Gosh; that's a hard one to nail. Despite talking a never ending stream of rubbish about 'things I hate' on this blog, I find it very difficult to come up with a 'least favourite' song. Not least because I'm not sure if that means the song I hate the most, or the song that I have least opinion of. You might be surprised that I can't think of either one.
It's hard to think of a song I have no opinion of, but my head is so full of songs i love that I really can't think of one.
I just asked the long-suffering, 'can you think of a song i really can't stand?'
She said, 'oh yes...' and she sang:
How can I hate a song so much from a musical I love so much?
You guessed it: I'm going to try to answer that question.
Fiddler is a really great musical, and I say that as someone who dislikes musicals generally, as a genre. At one extreme you've got 'Blood Brothers', a musical that takes itself far too seriously, and at the other end you've got pap like 'half a sixpence.' The only type i can stand is usually the knowingly silly but not stupid ones; Unless they don't take themselves seriously, my general take on musicals is 'why are you singing?
The hollywood trend around the time FOTR was made was to 'diageticise' musicals - for instance, Cabaret had it's non-stage songs cut, and consider the wedding scene in FOTR - rather than singing 'Sunrise, Sunset' out loud, the song is played as an internal monologue at a pivotal time. I'm not enough of an expert on 1970s musical films to comment much on this, but "films about actors, dancers or singers have been made as successful modern-style musical films,[examples needed] with the music as a diegetic part of the storyline."
So for me, Miracle of Miracles is the annoying side of broadway musicals, sunk into the classic, transcendent musical that is FotR. It's a cheesy slice of jolly shit pie. Not that FOTR, a multifaceted gem, can't cope with the diversity; it's a story of light and shade, and light in shade. But MOM's exactly wrong for me. I can't even watch it now; It's firmly in the hatefully delirious side of the musical tradition, that otherwise FOTR so perfectly skewers and eschews. It's so, well, happy! We hateses it, precious!
Oh, and how could i forget everything by the black eyed peas? they're SHIT.
No comments:
Post a Comment