Blessed all of my life with poor hearing, I've gained unique insights into pop music ever since Mick Jagger said it's a mistake to enunciate too clearly.
Many of us feel the same, and have recently begun to come out in websites like the one named after a climatic Jimi Hendrix line in Purple Haze, 'scuse me while I kiss the sky.'
I've also had a lifetime jones for the contraalto, hell, all altos. Much of this may have been a reaction to the chirpy airhead mode that many sopranos default to, as long as you exempt jJoan Baez.
(Did I forget to point out I went to high school in middle of America in the early '70s when it was commonly understood that teenage guys were driven into helpless erotic submission by the likes of Cheryl Tiegs? The cheerleaders knew this, and did their best. Meanwhile I was lusting after the sultry backup singers to Leonard Cohen with their close raised third harmonies redolent of Gaulloise in Parisian cabarets I'd never seen.)
That's why I was a sucker for one Karen Carpenter song, a slower one full of poignant, bittersweet reflection on young love lost, especially lines that speak to the tenderness in a still innocent but increasingly horny adolescent heart, including a vague reference to 'white lace and promises.'
What was the rest of it about? Beats me, but metrically and chorally it all fit into one of the more moving songs I'd ever heard.
So what was this oblique reference to some 'Superstar'? I imagined it was yet another cultural reference to something I'd never encountered, one of the many, but I knew it was part of the same heartfelt song as the rest.
That was one of the many benefits of listening to music without the internet. Now there are no questions anymore, no ambiguity, no space for your imagination to fly off with the fragments of lyrics, filling in space with ideas important to you alone.
I should have known better. But it had to happen. Many years later, I just had to figure out the backstory to the song. Needless to say, the actual topic was depressingly seamy and corrupt, at least to an innocent who thought love had to be pure.
Perhaps it would be different if I'd been a member of the Woodstock generation. But I was three or four years too young, and the arena music world I grew up in was the one of Altamont, filled with the wreckage of young people, especially young women like my late cousin, who crept up the back stairs of the nice hotels where the tours stayed so they could fling themselves into all of that until they couldn't stagger out anymore.
OH thank you so much for this… it is fabulous and absolutely the best way to start a new year!
Blessed all of my life with poor hearing, I've gained unique insights into pop music ever since Mick Jagger said it's a mistake to enunciate too clearly.
Many of us feel the same, and have recently begun to come out in websites like the one named after a climatic Jimi Hendrix line in Purple Haze, 'scuse me while I kiss the sky.'
That's right, kissthisguy.com.
I've also had a lifetime jones for the contraalto, hell, all altos. Much of this may have been a reaction to the chirpy airhead mode that many sopranos default to, as long as you exempt jJoan Baez.
(Did I forget to point out I went to high school in middle of America in the early '70s when it was commonly understood that teenage guys were driven into helpless erotic submission by the likes of Cheryl Tiegs? The cheerleaders knew this, and did their best. Meanwhile I was lusting after the sultry backup singers to Leonard Cohen with their close raised third harmonies redolent of Gaulloise in Parisian cabarets I'd never seen.)
That's why I was a sucker for one Karen Carpenter song, a slower one full of poignant, bittersweet reflection on young love lost, especially lines that speak to the tenderness in a still innocent but increasingly horny adolescent heart, including a vague reference to 'white lace and promises.'
What was the rest of it about? Beats me, but metrically and chorally it all fit into one of the more moving songs I'd ever heard.
So what was this oblique reference to some 'Superstar'? I imagined it was yet another cultural reference to something I'd never encountered, one of the many, but I knew it was part of the same heartfelt song as the rest.
That was one of the many benefits of listening to music without the internet. Now there are no questions anymore, no ambiguity, no space for your imagination to fly off with the fragments of lyrics, filling in space with ideas important to you alone.
I should have known better. But it had to happen. Many years later, I just had to figure out the backstory to the song. Needless to say, the actual topic was depressingly seamy and corrupt, at least to an innocent who thought love had to be pure.
Perhaps it would be different if I'd been a member of the Woodstock generation. But I was three or four years too young, and the arena music world I grew up in was the one of Altamont, filled with the wreckage of young people, especially young women like my late cousin, who crept up the back stairs of the nice hotels where the tours stayed so they could fling themselves into all of that until they couldn't stagger out anymore.