Category: Tuesday Tune Two-fer

I’m still riding my Superman high, trying to figure out exactly how it went from “a joyful celebration of comics and a fun time at the movies” to “this movie has lodged itself directly in my heart.” I saw a recap from some YouTubers that I think nailed it: watching Superman makes me want to be a better person.

I tried to find two thematically appropriate songs but with little luck. Turns out that “Better Man” by Pearl Jam is actually a downer about a woman settling in an unhappy relationship, which doesn’t work at all. So I’ll just have to stop trying to be clever and embrace being on-the-nose.

“Punkrocker” by Teddybears feat. Iggy Pop is the closing track for the movie, and if you want an idea of just how corny and emotional I am, listening to it again now while thinking of that final scene has me happy-crying at my desk.

Walking through CityWalk after seeing it a second time, I noticed that dozens of people were wearing T-shirts with various incarnations of the Superman logo. I liked imagining that it was more than just the kind of thing you’d expect to see on the opening weekend of a blockbuster movie. That people weren’t just celebrating fandom, but the idea of rejecting cynicism and being fearlessly kind.

So how about re-using a song I’ve already used before, but removing it from any 1990s college radio irony and treating it like a sincere celebration?

“Superman’s Song” by Crash Test Dummies felt like a novelty song back in 1991, a slow dirge/ballad about comic book characters that got a ton of radio airplay as an alternative to grunge. But whether it was corny in a self-aware way or just corny, I like to listen to it as a sincere appreciation of what the character’s all about. A character that’s been kept alive and familiar to audiences for almost a hundred years now, not because of media companies’ endless attempts to reboot or reimagine him to keep him relevant, but because the core idea is timelessly relevant: someone with the power to do anything, but who chooses to be selflessly and tirelessly heroic.

Also, I admit that this gets me really excited about future movies in the franchise, because I hadn’t considered a live action version with the same tone that might include the Legion of Doom and Solomon Grundy. The first time I saw the movie, I went to the bathroom during the part where Lois visits the Hall of Justice, so when I saw it on my second viewing (not to mention learning it was based on a real building which was used for filming), I made a gasp that alarmed the people in the theater sitting next to me.

Featured photo from the Athens, GA tourism page

Pride month is over, so it’s a perfect opportunity for corny people like me to misquote Proverbs and say that it’s time for the Fall. Especially when it lets me listen again to one of my favorite REM songs, which always conjures up good memories of my college years in Athens.

Corny jokes aside, it’s also a good opportunity for a refresher on what Pride month is all about, which is the rejection of shame. There have always been bad faith attempts to equate it with the deadly sins, from people trying to disguise their bigotry as a valiant fight against sinfulness.

Back when I first came out, I even bought into a less-bigoted version of that, wondering “what is there to be proud of? It’s just a part of me, and being ‘proud’ would be like being ‘proud’ of having brown hair or being right-handed.” The part that I was missing — and I wonder if people still miss, or if it’s nothing more than disingenuous posturing to keep marginalizing people — is that the achievement to be proud of isn’t simply being gay, or trans, or bisexual, or non-binary, or any of the variations on “queer,” but in having the courage to live your life being true to yourself.

Keeping with the “not what I thought it was at first,” I’m pairing it with The Beatles’ “If I Fell”. I always thought that this song was romantic at best, harmless at worst, but paying more attention to the lyrics, I see that it’s kind of gross. Maybe not “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her away from the things that she loved” gross, but still the opposite of everything I think of as romantic.

Based on the title and wistfulness, I’d always thought of it as being about falling recklessly in love, but of course it’s explicitly not. It’s a guy on the rebound demanding loyalty from a new prospect before they’ve even gotten to know each other, and presumably before she finds out what made his last girlfriend break up with him. Even if he weren’t setting up a relationship where he’s constantly comparing the new girl to his last girlfriend, he explicitly says at the end that he’s trying to make her jealous.

And appropriately, he includes the line “don’t hurt my pride like her,” in the bad sense of “pride.” Which all leaves me asking the question I’ll probably be asking a lot over the next eleven months: are the straights okay?

Hey now, wooo! Look at that! It’s a full-on ass crack from one of the Duran Duran guys¹, right there smack in the middle of the screen in the video to “Rio.” All these years I guess I’ve been too distracted by the model winking at me to notice how deliberately that shot was composed, and now I feel foolish.

Other things I didn’t really remember or fully appreciate: how much of the video is the guys doing slapstick, and how much of the song is Nick Rhodes² going nuts on the keyboard. I hope he was using an arpeggiator, or the poor guy must’ve been exhausted by the end of it!

The keyboards are such a big part of the sound of “Rio” (and also “Hungry Like the Wolf,” where they’re a little bit more prominent) that it seems odd that I’m only really noticing them now. But in my defense: 1) I can’t overstate how ubiquitous this album was at the time, and it gradually just became like background noise; and 2) I was more distracted by how much the video was stressing how heterosexual these guys were by having them cavort with supermodels, vs how not-heterosexual the video made me feel overall.³

It was also reminding me of another song that I couldn’t quite place. Eventually, after several fruitless Google searches for “pop songs with arpeggiators” I suddenly remembered it was “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” by Eurythmics. I’ve always been conflicted by that song, because there’s so much of it I 1000% genuinely, unreservedly love, like how Annie Lennox manages to stretch the word “bliss” across like a dozen syllables, and how the video says “what the hell, it’s the 80s, let’s just put everybody in drag,” and how it somehow still feels timeless despite the cheesy drum pads.

But I hate the harmonica solo, and I always hate harmonica solos, even when they’re by Stevie Wonder. I do genuinely wonder whether it has the same connotation for other people that it does for me, where it immediately makes me think of lower-budget live action family movies and Hanna Barbera cartoons from the late 1970s, where everything felt brown and cheap and dirty, and was just begging for the 1980s to come in and make everything clean and modern and brightly-colored again. Largely by artists like Duran Duran and the Eurythmics, now that I think of it.

1. Sorry I can’t be more specific, since I never bothered to learn who’s who. I thought the drummer was the cute one, even before I understood what it implied for me that I’d picked a cute one. ↩︎
2. I looked it up. ↩︎
3. And yet I never noticed the butt. It was still mostly vibes at that point. ↩︎

A couple of weeks ago, we visited Broken Compass, a tiki bar in Burbank that we’d never been to. Verdict: pretty good! Neither too small nor large, good separation of the waiting area and the reveal of the interior, a food menu that had a lot of variety, tiki drinks that were even better than the food, and overall a strong vehicle for everything you want from a tiki bar. I spent too much money on a pair of earrings shaped like Moai heads.

What makes this relevant to Tuesday Tune Two-Fer, though, is that in addition to the exotica you expect to hear inside a tiki bar, they were also occasionally playing Bond music. I heard one track that was extremely familiar, but I couldn’t place it exactly: was it from Thunderball? You Only Live Twice? Shazam wasn’t able to pick it up, so I had to wait until I got home and listen to every John Barry Bond score on YouTube until I reached it: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. One of the only Bond movies that I’ve never seen, something I should correct soon if only for Diana Rigg.

It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but Bond music works very well in a tiki bar environment. Maybe because they all suggest the 1960s, adventure, and the tropics. (Even when they’re mostly about skiing, I think?)

Speaking of Diana Rigg: Laurie Johnson’s music from The Avengers would also be an excellent addition to your tiki bar soundtrack. Yes, I know that it mostly conjures up images of extremely un-tropical England. But it’s so cool. (Incidentally, I don’t like the version of the theme included below, but it’s the only one available on Apple Music. Find the version actually included in the show, or in other compilations of Johnson’s music and/or 60s TV themes).

One of my (many) cultural blind spots is that I never really got into Prince. I know all the hits, of course, and I’ve been trying to get caught up in my adult years. But back in the 80s, I categorized Prince and the Revolution as being decidedly not for me.

I remember opening the LP of 1999 and being immediately scandalized at the huge centerfold of nude Prince lying there. Oh no, I am not supposed to be seeing this! I closed it and from then on tried to ensure that my parents never witnessed what I’d bought with their money.

So I didn’t fully appreciate the video for “Kiss” until several years ago, when I finally clued into how it’s so simultaneously corny and drily funny. I never thought of Prince as having much of a sense of humor — especially since Purple Rain never struck me as anything but painfully earnest — but here he’s clearly making fun of himself and his image.

Key to all of that is stripping it down to just him and Wendy Melvoin on guitar. For those of us who only knew of Prince as being on stages surrounded by meticulously art-directed and choreographed musicians and supermodels, it was a huge change to see such a relatively spare video. If the point of the video had been simply “I write music and play a ton of instruments and am super sexy,” then it could’ve just been Prince and the veiled dancer. But since the point was to have fun and poke fun at his own image, he needed to play off one of the most talented members of his band.

And she’s always come across as so cool in that video. Absolutely part of the whole showmanship and schtick of being in The Revolution, but also grimacing when he gets uncomfortably close. “Prince is gonna Prince! Gotta love ‘im!”¹I am vaguely aware that Wendy and Lisa were seriously on the outs with Prince for some time, but I thought it was heartwarming to hear Melvoin talk after his death about her experiences working with him.

Melvoin has done a lot outside of her work with Prince, as part of Wendy and Lisa and other collaborations both with and without Lisa Coleman, so I don’t want to diminish that. But I’m fascinated by this specific moment, when a superstar chose to be goofy and take the piss out of himself, so instead of “Waterfall” or “Computer Blue,” I’ll be corny and pair it with my favorite song by The Association. Who makes “Kiss” work? Everyone knows it’s Wendy.

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  I am vaguely aware that Wendy and Lisa were seriously on the outs with Prince for some time, but I thought it was heartwarming to hear Melvoin talk after his death about her experiences working with him.

If you’re not watching Game Changers on Dropout, you should start. I admit I was skeptical when the clips from that series and its spin-off Make Some Noise kept popping up on YouTube and Instagram: I didn’t think the material was all that funny, but I did love how the cast all so enthusiastically supported each other. That seems to be an overriding ethos of the channel and all of its series. Everybody’s just kind to each other, and it’s so refreshing to see. But Game Changers has come into its own the past couple of seasons, with some genuinely brilliant concepts.

Anyway, the most recent episode featured “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, for reasons I won’t spoil. It was the first time I’d heard the song in a long time, and it got immediately stuck in my head. I’d never thought much about it in the early 90s when it was released, beyond “hella corny” and “Batman” and “that hot dude singing with his shirt open.” Very rarely, I’ll launch into “my power, my pleasure, my pain!” if I hear it playing in a grocery store or something. But I’ve just thought of it as maudlin, forgettable, early 90’s pop.

But here’s the thing: it’s actually a good song! It’s a perfect showcase for Seal’s vocal range, and whether or not the lyrics actually mean anything, the phrasing is pretty interesting. “The more I get of you, the stranger it feels” doesn’t scan with the rest of the chorus, so it feels like a period at the end of a sentence instead of a melody repeating. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for a song I’d always dismissed.

Another ubiquitous Seal song from the early 1990s that I haven’t thought much about: “Crazy.” I admit I haven’t been as won over by this as much as I was “Kiss from a Rose.” But only hearing it on the radio and public PA systems without ever buying the album, I never knew that it was produced by Trevor Horn.

Listening to it now, it’s kind of obvious — I can’t tell if the sound is so closely associated with the late 80s/early 90s because “Crazy” played all of the time, or because Horn defined so much of what I think of as the sound of that time. I know of his music mainly through Art of Noise and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, but he seemed to have a hand in absolutely everything. I should go through and compile a Trevor Horn-produced playlist at some point.

(Incidentally: on the deluxe version of Seal II, which contains “Kiss from a Rose,” Seal does a cover of “Manic Depression” with Jeff Beck, and it’s pretty solid).

A year ago, we went to see the LA Philharmonic perform Song of the Earth, a song cycle largely about climate change from David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. I enjoyed it a lot, considering that it’s more experimental than my tastes tend to run, and the subject matter is pretty heavy.

At the time, I said I hoped that one day there would be an album release, since even though I can’t say with much confidence that I understood it or even felt it to its fullest effect, there were still several themes from it that kept bouncing around in my head. Today is that day, and you can get a recording of it from bandcamp and streaming services.

For a “serious” work, it’s got an awful lot of hooks. Or I guess they’re more accurately called motifs or something. In any case, the best example of that is “Gimme Bread,” which has a repeated “Yeah yeah” and xylophone flourish that is carried on throughout the rest of the work. (And the drive home, and the months afterwards).

Another thing I said at the time was that because of my very limited frame of reference for modern symphonic music, I kept being reminded of Orion by Philip Glass. Not just for the sense of repetition, but because it’s surprisingly accessible for those of us who don’t typically like orchestral or classical music. My favorite is “Brazil,” which I first heard as part of the excellent soundtrack for the PSP game Lumines.