So successful were they at these fraught atmospherics that Johnny Cash’s appearance on 1993’s “The Wanderer” outsourced their posing to one of the wittiest and gravest of poseurs.
INDECENT PROPOSAL 1993 MOVIE REVIEW ROLLING STONE PLUS
Posted by humanizingthevacuum OctoOctoPosted in Uncategorized Tags: Journalism, rock criticism, Writing 5 Comments on The peril of singing in character and wearing a headband: ‘Money for Nothing’ Ranking U2’s album closersįor all I crap on U2, “Love is Blindness” remains a stunner: an organ line forcing Bono to collapse upon a prayer kneeler, plus an Edge guitar part that doesn’t mind noise before it mimics a police siren. For example, I offer Newman’s “It’s Money That Matters”, on which Knofler, whaddya know, plays a variant on the “Money for Nothing” riff to pungent effect and Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet,” where an expression of love is an excuse for unveiling the contempt animating his side of the failed relationship. I do like a few Newman and Knopfler tunes when they drop the distancing games: when they are assholes. By contrast Knopfler, stuck with that potholed Highway 61 vocal tone and his expert, pinched guitar leads and fills, sings like he’s the appliance store dude in “Money for Nothing” clocking in for another day’s work. The string arrangement on “Sail Away” ironizes the lyrics, revealing the rot of the so-called American Dream for the chained Africans breathing the air of liberty to the beat of the overseer’s lash. While it’s probable the assholes and rednecks they “play” would’ve luxuriated in their misanthropy years before the Trump era, what would be the point of satirizing them? Often reduced to its most unenforceable denotation as if it were a liberal act of Congress before the Roberts Court, satire isn’t merely a lampoon: successful attempts require a moral redress.
I don’t believe them when they Sing In Character. I have the same problem with Knopfler that I do with Randy Newman. Perhaps he meant 1990’s “Les Boys” as a poignant account of Weimar-era cabaret life in Knopfler’s hands and thanks to his mouth, the song plays like an attenuated, delighted sneer, as Stephen Thomas Erlewine pointed out in a review last month of the Dire Straits box set, lord save him. “Money for Nothing” wasn’t the first time Knopfler, Playing a Character, disparaged homosexuals. (Knopfler has never mentioned the race of the guy working in the appliance store.) And then, of course, there’s the divide caused by the use of one particular word - an anti-gay slur that I don’t really feel like typing out here.Īnalyzing Knopfler’s use of “faggot,” he writes, “Even if you’re just singing in character, that word isn’t really the type of thing that a straight white rocker should play around with.” And, yes, the slur offended rock critics in 1985 too. There are class divides and generational divides. There are a lot of divides at work in “Money For Nothing” - between the appliance-store worker and the people on MTV, but also between the appliance-store worker and Knopfler, and between Knopfler and the people on MTV. Everything about it is complicated.” Well, possibly. “’Money For Nothing’ was a sort of satirical broadside against MTV that also worked as an advertisement for MTV,” Tom Breihan observes in his post on Dire Straits’ only American #1.
Eugene Trzecieski - RIP Ranking Joni Mitchell’s album closers Eugene Trzecieski - RIP” Posted by humanizingthevacuum OctoOctoPosted in Uncategorized Tags: Catholicism, RIP, Writing 1 Comment on Br. After a tenth grade honors English course in which we crunched on the dialectical subtleties of Clive Cussler and Dean Koontz, understanding Aeschylus’ concept of justice in Prometheus Bound gnarled our brains at 8:30 a.m. The dozen sophomores and juniors crammed in that lounge had their own reasons for taking a six-week summer course on Greek literature: college board ambition, parental pressure, curiosity. Eugene didn’t explain finding answers was our duty, our problem. Male students at a Catholic high school didn’t understand dishwashing or hygiene. We hovered over an Entenmann’s Danish ring that looked fresher ten days earlier when opened and not exposed to the faculty lounge’s also unfresh cigarette reek. “You all look like semi-educated cows chewing intellectual cuds,” the dome-headed sexagenarian remarked, not unkindly.
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