You know what? If Kristen Chenoweth, Lea Michele, and Liza Minnelli were in the periphery of yesterday’s Scarjo post, let’s make today’s post be all about them and their awesome pipes.
Kristen Chenoweth as April, hoping for that strike; image courtesy of tvovermind.com
Lea Michele's Rachel, striking gold at the bowling alley with glee clubber Finn; image courtesy of stayinginwithvlada.com
So, if you’re watching Glee, you might have been so excited to see a TV show that closed with a rousing rendition of Queen’s “Somebody To Love,” getting at least one person closer to her goal of seeing it performed by an entire dramatic ensemble like the “Wise Up” scene in Magnolia.
More importantly, you might have been won over by Chenoweth and Michele’s duet on “Maybe This Time.” (BTW, thanks Neesha for making me think to spotlight this scene.) Followers know the cruel irony of this song’s inclusion in a series as deceptively sad and desperate as this one. Chenoweth’s April Rhodes is a washed-up former glee clubber with a surprising amount of Jerri Blank’s warped charm. Michele’s Rachel Berry is a talented, go-gettin’ ingenue who is just barely hiding how profoundly lonely she is.
You may also recognize the show’s not-so-secret gift of making the sheer cathartic power and physical release of a pop song or musical number to make both the singer and the spectator transcend to a higher plane (for a more abstract example of how the corporeality of singing can reinvigorate both parties, I’ll point you toward the Patrick Daughters-directed music video for Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks,” wherein the four-piece are so overjoyed by the power of singing, their heads catch on fire as I get goosepimply).
If we dig a little deeper, the Minnelli reference comes in. “Maybe This Time” was originally written for Bob Fosse’s film adaptation of Kander and Ebb’s stage musical, Cabaret, which Rachel is starring in (and a real high school would almost certainly never stage, even though I begged our choir director for us to do it). The musical, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, involves the doomed romance between Cliff, an American journalist, and Sally Bowles, a blindly determined British showgirl who makes the decision to stay in 1930s Berlin just as Hitler is starting to get a chokehold on Germany while her partner flees back to the states. In the movie version, Bowles is American, and played with put-upon worldliness and brittle vulnerability by Liza Minnelli, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance.
Admittedly, if the song Glee had chosen was “Cabaret,” which was in both the stage and film versions, Liza’s version of it would add another layer of readability, as it’s impossible for me to hear this version of the song, which is performed right at the moment when Bowles’s personal life is going to hell, and not think of Mama Judy Garland.
But I think these twin versions of “Maybe This Time” speak to a few key issues particularly poignant to women and girls’ relationship to musical theater and to the outside world: the gendered masquerade of happiness for the sake of upholding spectacle, the ability to stop time and transmorph because of the aural spectacle of your own voice, and the strength your voice has to keep you persevering. Because the push you’re looking for to get through the next set of insurmountable odds might be found by landing that high note.
Scarjo in the recording studio; image courtesy of actressarchives.com
Scarlett Johansson wants to be considered a hyphenate. And not by joining her surname to husband Ryan Reynolds’s. She wants you to think of her as both actress and singer.
Now, I’m not sure when hyphenates like “actress-singer” or “singer-model” or “model-actress” became a punchline, but I think it suggests a certain snobbery toward classical training and finely-honed technique, usually acquired from years of stage work. Having just watched another episode of Glee, I wonder if guest-star Kristen Chenoweth and principal Lea Michele, both Broadway babies, lend legitimacy to the hyphenate. You could sub in any number of singing actresses with considerable stage training for more examples — Patti LuPone, Julie Andrews, Rita Moreno, Bernadette Peters, Vicky Lewis, Jane Krakowski, the mother-daughter legacy that is Judy and Liza.
Jane Krakowski as Lola in Damn Yankees; image courtesy of playbill.com
And yet, if actresses like Scarlett Johansson, Juliette Lewis, and Gwyneth Paltrow try to establish a musical career, their efforts are dismissed with a derisive chuckle (okay, admittedly, GOOP made Paltrow more of a punchline than Duets ever could).
But Johansson is an interesting case, because she seems to want to tap into some of the indie caché that fellow It Girl Zooey Deschanel has cultivated with projects like She & Him, if not at the very least balance it with an attempted career in the imagined, perennially just-emergent film musical revival.
Johansson has made music for some time, having taken music and dancing lessons as a kid. Fans of Lost In Translation, her break-out movie from 2003, were perhaps charmed by her performance of The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” during the scene at the karaoke bar. I know some girls who donned that pink wig for Halloween.
Johansson also leant her vocals to a cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” for a charity album in 2006 and performed with proto-shoegaze royalty Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella back in 2007. Again, anyone who saw Lost In Translation can walk through the big symbiotic moment that results from having the actress sing a song featured in the movie that made her a star. That she is alongside the band that authored such a legendary song in the first place and performing it at such a public, credible venue as Coachella should not be overlooked.
But Johansson’s first widespread effort to tap into hipster-approved musical ventures was her Tom Waits covers record, Anywhere I Lay My Head. Pointedly, this effort was widely dismissed by its target audience. The critics were not kind, dismissing it as a vanity project, discrediting Johansson’s ability, and crying offense that some starlet would dare cover the songs a musical legend like Tom Waits.
Cover of Anywhere I Lay My Head, released in 2008 on Atco/Rhino; image courtesy of tomwaitsuper.blogspot.com
Now, I don’t consider Waits’s ouvre or anyone else’s to be a sacred text. Songs are malleable. What’s more, covers are really fascinating. When they’re bad, they test what you actually like about the original. When they’re good, they can be transcendent, forcing you to rehear a song you already know and love. The Wire faced this each season when they re-worked Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” for the opening credits, the original only being heard in season two. Let it be known that I think Steve Earle’s pedantic version for season five that swipes from the theme to Law and Order made me question if this song was actually good. Conversely, The Neville Brothers’ version in season three reminded me that it totally was.
Oh, have you seen The Wire? If you haven’t, you should.
For me, then, it wasn’t so much that Johansson, an actress, dared attempt reworking the songs of the (male) master. I could think of far worse things Johansson could do with her time and resources (get arrested for drugs, get cosmetic surgery, get really skinny, make another movie with Woody Allen).
My big frustration with her Waits covers record, which is where I ended up siding with some of the critics, is that I couldn’t actually hear Johansson. Perhaps putting her vocals so far down in the mix was meant to free her from any tethers to the master’s words. But, to my ears, it kind of sounded more like an attempt for producer David Sitek to upstage her, twiddling knobs and piling on layers of reverb so that her voice lent a “cough medicine/Tinkerbell“ vibe to the proceedings. Sitek’s futuristic, anthemic sensibilities usually do it for me, particularly with the work he’s done with Telepathe, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and his own band, TV on the Radio (aka my favorite band, aka the rock band of the 2000s). But here, I was like “oh, this is really his record.” It seems to make all the difference when she sings the song live.
Despite this setback, Johansson continues to make music. Last summer, she covered Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” for the soundtrack to He’s Just Not That Into You, a movie I did not see because I figured an ensemble rom-com of needy skinny women, aloof men, and Wilson Cruz being underused would make me yell “feminism!” and throw tampons at the screen and that’s why we watch movies at home. I can’t valorize her efforts, because the original is a song that made me so swoony for the beautiful boy singer that I taped a photo of him in my notebook and spent my allowance money on Grace. Johansson’s version, on the other hand, reminded me of Vonda Shepard. Tepid execution of such a powerful song makes me feel like a wet noodle.
But now Johansson has recorded Break Up, an album she did with Pete Yorn (who has not had the effect on me that Buckley has, but he seems nice enough). If you’d like to hear some songs off the album, along with their interview with NPR, check it out here and then thank my friend Kristen for, once again, pointing you (and me) in the right direction.
Cover to Break Up, released in 2009 on Atco/Rhino; image courtesy of forthempire.info
Yorn had Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot‘s collaborations in mind when composing these songs and casting long-time friend Johansson, who he felt was today’s version of the French bombshell.
The music itself sounds fine, and definitely lines Johansson up more closely with the indie-friendly retro cool Deschanel has found for herself. I still feel like her voice, while more expressive and interesting here, seems a bit flat and projectable. And, of course, there’s something potentially unsettling about Johansson being linked with men like Yorn and Sitek who seem to have a little too clear a vision of what they want to construct instead of fostering a more openly collaborative relationship. One could easily extend this reading into a comparison of patriarchal impulses surrounding production between musicians and movie directors.
So while I don’t want to suggest that Johansson isn’t singing for herself, I also hope she keeps striving to find her own voice.
Cover to Soundtrack Available; image courtesy of t.douban.com
I knew the trip from Austin to Traverse City would be lengthy, so I packed this 2001 anthology, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Vanguard film music scholar Claudia Gorbman called it ”muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity.” Strong words.
And true statement. This is a great book that covers so much ground. It was also a very heartening read, because identity politics, industry practices, sociohistoric context, and the myriad of ways soundtracks inform and impact movies are at the fore of this anthology, mirroring my own scholastic aspirations. And the forward (or “overture”) to this book stresses the importance of popular music to media studies, and challenges how this emphasis is lacking in the field. I only wish I had gotten to this book sooner, but it definitely gave me a sense of who to look for when I choose to reapply for PhD programs, as well as how to go about framing my interests in a statement of purpose.
Also, as a bonus, PhD students’ work is nestled alongside big names like Rick Altman. Seriously, I think I’d die if something I wrote was in an anthology with his work in it.
I had a pre-existing relationship to this book prior to flying in and out of O’Hare and road-tripping I-90. And, for my work, the two pieces that most interest feminist music geekery are chapters I’ve already read. But I never blogged about them before, so let’s pretend they’re new to all of us.
The first piece is Kelley Conway’s “Flower of the Asphalt: Chanteuse Réaliste in 1930s French Cinema,” which focuses on the working class singer in French film, whose cultural popularity reached a peak between the two World Wars and during France’s period of considerable urban restructuring and economic poverty. I first chanced upon it when doing some research on Conway (who is currently at Madison). As a big Edith Piaf fan, I was kinda irritated with myself for not knowing that the chanteuse réaliste was an important character in French cinema. In addition, Piaf wasn’t the only woman associated with the singing style and film subgenre. Conway pays more attention to lesser-known figures, like Damia and particularly the proudly full-bodied Fréhel (who you may have heard if you’re a fan of Amélie; her song “Si tu n’étais pas là” is on the soundtrack).
Fréhel, chanteuse réaliste; image courtesy of pierre-michel.fr
A key component to the chanteuse réaliste was authenticity. She had to be as hard-scrabble in life as she was on screen and in song. Often, these women played prostitutes and drug addicts — Fréhel was both. They also had to be aligned with the working class. Indeed, some of these films (particularly Coeur des Lilas), made great efforts to create a symbiotic relationship between the chanteuse and the street.
Most importantly, these women were often marked by excess, sexual agency, and delight toward transgression. Coeur des Lilas contains a musical number called “La môme caoutchouc” (French for “The Rubber Kid”) where Fréhel delights in her flexibility, sexual prowess, and ample bosom.
There are, of course, downsides to the chanteuse réaliste that Conway is quick to point out. For one, she is rarely the leading lady, usually a supporting character. And while she is decidedly working class and tends to be sexually voracious, she usually has no social mobility. She also tends to be a tragic figure; alone, unloved, and sometimes met with an untimely demise.
The other piece that I had previously read was Wojcik’s “The Girl and the Phonograph: or The Vamp and the Machine.” I drew from this piece for a recent conference paper I delivered on female deejays in horror film. Wojcik looks at the marginal but noteworthy presence phonographic technology has for girls and young women in contemporary cinema (ex: Little Voice, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Pulp Fiction, Truffaut’s La mariée était en noir), as well as teen magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. Her statement “the phonograph was something of a free-floating signifier: it is, alternately, a toy, a decorative item, a serious technology, a party machine, and a key to access a world of music” was too wonderful to ignore.
To the left; one of Holly Golightly's few pieces of furniture in her apartment was her record player
It also reminded me that I need to see Little Voice, a British film about LV, a shy girl who inherits her dead father’s record collection (which Wojcik notes that, through his fandom of Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey, alludes to his possible homosexuality). LV begins poring over them out of grief and as a means to distance herself from her sexually liberated, Tom Jones-loving mother. Through studying these records, she starts a musical act as Little Voice where she emulates these singers perfectly.
An unfortunate narrative commonality of the trope of the girl and the phonograph is that, often, in order to obtain emotional or mental maturity, they must give up phonographic technology. Also, as Wojcik notes in Diner, sometimes females’ clear interest in phonographic technology gets overshadowed while enforcing how inept and careless they are alongside traditionally defined male traits of indexical prowess.
In addition, the following are some chapters that, while not directly applicable to feminist music geekery, I found interesting and potentially useful.
Jeff Smith’s “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema” – This one focuses on using popular music for pun and reference, advocates fluency in song selection as an interpretive strategy to further bolster scholastic and cultural understanding of a text, and suggests the authorial power of the music supervisor. I could easily see this being useful in my work, as I always advocate further understanding of how song selection informs a movie (I don’t know how you can read Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette without interrogating the Marxist values of post-punk and the pre-Revolutionary fixations of the New Romantics whose songs make up the soundtrack). However, I’d configure music supervisors as collaborative authors rather than sole authors, but I try to challenge monolithic authorship wherever possible.
It also validated my reading of the music in The Hangover. Music supervisors George Drakoulias and Randall Poster, both of whom have worked with Noah Baumbach and the latter of which is the on-call music supervisor for the indie smart wave, use the biggest, glitziest, most bombastic current and recent Top 40 hits as a means of setting up a spectacle (four white brosephs let loose in Vegas) that is never shown to the audience (pointedly, the top 40 hits basically disappear from the movie the next morning). Some more concrete examples include: Zach Galifianakis’s character asking his co-hort if they’re ready to let the dogs out in deadpan, followed by quick cuts of the group strutting down a hotel hallway to the Baja Boys’ “Who Let the Dogs Out” (this got big laughs during the screening I attended). Also, their drive to Las Vegas is underscored by Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’” and if anyone has seen this music video, then they were probably hoping to see Galifiankis lip-sync to the camera, if only for a moment. I know I was.
There might be something going on with Mike Tyson’s love of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” too, but I’m not sure what. However, when be-credded musicians like Panda Bear praise a seemingly un-cool Collins, I can’t help but wonder if some kind of ironic appropriation is going on. Or maybe Tyson just likes the drums. They are pretty sweet.
In addition:
Paul B. Ramaeker’s “‘You Think They Call Us Plastic Now‘: The Monkees and Head.” Great interrogation of the teen idols’ arthouse flop, as well as how it fits into their star persona and the stylistic motivations of the show.
Neepa Majumdar’s “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema.” Great piece on the role of playback artists (singers and voice actors) in Bollywood. Particular focus on Lata Mangeshkar. Made me keep thinking about the voice and disembodiedment, which I hope to extend further into a discussion of representational politics and animation at some point.
Barbara Ching’s “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film.” Interesting piece about how country music and its politics have been framed in contemporary film (Nashville, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tender Mercies, and Pure Country). Any piece that makes me think critically about Nashville, one of my all-time favorite movies, gets a nod.
Nabeel Zuberi’s “Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But . . . and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities.” Great piece that ties the use of music to frame developing South Asian populations in Great Britain in the 1989 documentary I’m British But . . . to the marginal but emergent presence of British musicians of South Asian descent in the late 90s (ex: Cornershop). Pays particular attention to how these musicians were influenced by hip hop, soul, funk, and other musical genres associated with African Americans. Zuberi only gets to the late 1990s, but I am obviously interested in extending this discussion to people like M.I.A., who I love and have researched previously for a conference paper.
Krin Gabbard’s “Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County. A look at how the jazz singer keeps Eastwood’s character Robert Kincaid from being emasculated in the movie. Also looks at the use of jazz music in the broader context of Eastwood’s acting and directorial work.
So yeah, read this book. I hugged it when I finished it, just like I did with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And if you’re at UT, pick it up from the Fine Arts Library.
