Videos

Music

Kesha Deconstructed

Video

Why am I featuring a video by Kesha (formerly styled Ke$ha), the pop star who famously brushes her teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels?

She cultivated a wasted party-girl persona when she first made it big, so you could be forgiven for thinking that she’s just a trashy, yodeling Valley Girl, or a rapping, adenoidal lightweight, or that her songs are indeed catchy but too full of drunken, sneering bad-girl behavior to merit much attention.

But don’t underestimate her talent or her power; Kesha has sold over 60 million albums around the world, and she began her music career as a back-up singer and pop song composer in her teens. She earned her first recording contract at 18 after growing up in a Nashville suburb learning about the business from her mother, a country music songwriter. Kesha cowrote every song on her first two albums and has written for other artists including Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears.

For several years I thought of her music as a bit of dumb fun providing bouncy background beats on my car radio when I need a mindless dance club-style lift, and I still see much of her music that way. No harm in that. But then I heard the spare, dark and moody version of her nightclub anthem “Blow” from her “Deconstructed” EP and gained a whole new respect for her.

Kesha usually relies on dirty sass and frequent vocal fry crackles along with a sort of grubby, drunken energy to make her songs stand out. In the deconstructed version of “Blow,” Kesha’s intense, breathy vocals are front and center and backed up by keyboard riffs brimming with tension and delicious dissonance. The song begins with a muffled, distorted piano and the layers of vibrating echo build menacingly behind her anxious, slightly frantic soft vocals. I think it’s a beautiful surprise from a totally unexpected source. Give it a listen.

Film & Television, Music

The Birth of the Monkees

Video

In 1965 Americans Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork and Englishman Davy Jones were chosen to star in a TV show about an imaginary rock band inspired by the Beatles: they became The Monkees. Micky Dolenz came from a show-biz family, Mike Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper (no kidding) and Davy Jones had earned a Tony nomination for his role as the Artful Dodger in the original Broadway cast of the musical “Oliver!” (He originated the role in the London cast.) Talented musician Stephen Stills (who later earned fame with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills and Nash) had auditioned for the show but was turned down because his hair and teeth were deemed unsuitable during his screen test. When asked if he knew of another musician with a good “open, Nordic look,” he recommended his friend Peter Tork. From 1966 to 1968 the popular show featured the four young men in endless ridiculous scenarios and scores of musical performances. While considered by many to be a lightweight, manufactured ripoff of actual rock groups, the Monkees’ were actually talented musicians with real charm and their music was hugely popular: they sold more than 75 million records worldwide. After their show was canceled in 1968 they went on to release music for two more years and they had numerous successful reunion tours. At their peak in 1967, the band outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. This compilation of their screen tests shows how fresh and young, boyish and goofy they were, but also shows the confidence and charisma each one displayed well before becoming big TV stars.

Articles

Mary Lambert Has No Secrets

Video

Seattle singer and poet Mary Lambert is best known for writing and singing the musical element of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s gay rights anthem “Same Love,” a beautiful paean to marriage equality overlaid with Macklemore’s spoken word performance. She performed the song alongside Madonna at this year’s Grammy awards ceremony while Queen Latifah presided over a mass gay wedding. Lambert has also recorded an expanded version of the song without Macklemore’s spoken voiceover called “She Keeps Me Warm.”

Before becoming a singer, Lambert had some success as a spoken-word artist and poetry-slam regular in the late 2000s, and much of her music has that same sort of coiled, hurting, on-the-verge-of-tears feeling to it that is an important element of the poetry slam tradition. Her latest hit song, “Secrets,” is significantly more bouncy than “Same Love,” but no less heartfelt. She begins by listing personal traits that others might be ashamed to own, including her bipolar disorder, her emotionalism, her weight and her lesbianism. But she then embraces these labels, refuses to hide who she is anymore and says she doesn’t care if the world knows what her secrets are. “So what?” she asks with repeated, cheerful defiance. It’s such a positive, openhearted celebration of self-acceptance and tolerance. Shame? Self-loathing? Denial? We’re so over it.

Music

The Bottom Line

Video

Meghan Trainor has been making a lot of money lately, but she’s also been getting flack for her big hit “All About that Bass,” with some reason. The ultra-catchy song and its cute, candy-colored video celebrate women with curves and encourage women to appreciate whatever bodies they have, saying “Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top.” So far, so good. But the song also puts down “skinny bitches” and tells women and girls with a more prominent bass line to feel good about themselves because “boys like a little more booty,” as if their value comes from being ogled by men. So, sadly, the supposed song of empowerment still encourages feelings of competition between women and buys into finding one’s value in another’s gaze. I like it when pop culture moves in the direction of acknowledging beauty in all its forms, and I think it’s great that we’re gaining a greater diversity of cultures under one national roof with the rise of populations of people who don’t value bony booties as much as white folks have tended to do over the past fifty years. It’s great when standards of beauty rise beyond size 2 booty shorts. Songs of praise for bountiful bums are all over the radio right now, and more power to the big-bootied among us. But let’s not turn right around and shame slimmer folks or boil it all down to women’s value coming from body parts and man-pleasing. It’s great to want to please others, but your worth doesn’t derive from the size of your thighs.

Music, Theater

Feeling Good

Video

Nina Simone’s dark, rich, beautifully bluesy version of the song “Feeling Good” is a classic, and with good reason. The version I grew up listening to is also extraordinary, but quite different. The song was written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd” and was sung on the original 1965 Broadway cast album by baritone Gilbert Price. His delivery is nothing like Nina Simone’s, yet I find it just as beautiful and arresting as her cover of the song. Few people nowadays know Price’s warm and powerful voice; give it a listen and hear what you’ve been missing.

Music

Papaoutai

Video

In 2013, the most popular video on French TV and the number one song in France and Belgium was “Papaoutai” by Belgian singer Stromae. The tune and rhythms are appealing and unusual; the video is compelling and, ultimately, moving. Though the title sounds like it could be a word in an African language, it is actually meant to be understood by French speakers as meaning “Papa, où t’es?” which translates as “Dad, where are you?” The song and the story of the video refer to the absence of Stromae’s father, who was killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The plaintive cry of the singer who feels the absence of his father is also expressed in the child in the video who begs his mannequin-like father to come to life.