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  • "The Happening" and the Fickle Finger of Fate


    I can’t be the only one who’s had (of all things) a Supremes song stuck in his head ever since seeing a trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming disaster flick (which is being heavily touted for carrying Shyamalan’s first R rating): The Happening. Despite the film’s deliciously retro title which evokes images of arsty hippies staging random acts of public randomness, the trailer brims over with Shyamalan’s by now familiar (to the point of virtual self-parody) bubbling stew of supernatural terror and quasi-religious inscrutability. Urgh. On the other hand, the scariest thing about The Supremes‘ positively rapturous 1967 single “The Happening” (their 10th #1 hit on Billboard‘s Pop chart), is the way Diana Ross’s smile (to say nothing of her Bruckheimer-scale hairdo) threatens to consume the rest of her face (and everything else in the immediate vicinity) as she effortlessly maneuvers through the song’s brisk tempo and relentlessly acrobatic melody in this live performance.

    This dizzyingly catchy song, a collaboration between Motown’s venerable Holland-Dozier-Holland team and TV theme composer Frank DeVol (whose most famous composition centers on the story of a lovely lady bringing up three very lovely girls), was written for the 1967 movie The Happening starring Anthony Quinn as a mobster restauranteur who gets kidnapped by a bunch of hapless hippies (including Faye Dunaway in her screen debut!) in a plot that would get recycled for Ruthless People in the mid-80s. But despite the song’s boundlessly chipper veneer, it marks a pivotal point in the Supremes’ history. Their very next single – the #2 hit “Reflections” – would be the first one credited to “Diana Ross and the Supremes”. Meanwhile, Florence Ballard, who gave the group their name, would soon be signing away her rights to it. Considered by many to have the superior voice, Ballard actually sang lead on some of the group’s earlier tracks, but with Ross’s star ascendant, she was increasingly marginalized in the group. Her alchohol problem didn’t help matters: though she sang on “Reflections”, she’d been fired from the Supremes (replaced by Cindy Birdsong of Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles) by the time it was released. In 1976, she died of heart failure at the age of 32. What did they say about that fickle finger of fate?

    -P. Lorentz

  • MY Best of, Vol. 1: Radiohead


    A column that I hope will become a MHW mainstay is “MY best of”, in which our fine staff of music lovers decides to create their own compilation of a band’s best work…and what better band to start with than Radiohead, who actually have a (non-sanctioned, but isn’t what record companies do when a band leaves their label?) “best of” album out this week. Enjoy! More to come…

    -Ed.

    So EMI have released the first “greatest hits” compilation of Radiohead’s esteemed career, and I’ve gotta say, considering that they’re digging for pennies in an abandoned couch, it’s not too shabby. No matter the circumstances behind this release, you just can’t argue with the power of the songs, though somewhat predictably, the label have taken a safe route, heavily favoring the Bends/OK era (together comprising ten of the album’s sixteen tracks), sparing a few awkward glances toward Kid A & Hail to the Thief, and basically confining Amnesiac & Pablo Honey to the attic and feeding them a bucket of fish heads once a month. Not only is this presentation of Radiohead rather lopsided, but the sequencing kind of sucks too, especially in the latter half (the decision to throw “Everything In It’s Right Place” right after “Street Sprit” was either the work of a complete boob or someone with a demented sense of humor).

    I remember awhile ago Money Mike made his own Prince retrospect in response to a set Warner was pushing at the time. So I figured I’d try and do something similar with the ‘Head’s EMI years, and this is what I came up with:

    1.) Creep (Acoustic) [from My Iron Lung EP]
    2.) The Bends [from The Bends]
    3.) You and Whose Army? [from Amnesiac]
    4.) Optimistic [from Kid A]
    5.) 2+2=5 (The Lukewarm) [from Hail to the Thief]
    6.) Paranoid Android [from OK Computer]
    7.) Idioteque [from Kid A]
    8.) Sail to the Moon (Brush the Cobwebs of the Sky) [from Hail to the Thief]
    9.) Pyramid Song [from Amnesiac]
    10.) Fake Plastic Trees [from The Bends]
    11.) Karma Police [from OK Computer]
    12.) Where I End and You Begin (The Sky is Falling In) [from Hail to the Thief]
    13.) Knives Out [from Amnesiac]
    14.) Just [from The Bends]
    15.) Lucky [from OK Computer]
    16.) Motion Picture Soundtrack [from Kid A]

    There a few holes—many sacrifices, Pablo Honey still gets shafted, enough B-side material to make up a box set (hint hint EMI)—but I was going for a mosaic of the band rather a packaging of their “greatest hits” (and really, have Radiohead had anything in the way of an actual hit other than “Creep?”). So yes, this is what Radiohead means to me after a decade.

    So what do you think? You’re given the Herculean task of compiling Radiohead into a single disc (or with a “bonus disc” if you feel like cheating). What the hell do you put on it?

    -G. Harrell

  • I’m Not Gonna Take It: Bayer Pharmaceuticals Ransacks the 80s with its Yaz Ads

    It’s probably safe to assume that when Dee Snider and his pals formed their band – a glam metal outfit they called Twisted Sister – back in the early 70s, that, despite their name and their gimmicky image which drew from drag culture and low budget horror in equal measure, they were really thinking about premenstrual dysphoric disorder. And certainly, their genre-defining 1983 anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was more about defying parental (and, as it turned out, governmental) authority than defying a certain female-specific monthly tyranny.

    But there the song is these days: 25 years after Twisted Sister’s hostile (but playful) take-over of MTV’s airwaves with a video featuring Mark Metcalf (sending up his role as Niedermeyer in Animal House) playing the Wile E. Coyote to the band’s Roadrunner in a series of escalating slapstick hijinks, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is back on the airwaves this summer as a chirpy, synthesized call to women’s liberation… from their periods. The song, along with a similarly re-recorded version of Scandal’s spunky new wave classic “Goodbye To You”, is currently being used by Bayer Pharmaceuticals to tout a birth-control-with-benefits pill called (oh it just gets worse, doesn’t it?) Yaz.

    Yaz (or Yazoo as they were known outside the U.S.), you may or may not recall, was the brilliant, if short-lived synth pop duo of husky-voiced singer Alison Moyet and synth-wizard songwriter Vince Clarke, formed in the wake of Clarke’s resignation from his post as Depeche Mode’s (then) sole obvious talent, shortly after that group’s debut. Together Clarke and Moyet recorded a pair of excellent records in the early 80s – Upstairs at Eric’s (1982) and You and Me Both (1983) – contributing a good handful of singles to the classic alternative canon before they too split, with Moyet launching a successful solo career and the openly straight Clarke forming Erasure with the wildly flamboyant singer Andy Bell and establishing his own little niche in gay iconography as Bell’s silent enabler. Despite generally minor chart performances (in the U.S.) at the time of their release, Yaz songs like “Situation”, “Don’t Go” and “Only You” have become just-left-of-center pop standards for a generation of almost-forty-somethings weaned on John Hughes movies. These are songs you might now hear piped in at your local grocery store while you’re trudging through the salad bar line. Tom Jones has covered Yaz. Seriously.

    It used to be (and still generally is) that established brands practiced a military vigilance against any unsolicited associations, no matter how innocuous, with pop and rock music groups. Chicago used to be Chicago Transit Authority until the Chicago Transit Authority threatened legal action. In the 90s, Green Jello promptly became Green Jelly when it started to look like they might sell a few records. So pardon me if I’m feeling a little galled (I’m not gonna take it! No! I’m not gonna take it!) that Bayer has appropriated the name Yaz for its latest birth control wonderdrug, especially since it’s my personal belief (admittedly, not backed up by any medical training) that three minutes of “Only You” can provide instant, albeit temporary, relief for just about any ailment with none of the side effects – cardiovascular problems, upper respiratory infections, and a few others I couldn’t possibly mention here without puking in my mouth a little – indicated for the drug Yaz.

    Bayer’s Yaz ads come at a particularly inopportune moment for fans of the band Yaz. The reunited (after 25 years) duo are currently on tour behind In Your Room, a new four-disc box set collecting remastered versions of their two albums, a disc of b-sides and remixes, and a DVD featuring the duo’s original music videos, live BBC performances, and a short documentary with new interviews with both Clarke and Moyet set for release July 8th, just in time for the group’s American tour dates. The box set (with can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com for about $60) and tour, which were announced back in January, are so hotly anticipated that I’m getting cramps just thinking about it.

    -P. Lorentz