Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for December, 2008
Elvis Presley. Duets with People He Never Knew.
12 December 2008
The King died thirty-one years ago. That’s nearly two generations that have passed since the day my economics teacher broke the news to our class about how the greatest voice in rock and roll had been silenced. We were too young to appreciate The King, his voice and the passion that poured through every note. You see, I had not heard In The Ghetto, Old Shep and Jailhouse Rock. I certainly was not aware of his gospel music. His fabulous movie music like Viva Las Vegas was still some years off. But as my musical experience ripened away from Deep Purple and The Sweet, I learned. I learned.
You’ve got to remember that Elvis had it all against him. He dealt with record companies that weren’t very marketing savvy, and doing a style of music was unheard of and to many, inflammatory. That he became the star he did was remarkable. That he recovered after a series of kitch and rather wet 1960s movies is just as remarkable.
Especially when he was recording in studios that were primitive in the 50s and 60s, often doing it on just one track from one microphone hanging over the assembled musicians. Overdubs? Yeah right.
Through the miracles of technology, a new album has been put together of Elvis Christmas songs. Duets in fact, when he had never recorded them as duets. What they’ve done is to somehow take Elvis’s voice off some of those old Christmas songs, most dating from 1957, clean the tracks up so that he sounds amazingly contemporary, then add new musical backings, and then pair Elvis with other singers like Olivia Newton-John, Amy Grant, Anne Murray and Sara Evans.
This album shows just how much technology can do. Elvis chats to the musicians during the songs, and these musos (many of which were not even born when the King uttered these lines way back when) respond with fabulous solos and passion.
My favourite track from this “Christmas Duets” album is the very funky Blues Brother-ish “Merry Christmas Baby”. His duet partner here is Gretchen Wilson (the self-proclaimed US redneck country singer). The pairing doesn’t work as well as a duet as some of the others, with Wilson playing more of a backing singer role, but when you’ve got Elvis in full throttle, no attempt at a duet is going to work. As a piece of music though, it is one of the tracks of the year.
Some years ago Natalie Cole started the posthumous duet trend by recording lines with her father Nat King Cole for the album “Unforgettable”. It was a nice exercise, but when you hear Nat singing those same songs on his own, you might ask the question, why change it?
In the case of Elvis, it is worth changing, if only for the joy of a snappy, full-sounding backing band and some of the best female voices in the world lending a bit of a hand. In the album’s notes these women all express joy at the opportunity. Olivia Newton-John says she has danced with Gene Kelly and John Travolta, but to be singing with Elvis is an unexpected thrill and a gift.
Sometimes technology can be fabulous.
– Phil
Four Christmases. Vince and Reese hamming it up.
11 December 2008
Last night I saw the new Xmas flick “Four Christmases”, which for some reason was retitled the nonsensical “Four Holidays” for the Australian market.
Despite the presence of the fabulous Reese Witherspoon, in one of her first performances after her academy award for that Johnny Cash movie, and Vince Vaughan, I still had my prejudices about yet another Christmas season romantic comedy.
I need not have feared.
Reese and Vaughan get into some serious acting in this piece and add surprising layers to their roles as a young couple who find themselves stranded in their hometown on Christmas Day and unable to avoid going to their parents houses for the annual gatherings. Since their parents are all divorced, this means four sets of family visits. For viewers, the big joy here is that the parents are played by some of Hollywood’s best: Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight and Mary Steenbergen.
Beware though, this is a film that highlights the worst of family Christmases. In those four visits, you get every possible family gathering disaster. My family is not quite a basket-case, but there were times when the scenarios on the screen brought back memories painful enough to make me feel uncomfortable.
This is a very funny and intelligent film that doesn’t waste the talent of Witherspoon and makes the most of Vaughan’s ability to deliver snappy repartee (although there were times when the lines he had to speak were a little over-the-top, like when he and Reese were having a relationship-risking discussion, and the writers had him delivering clever lines that in any true discussion would have had a real-life Reese throwing a pot of boiling water over this head.
In all, this is a good end-of-year escape movie. That is, unless your family is like one of the four depicted. In that case, this could be a Christmas nightmare movie.
– Phil
Robert Kuttner on Barack Obama’s challenges
10 December 2008
We know Barack Obama faces some real challenges after he takes office in January. He will inherit a US economy in a spin, health care not reaching many of the people who need it, and a Commander-in-Chief role at a time when the US miliatry is fighting two big overseas military campaigns.
That’s a lot of challenges for one man.
Author and journalist Robert Kuttner says in his new book, “Obama’s Challenge”, that there have not been that many US presidents who have been able to transform their country. He cites the few that have had this greatness about them: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Johnson? Yes, says Kuttner. Johnson was the man who succeeded in enacting the US Civil Rights legislation in the mid-sixties. What made him special was the way that he took the country with him. He didn’t impose the laws on the people, he made the American people believe that these were the laws that they needed. Roosevelt, he says, also pulled the nation together and encouraged them to get through the Great Depression, and in doing so, got them on side for the transformation of the country into more of a welfare “safety net” state.
Kuttner also cites, perhaps surprisingly, Ronald Reagan for his ability to convince the American people that they needed to move to the right and adopt a free market attitude. Kuttner says this attitude has since been discredited, especially with the current financial downturn, but regardless of this, Reagan was a transformational president.
Perhaps surprisingly, one president who Kuttner says lacked this skill when it mattered most, was Bill Clinton. He came to office with majorities in the congress, but failed to get his much-touted health reforms through. What Clinton did was to try to impose his wife Hillary’s health package on the people, when he should have talked to his constituents about the need for the change and got them excited for it. Kuttner believes if Clinton had been more transformational, he would have fixed the health system. Instead, he bunkered down, believing a good presidency was about ramming into the American people the policies that he believed were good for them, and failed.
As much as Obama and Clinton appear to be similar in many, charismatic, ways, Kuttner says they are very different. Clinton was admired. Obama inspires.
Kuttner believes that if Barack Obama remembers to take the American people with him and doesn’t become an ivory tower president, he will stop America going into depression, he will resolve the Iraq issue, and repair health care.
Kuttner believes Obama will pull it off. We’ll know in four years.
– Phil
Britney Spears or Barack Obama. Britney wins, apparently.
9 December 2008
For Barack it must be a case of Baby Hit Me One More Time.
He’s been voted the presdient of the US, the first African-American to do so. An historic moment in a time of economic crisis.
So what is the number one Yahoo search phrase?
Not Barack Obama.
It’s Britney Spears, that woman who was once a mouseketeer, and who has gone on to pleasure us with a list of benginly poppish tunes that give us little to actually massage our brain cells with. This woman who went through rehab, and then bumped her car into another vehicle at extremely low speed.
The world wanted to see the YouTube footage of the crash that really wasn’t.
This woman who then lost custody of her children for a short time while she cleaned her act up again with the help of a few doctors and a substance-free environment.
And that’s about it.
Meanwhile the incoming leader of the free world is considered less interesting.
I must be in a minority. I don’t find Britney remotely interesting. Marilyn Monroe, now she was interesting. She could act, and was a personality that was truly larger-than-life. She was the bane of her directors because she was habitually late for her shoots and had difficulty with her lines, but boy, when she delivered, she delivered. She was truly an interesting study.
Maybe it’s a case that the world is a little over Barack Obama. He has featured so prominantly for so long, that perhaps people just want to forget politics for a while. After all, he is in the process of transforming from pop star to politician. The same thing happened to JFK. Adored for a moment, then along comes the Bay of Pigs, and he becomes just another guy in a suit sitting in an oddly shaped room in a monochrome building.
But to be replaced in the search engines by Britney Spears?
Life is strange, dear friends.
– Phil
