Tag: glee

…by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat!

https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1331349903726039046?s=20

This delightful tweet from Linda Holmes sent me down the rabbit hole this afternoon exploring “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” and learning a little more about its composer, Frank Loesser.

“Sit Down” is a showstopper from the musical Guys & Dolls: the gambler Nicely-Nicely bullshits a temperance congregation into buying that he has been reformed after a religious epiphany in a dream. A context that isn’t as visible to today’s audiences, as both the early 1930’s in which the musical is set and the early 50’s in which it was staged blur together in the rear-view mirror, is that Dolls was a loving tribute to the outsize characters of a time past; it is a similar project to the 80’s movies/musicals that pay tribute to 50’s and 60’s styles, like Grease, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, American Graffiti, and Little Shop of Horrors. Most of Dolls is written in a sophisticated pastiche of Big Band and Swing-era jazz, and it’s a mark of success that so many songs from the musical have become standards. For story reasons, “Sit Down” also draws upon the densely chromatic close harmony choral style that you might be familiar with from Disney animated musicals like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, or Dumbo, and the white gospel/tent revival style from a song like “In That Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’.”

Frank Loesser was a truly fascinating American character. His father was a pianist and made his living teaching, but for whatever reason—reading between the lines here, some tough personality clashes—his father never formally taught Loesser. He was self-taught on several instruments on the incredible strength of his ear, but seemed never to develop his musical reading or writing skills. Still, I think all of that dense European classical harmony is shot through his music.

The first song of his that really came to my attention is “Inchworm,” from the movie musical Hans Christian Andersen. It has a beautiful childlike melody, and wrings so much sensuality from small and deceptively simple harmonic movements. [In addition to the many jazz and pop artists that covered it, it was a special favorite of David Bowie, who wrote, “Ashes To Ashes wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for Inchworm. There’s a nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.“]

Loesser was always connected to music but had to make his way in the world from a young age and made his living as a young man in various creative fields like advertising and business. His first entrance into show business was writing jokes for Borscht Belt comedians, then started writing lyrics for other composers. It is astounding to me, given how fresh and unique his musical style was, that he was well into mid-career and his forties before he was able to compose and write lyrics for his own musicals.

The lyrics are great! Steven Sondheim singled out Loesser as having virtually perfect lyric writing technique, marveling at his ability to sound both conversational and stylishly playful in verse. Just look at that line I quoted in the title: “by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat”—those marvelous assonant plosive p’s in sharp and lapel and c’s in chekered and coat (by assonant, I mean the same consonant sound is repeated, and by plosive I mean that the consonant sound is made by a sudden burst of air). Those are the kind of words that demand to be sung, even if they weren’t also funny and charming and told a story.

But it’s the music that has been stuck in my ears all day. I love the way that the sopranos in the chorus keep going up the pentatonic scale to hit the high note at 1:16 in the first video, and the way the chorus builds a chord in the phrase after at 1:23. I love the surprising cadences that lead into the verse, the chordal motion echoing church hymns. For such a big company number, the verses are surprisingly slow and its an incredible role for somebody who has the energy to ham it up.

Other notable videos…

Walter Bobbie at the 1993 (94?) Tony’s

Just a murderer’s row of early 90’s talent, including J.K. Simmons, who is dead center and looking totally committed (this was even before his breakout role on Oz as a sadistic gay neo-Nazi), Nathan Lane, and Ernie Sambella (who would voice Timon and Pumbaa a few years after this performance).

Titus Burgess at the 2009 Tony’s

This was before Burgess’ breakout performance as Titus Andromedon on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and really shows off his incredible upper range. Worth it to watch the moment when he had to roll with switching the mics due to a technical malfunction on live TV!

Justin Keyes at the Guthrie Theater

I have a secret to admit—I’m not actually much of a musicals or theater person, very much an interested casual fan—, so I didn’t know what the Guthrie Theater was. If this is representative of the average quality of productions out there in Minnesota, though, I think I need to make a visit to Minneapolis. Fantastic singing, incredible costuming and choreography.

Clive Rowe on Great Performances

Rowe has a wonderful voice for this character (he does an incredible vocal trick at 2:02 that made my jaw drop). The tempo here is a little sleepy and takes a lot of energy out of the number, imho, but the orchestration is a little less swing-band and a little more Dixieland/hot jazz, which I thought was cool.

The Cast of Glee

Given the influence of Glee on theater kids, gay boys, and future Broadway cast members of my generation, I thought it was interesting that “Sit Down” was featured on the very fist episode of the show, showing how central it is to the American songbook.

Ashton Harris & The Hillsboro High School Players

This was far and away the best high school performance I found on YouTube. Ashton Harris did a great job here. If you look through other high school performances, you can see where the trouble spots for less-trained voices are: In the narration verses, a lot of the long belted notes are high in the range, so if the young singer does not have strong pitch control it is very easy to go sharp. The choruses are very lyric-dense for the soloist, the words come fast, the tempo is fast, adrenaline is cranking your heart rate up and throwing your internal clock off, everyone around you is singing at full volume so you can’t hear the pit very well, and the line is syncopated. Almost all of the high school soloists rush through “And the devil will drag you under” and end up a full beat ahead by the end of the choruses.

Frank Loesser with Frank Loesser

Here’s the man himself. He had a perfectly serviceable voice, and it’s interesting to hear this simplified solo piano reduction by the man who wrote it, it shows what he thought was the essence of the song, and which lines he liked to mug with.

…and one orthogonal connection.

Loesser’s other big Broadway hit was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which also has a faux-revival big production number, “Brotherhood of Man.” NBC inexplicably chose this number for their network promo in 2012, which I was introduced to by this tweet. It feels insane to see this chosen, given NBC’s institutional problems with sexism in leadership and the no less than 4 sexual predators featured in the casts here. Every segment has something hilarious to look at. [Also it’s catchy as fuck and I will pay you $10 to tell me what that insane dance move that Ken Jeong does is.]

addendum

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

A couple thoughts that I couldn’t work into the earlier post:

–You may think I’m being melodramatic, but look at the face of Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad and The Queen) when he talks about Glee:

–I don’t buy for a second that music being featured on Glee is good for musicians because it exposes people to their music (at least when talking about Glee covers released commercially. If the music stayed on the show, I probably wouldn’t have anything to say). I’m not saying that the original song artists are being exploited financially (although some of them probably are, as I would imagine that only the credited songwriters are paid), I’m saying that its dirty money.

–Interestingly, that same conversation happened about the legitimacy of samples in hip-hop. I think a continuum from good sampling and bad sampling has emerged: Kanye West (just as an example) sampling “21st Century Schizoid Man” in “POWER” is brilliant, while Kanye West lifting “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” wholesale in “Stronger” is lazy. Of course, that was a hit too, so maybe we’re just fucked.

–If anyone wanted to know why could never in any way get on board with Greg Sandow’s idea that the classical music should look to Glee to see how can it can become culturally relevant again, that was it.

–It’s really strange to me that we have a force on the music charts that is such a cipher. Look at the other top 10 artists I mentioned in the first section, all of which have their own flavor completely different from each other. And all of them were tremendously influential–you could probably find a direct musical descendant of each of them on the top 100 list I liked to. How could Glee possibly be influential? The sound of their music seems to have no connection to the popularity of their music, it’s simply an expression of a marketing machine. In other words, no musician would ever want to copy their sound (they don’t have one) or their song strategies (they don’t have one), and if they did, there’s no way they would succeed anyway. It’s like a weird backwards culture where Kidz Bop was the number 1 recording artist of all time.

–I spontaneously made the Kidz Bop/Glee comparison, but a quick Google search shows me that I’m not the first. It should be a bigger part of the conversation. As much as I hate the use of music to signal social status and identity, if I could shame people into not buying Glee music, I would.

-I’ve written way too much about this.

 

 

a note of despair

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

1. glee rex omnis

In the category of computer-aided statistics micronews*, the Official Charts Company (which sounds like a fake name) has stated that the Glee cast has broken Elvis Presley’s record for fastest act to score 20 top 40 hits. That particular “record” may or may not mean anything to you, but it’s undeniable that Glee singles are, to use Joe Biden’s charming turn of phrase, a big fucking deal. After all, look who (with the Glee cast and Elvis) rounds out the top 10 list of most entries in the top 40 charts: James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, Fats Domino, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and FRANK MOTHERFUCKIN’ SINATRA**.

I think Glee is pretty mediocre as a television show, but that it’s popular doesn’t make me depressed about the future of television. In fact, it even works for me on occasion, like when it nods to the past by recreating a famous TV moment, or when it tweaks conventional gender roles, or when the combination of music and choreography is so well executed you can’t help but be entertained. But Glee‘s supremacy on the pop charts deeply depresses me, and to understand why, we have to take a detour through some pop music theory.

*It’s kind of like sports: if you have enough statistics kept over a long enough period of time, you’re likely to find two or three “records” being broken in any given game, which is why it’s sometimes hard not to laugh at the bullshit the commentators are slinging.

**Although the piano is usually peripheral to pop music, it’s interesting to see how many keyboardists are on this list. Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Elton John and Stevie Wonder often use piano as their primary instruments, everybody knows that Paul McCartney loves his ebony and ivory, and not as many people know that Aretha Franklin is a wonderful gospel pianist.

2. painting with sound

In 1979, Brian Eno gave a lecture titled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at a conference sponsored by the New Music America Festival, which was subsequently published in Downbeat. In it, he addresses the musical implications of multitrack recording, a technology that was relatively new (Earlier music studios were limited to 4- or 8-track recording. Eno is talking about 32 & 64 track machines; the virtually unlimited tracks that come with today’s computer technology was a couple decades in the future.) Eno:

The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something’s on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren’t. It’s hard to do anything very interesting with a disc – all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can’t actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.

…

In a compositional sense this takes the making of music away from any traditional way that composers worked, as far as I’m concerned, and one becomes empirical in a way that the classical composer never was. You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound – you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter – he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.

Eno makes many points in this lecture, but what I want to focus on is the idea that pop music has a specificity that’s different from classical music, or from folk music. Every musical tradition has a loose set of values that define what music is*. For classical music, you might say that the music is defined by the written score, or the composers intention. The defining characteristic for a folk song might be anything from a set of chords to the words of a refrain.

One of the strengths of recorded pop music** is that it is so sonically specific–the sounds that make it on the record define the song. Minute adjustments to the tone of individual instruments, carefully tailored studio effects, all of these details make up the identity of the song.

*Keep in mind that I definitely don’t want to say that these values are universally accepted, or that there aren’t exceptions.

**To distinguish from live music, which is a whole different beast. If it weren’t then there would never be any bands who are great live but have shitty albums, or vice versa.

3. a case study

The very first time I remember becoming completely enchanted with a detail in a pop song was listening to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover.”

Many of my early music memories consist of listening to KRTH 101.1, the oldies station, in my mother’s car. There’s a moment—right after a climax of guitar, backing vocals, and noise—where the music simplifies to a guitar arpeggio over a relaxed percussion groove, and this voice, this voice, enters (4:28 in the video above*). The story I’ve heard is that Tommy James was just fucking around in the studio and wanted to hear what it sounded like if he plugged his mic into a guitar amp with the tremolo effect on. That effect blew my mind.

This song has been covered many times before, and it was probably played many different times live, but that effect is inseparable from the song’s identity. Any music fan can point out those things that, taken together, make up the music that they love.

*The best comment on that video: “I remember riding in the car and listening to this song on the radio and asking my dad why the singers voice gets all weird. He replied, “That’s for people who are fucked up on drugs and listening to the song”, then he turned it up.”

4. bringing it all together

Which is why Glee‘s dominance of the music charts deeply depresses me. The show’s production strategy is always to dull any edges, to plane any uneven surface. Just listen to that Jason Mraz song at the top of the post, a song that’s insipid to begin with. It doesn’t just change the details I was talking about–it obliterates them. Glee never met a guitar solo it couldn’t castrate. All the Glee voices are competent and pleasant but processed beyond belief, as far away from real singing as Oscar Meyer wieners are from beef. Somehow every song manages to sound like a commercial jingle (from back when, you know, they made those).

I think it encourages listeners not to care. There are many forces, from the increase in ambient music in public places to the sheer amount of music available in the internet, that discourage real listening. And I cannot accept that if people are really listening, and caring about what they’re listening to, they will choose the Glee version of a song, rather than the real thing.

Revisiting Community

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

The last time I wrote about NBC’s Community, I was deeply ambivalent. It was a little to shiny and cutesy for me. Since then, I’ve become a semi-regular watcher, but once again, I think I’m going to stop watching the show.

One of the things that pisses me off is the free pass that the show seems to get from TV critics about the show’s racial humor. I think this pass is a result of two things, the fairly ( and depressingly uncommon) diverse and integrated cast, and the fact that every once in a while, the show has extremely witty race-based humor (see the clip above). For example, read this fawning passage from Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club:

Community‘s about a lot of things, really, but one of the things it keeps buried until it’s useful to trot it out thematically is the fear of getting old. I mean, just aside from the fact that the show has an elderly guy and a middle-aged black woman as characters and actually takes them seriously beyond the stereotypes other shows would reduce them to, …

…As much as everyone loves the supporting characters on the show, Jeff and Britta are its heart, with Annie and Troy as reminders of who they were, Pierce and Shirley as ideas of who they might become, and Abed as the odd man out, observing and always commenting.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that the show takes these characters beyond stereotypes at all. Alyssa Rosenberg blogged about this in relation to Glee a few days ago:

I love, love Amber Riley, and I love Mercedes as a character who can declare “I’m worried about showing too much skin and causing a sex riot,” as an explanation for why she refuses to wear a cheerleading skirt, and I hate that the inevitable end consequence of having a big, sassy black girl is a story about eating disorders and a rainbow of high school students singing Christina Aguilera’s most saccharine song.  Why can’t she just be fabulous without consequence? Why can’t she have a boyfriend? Why are the show’s best, tartest couple reduced to sidekicks?  Why does the gay kid have to be semi-pathetic and clueless?

What this comes down to is that there is still work to be done, still decisions to be made once the casting is done. Both Glee and Community would have you believe that they are poking fun at the “sassy black woman” stereotype. But the shows never made that transition to treating their characters beyond stereotype, and so end up reinforcing them.