomorrow night, Feb. 15th, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on the network and is streamable on Peacock.
John MacDonald is credited as editor of the montage, and Oz Rodríguez as co-
director on the special. Questlove’s 2021 doc Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is for my money one of the best films of the decade, period, and not just because I hadn’t seen Marilyn McCoo in too long; you can watch it on Hulu.
Peacock debuted four 1-hour chapters of a documentary series marking Saturday
Night Live’s 50th in January, with a concert featuring many past musical guests streaming tonight. SNL’s entire catalog of nearly 1,000 episodes is on the service as well. The anniversary special is set to air live on NBC Sunday night, Feb. 16th, at 8 p.m. ET, preceded by a red-carpet show at 7.
Don’t sleep on Ladies and Gentlemen… even if you’re far more interested in SNL’s comedic heritage than its musical guests. Music as part of that comedic heritage is also deftly explored, from sketch jingles and The Lonely Island shorts to celebrity impressions and musicians as hosts.
Related: Mad Mix • Swift Kicks • My Other Saturday Notes
Despite what I said at the end of my last Favorites post, I’ve opted to swap in another topic for the sake of a trilogy.
The Rule of Three is a powerful lure. And while the general, you know, oomph — sorry ’bout the technical language — of the previous two entries in this series could hardly be more different, they still both involve songs. I’m closing out the unorthodox triad with a brief ode to Firefall’s classic 1976 earworm, “You Are the Woman”.
A friend and I mark the second week in October, during which our respective birthdays fall, by sending each other videos.
We’ll throw fresh material into the mix but it’s mostly old reliables. I’ve shared a
few on the blog in years past; the one that hilariously interprets lyrics to Joe Cocker’s performance of “With a Little Help from My Friends” at Woodstock [4:06] — a.k.a., to us, “I Did Some Wonder Loaf (Hoggify)” — I rather inexplicably have not ere now and it is among my favorite things. While the video’s been around so long that its original link/uploader is lost to the mists of time, I’m pretty sure the mysterious Dan’s name has always popped up at the end.
I’ve had Don McLean’s “American Pie” on the list of things to include in this
series from the start.
Once upon a time, I figured that when I did finally write about the song it would be
in large part to annotate or explicate it. That was before. It was before cyberspace got quite so full; before I realized that with age the mystery and myriad possible interpretations of the lyrics grew more interesting to me than any definitive answers; before McLean slowly began to break his silence on the subject, most recently and distinctly in a documentary that premiered on the Paramount+ service last month called The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie”.
When a friend demanded a complete version of my “Yoda Clone” lyrics back in 2019,
I replied that I’m a fan of Jorge Luis Borges — the magical-realist, postmodernist master known to reference and review books that didn’t actually exist.
Like many others throughout cyberspace, I enjoy creating images of merch for imaginary movies, etc. Just a snippet of and/or allusion to a work not fully realized can be as satisfying as, if not more satisfying than, making or reading/watching/hearing the entire work itself. Plus, I simply don’t have enough mental bandwidth and time, so my choice is usually to cobble together either a little bit or nothing.
The problem comes when I get a brainstorm and then let what I’ve sketched out sit
for a while expecting that I’ll bring it to fruition — lots of Top X lists and mashup ideas languish unfinished in virtual folders, some of whose inspirations have long since left the zeitgeist. Here are the choruses to a few songs that will probably, and perhaps to your relief, never go any further.
Thor’s hammer ooh na na
Cap was found worthy of Thor’s hammer ooh na na
We’re glad Doc Strange was a good planner na na na
Hulk’s integrated with Bruce Banner
And Cap swung Thor’s old hammer
Thor’s hammer ooh na na
Avengers: Endgame Overture
My apologies to Camila Cabello.
We finally learned the name of the little guy who’s taken popular culture by storm on last week’s episode of The Mandalorian, and it reminded me that I never shared here the brief parody lyrics I posted on Twitter a year ago before we knew anything of his background.
Yoda clo-o-one
He is pale green in color
Plays with a knob and slumbers
Fifty years old, looks more
like fifty days (oh yeah)
Now you’re a kind of family
He led you down a nobler path
Mando, I hope that Yoda clone’s okay
Ellen Winter, cousin of my cousins on the other side, is associate musical director
and keyboardist of The Elementary Spacetime Show. The new production written by César Alvarez and directed by Andrew Neisler is playing through Sept. 24th as part of the 2016 Fringe Festival in Philly. You can find out more on Facebook.
I don’t usually plug timely, local stuff here but it got a great review in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer and of course experimental, independent art plus familial connection is a perfect storm for deserved signal-boosting. While I’d already been hoping to go, “a tradition of fantasy, science, philosophy, and humor that includes Lewis Carroll, Doctor Who, Monty Python, Willy Wonka, and the ideas of physics and cosmology” pushes so many of my buttons. [Update: I found the show provocative and great fun on the whole. Keep an eye out for workshops or performances in your area if it sounds at all like your kind of scene! The Inquirer article is now behind a subscriber paywall but you can read a synopsis, listen to some numbers, and check out several fantastic photos that really capture the show’s aesthetic on Alvarez’ website.]
The material does merit a trigger warning for those who may have struggled with or
lost a loved one to depression.
Photo of Salty Brine as the Emcee and Aris Louis as Alameda: Eric Wolfe.
I’ll wager that most of you are familiar with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, a
— really, the — standout feature of his brief tenure as host of The Late Late Show on CBS. You’ve probably already seen its latest installment, in which Corden drives around Manhattan with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra MacDonald, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Jane Krakowski. So you don’t need me to link to it.
But I just did anyway.
David Bowie discography grabbed from www.davidbowie.com
This post is currently down for maintenance.
I was in line at a store earlier, barely moving, with a full interior wall on the left and half-wall division to the right.
When I arrived the woman in front of me was slumped against the left wall; as people shuffled forward she slumped against the right, then against the left wall as we shuffled forward again, back to the right, etc., repeat, all the way to the front.
It was the slowest homage to the video for “Take On Me” I have ever seen.
Related: 23 Skidoo • Hell No • Coin Drop
I praised the pleasant surprise that was John Oliver’s hosting of The Daily Show
when Jon Stewart took a sabbatical last summer. And I was not alone. Many TV critics predicted that Oliver would be promoted from correspondent to host of his own show — probably someplace other than Comedy Central, since a third half-hour* of satirical news and punditry there wasn’t likely. That someplace turned out to be HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
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Lake Street Dive is my latest jam. I’ve had their whole discography on repeat in anticipation of today’s release of their new album, Bad Self-Portraits.
The band, whose members met at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, consists of Rachael Price (lead vocals), Mike “McDuck” Olson (guitar, trumpet, backing vocals), Bridget Kearney (acoustic bass, backing vocals), and Mike Calabrese (drums, backing vocals).
The Ed Sullivan Show 17.19 photo © 1964 SOFA Entertainment.
I’m a little surprised at how emotional I got watching the Beatles tribute earlier tonight.
I’m glad but a little surprised that Frozen is doing so well.
Image © 2013 Disney Enterprises.
Which probably says more about my critical eye and very specific tastes — a mite too critical and crazily specific, I’ve been told — than with the quality of the film or the general public’s own appetites.
Frozen’s other pleasant surprises:
John Oliver wasn’t the sole member of Comedy Central’s late-night team giving
us process junkies a peek behind the curtain in the past couple of weeks. Stephen Colbert was interviewed by Paul Mercurio, who does warm-up for The Colbert Report, over nearly an hour on a variety of topics — but mostly about the Daft Punk fiasco. You can listen to the podcast free.
Daft Punk, scheduled to be on Colbert’s show earlier this month, bowed out and/or
was yanked over misunderstandings and Viacom internal politics due to the mysterious French faux-robots’ upcoming special appearance at last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards telecast.
