55 posts tagged “music”

Ever wandered into a music or video store here and there are sections marked ‘A–Z’, ‘New Zealand’ and ‘Foreign’?
   The biggest section is the first one, and often we have the smallest section.
   Think about it though: shouldn’t everything not in ‘New Zealand’ be under ‘Foreign’?
   The other one I get a kick out of is ‘World’, which Borders uses. Shouldn’t everything be under ‘World’? I mean, if you have this category, there is no need to have any others.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you sing?

If 1 is an American Idol reject and 10 is Matt Monro, then I would give myself a 6.
   Meanwhile, here’s some real singing from Matt.

This is amazing (found via Petrolheed on Twitter). Forget Susan Boyle, Ukraine’s Got Talent in the form of Kseniya Simonova.

Darn it, Selma Blair has a heck of a great voice.

‘I Could Be So Good for You’ has been covered by other artists. For starters, a Mr Tom Jones impersonator singing the Minder theme tune with his Welsh accent:

During a quiet moment at work, I put these on. A small tribute to Dennis Waterman, his starring roles, and his singing the ‘feem toon’.

Sons of Maxwell, a Canadian duo, flew United in 2008 and musician Dave Carroll was dismayed to find that his guitar had been damaged by the airline. Unfortunately, when he tried to get this sorted with United, the reps he spoke to all passed the buck, over a period of one year. It took this song going on YouTube (eventually getting millions of views) before United offered him compensation, which Mr Carroll suggested the airline donate to charity. It’s actually quite a good song and well recorded, and it has helped raise the group’s profile tremendously!
   United, meanwhile, looks inept, with its too little, too late response.

Some cheese for today. The Love Boat theme in arrangements you might never have heard before! I assume this is The Lawrence Welk Show, which ran from 1955 to 1982.

Here was Saturday’s newspaper:

Michael Jackson is headline news

Farrah Fawcett isn’t

I’m firmly an officious bystander in the whole “Michael Jackson thing”: I am sad people have lost a son, a brother and a father. But since the mid-1980s I have not been a big Michael Jackson fan. His death, while premature, is not going to make me suddenly say that I adored the man and his music. I’m not one of those people who made every single item on Amazon.com’s top 10 a Michael Jackson one. I’m not going to join his MySpace page and leave a tribute.
   But I do not think he was a nonce. When the media go on about child molesters ad nauseam, I am not surprised that some accused Jackson of molestation. Paranoia alone could have seen to that. Some may have seen dollar signs and took the man for a ride. Psychologically, I don’t think the man was capable of forming the sick thoughts that pædophiles have.
   He may have paid off some of his accusers, but think of it this way: if you are a lawyer and your client has the mentality, or tantrums, of a child, what do you do? A father might encourage his son to stand for the truth and go through even a difficult experience to build his character. Someone less close, knowing the person had millions, might just advise paying up to spare a fellow human being more emotional pain than he seemed capable of handling. Michael Jackson seemed like one such person: the stresses we might choose to bear were anathema to him.
   That is, perhaps, how one should think of Jackson: a man who preferred to live some form of childhood than recognize that he had reached adulthood. In his interviews, during the legal cases, Jackson came across in words and manner as a man deeply hurt, as a child might be. Visually, however, his damaged appearance through continual plastic surgeries swayed many of us into thinking he was a monster. It is easy to be fooled by what one sees, and Jackson was the victim of his own choices in that respect.
   I am not excusing him fully. I am not going to say that Michael Jackson lacked an adult’s mental capacity. He was able to reflect on his own mortality, according to his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley on her MySpace page. He knew what was going on, even if he chose to shield himself from it.
   But he was a deeply troubled man, with a very different perspective on life because of his experiences. He chose himself to be as defined by his eccentricities as his music. Just as with Britney Spears shaving her head, many chose to poke fun at the person rather than say that they needed to be protected and looked after. Jackson’s plastic surgeries and his strange complexion were signs, in my layman’s understanding, of someone who chose to dissociate himself from his true identity. This was not about race, as many want to paint, but about a man who never understood who he was.
   Still, I have devoted a post to him. One part of it was seeing the negative comments pages with his videos are attracting on YouTube. He did not deserve many of them. The other part is that there was a Michael Jackson, once, who was a great performer, who never divided opinion as deeply as he does today. I choose to remember hits like this one.