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  • Commercial-isms: JCPenney vs. Lesley Gore “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows”

    Commercial-isms: JCPenney vs. Lesley Gore “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows”

    Sunshine, Lollipops, Rainbows, and a Simplified Pricing Scheme

    Attention all professional (and do-it-yourself) outraged social conservatives! JCPenney is now officially f*cking with you.

    We all remember your impassioned pleas to the big-box retailer to drop their tacit endorsement of the homosexual agenda, embodied by their hiring of arch-lesbian Ellen DeGeneres to appear in a series of ads touting the chain’s revolutionary (giggle) new pricing scheme. Not only did they refuse to back down and give the job to someone more appropriate – like Elizabeth Hasslebeck – but recently, they’ve taken your hero Sarah Palin’s advice (Don’t Retreat: Re-Load!) and opened a new line of attack on family values. A stealth attack, even! Like the big bad wolf dressed up as sweet old grandma, JCPenney’s latest endorsement of the morally bankrupt gay lifestyle is dressed up as sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.

    Or rather: “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” the 1965 Top 20 hit single by Lesley Gore (from the movie Ski Party, starring Frankie Avalon!).

    Lesley Gore “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” (1965)

    Lesley Gore is most famous for a pair of singles (produced by a very young Quincy Jones), “It’s My Party” and its sequel “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” The two songs chronicle a love triangle between Lesley, her boyfriend Johnny (who seems like a total nob), and her duplicitous best friend Judy who shows up to Lesley’s birthday party wearing Johnny’s ring (it’s all good – Johnny goes back to Lesley!). Over the course of eight albums released by Mercury between 1963 and 1967, this Jersey girl covered an encyclopedic range of squeaky clean (and, it goes without saying, totally heterosexual), romantic teenage drama, each two-minute song a self-contained soap opera.

    In “Hey Now”, she tells off an indecisive beau (it’s like a 20-year-pre-emptive reply to The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” with an even more contagious groove). In “She’s a Fool”, she calls out another girl for mistreating her boyfriend (upon whom Lesley is crushing). In “Maybe I Know,” she admits she’s in denial about her cheating boyfriend (“deep down inside, he loves me!”), but won’t DTMFA. And in the darkly fabulous “You Don’t Own Me”, she asserts some pre-feminist girl power: “Don’t tell me what to do, and don’t tell me what to say, and please when I go out with you, don’t put me on display.” (In 1987, the song was covered by the British synth-soul group The Blow Monkeys for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack – that was where I first heard it – and I remember my sister and I being scandalized/titillated by the way lead singer Dr. Robert sang it without changing the gender of the verse: “Don’t say I can’t go with other boys.”) Here she is, having just turned 19 years old:

    Lesley Gore “It’s My Party”(1965)

    “But, Paul,” the conscientious social conservative might ask, “these are sweet, wholesome, totally heterosexual songs sung by a sweet-faced pre-sexual revolution teenage girl.” But are they? Are? They? The fact is – correction: the superfabulous fact is… that Lesley Gore is gay. She hasn’t had a hit single since 1967 and for the last 40 years she’s mostly been retired from recording. (She has occasionally released new music – her most recent album was 2005’s Ever Since, a collection of torchy jazz interpretations, including a great new version of “You Don’t Own Me”) But in 2004, she started hosting the PBS LGBT newsmagazine In the Life, and came out publicly soon thereafter. That’s right, OneMillionMoms.com! JCPenney now have two lesbians shilling for their newly simplified pricing schemes!

    Of course, like Ellen DeGeneres, Lesley Gore is one of those people it’s extremely hard to dislike, much less hate. When I was 11 or 12, and receiving my allowance in 45 rpm records (I would give my Mom a list), my mother snuck in a reissue “oldies” single of “It’s My Party” b/w “She’s a Fool” in between the latest hits of Duran Duran and Culture Club, and I became an instant Lesley Gore fan. And that was long before I’d ever heard “Sometimes I Wish I Were a Boy“! And really, how do you protest against sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows?

  • Commercial-isms: T-Mobile vs. Laurie Anderson “O Superman”

    Commercial-isms: T-Mobile vs. Laurie Anderson “O Superman”

    HTC O… M Effing G
    I took it as further evidence of my exceptional parenting when my 17-year-old son perked up at the sound of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” coming across from the TV and pronounced “Awesome song!” In my head, I was congratulating myself: My son knows Laurie Anderson’s music! I am a good dad! I am a good dad! But this moment of parental pride was sullied when I realized that familiar “hah hah hah hah hah hah” (I always thought it sounded like a robot breathing) was being played in the background of a commercial. For T-Mobile’s new HTC One phone.

    Really?

    Now I’m not so naive to actually believe that, at least when it comes to pop culture, some things might actually be sacred. But seriously: what’s “O Superman” doing in a cell phone commercial? Suddenly the tired arguments about artists “selling out” with their licensing choices feel freshly relevant. Not that I think Laurie Anderson has sold out, nor do I begrudge her whatever money she might be making from a 30-year-old song that might only be regarded as a “hit” in the most artsy-NYC-hipster-ish sense. (It did top the Village Voice’s 1981 Pazz & Jop singles poll.) But there is something sad about such a monumental song reduced to… this.

    If you’ve never heard “O Superman”, you may be asking yourself just what the big deal is. And if you’re just hearing “O Superman” for the first time, you should know: it’s damn weird. But it’s also wonderful. As proud as I am that my son could identify it so readily, he was a tiny bit wrong in pronouncing “O Superman” an “awesome song”. It certainly is awesome, and I don’t mean “awesome” in the deeply trivializing 80s-vintage colloquialism sense, but rather in the Old Testament music to bring down the walls of Jericho sense. It is awesome. But to call it simply a song is also a little trivializing.

    For one thing, it’s just not very song-like. For another, it’s massive: eight-and-a-half minutes massive, sustained without benefit of a catchy chorus or an extended guitar jam or even a drum solo. The music is stark and electronic, the words poetic and prayerful, and delivered (through a vocoder) alternately as a monologue and a chant – ah-hah-hah-ah hah-hah-hah-ha-ah. It is by turns funny and sweet (“Hi Mom!”), and chillingly prophetic:

    Here come the planes
    They’re American planes
    Made in America
    Smoking
    or Non-smoking

    There’s also a visual element that is integral to the song itself. In live performance, Laurie Anderson would play her synthesizer with one hand, and with the other, punctuate her lines with hand and arm gestures projected as shadows in a circle of light on a screen behind her.

    Laurie Anderson “O Superman” (1981)

    The song was first released as a NEA-funded limited edition 7″ single in 1981; the following year it became the centerpiece of Anderson’s major label debut record Big Science, which, itself, was conceived as part of an epic scale multi-media performance piece called United States, inspired largely by a four-year field trip Anderson took around the country, working various sorts of jobs as she went. “O Superman” is still regarded as Anderson’s masterpiece, and in the same way the “Hallelujah Chorus” (all 100 or so seconds of it) has become “bigger” than the larger work it was part of (Handel’s “Messiah” oratorio), “O Superman” has eclipsed United States in sheer concentrated power and historical resonance.

    The song was inspired by the aria O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere, from French composer Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid, and alludes to its words. Laurie Anderson described the aria as a “prayer for a knight on the eve of a hopeless battle… a prayer about empire, loss, and ambition.”

    ‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.
    And when justice is gone, there’s always force.
    And when force is gone, there’s always Mom.

    “O Superman” was also inspired by current events: specifically a tragically failed military mission during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. But 9/11 and the government’s ongoing struggle to respond to it – both the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the domestic policies passed in the name of security – have given the new song an even more powerful and unforeseen resonance. Here’s Laurie on performing the song to a New York audience a week after 9/11, from her notes to the 2007 reissue of Big Science:

    “During a top-secret mission to rescue hostages being held in Tehran, American helicopters crashed in a sandstorm and blew up. The mission’s failure was a blow to the United States’ reputation as a technological superpower and played a role in the downfall of the Carter Administration and the rise of Reaganism. Almost thirty years later we’re fighting the same war… I suddenly realized I was singing about the present.”

    So yeah, how about that skydiving fashion photographer? Here’s the song that opens the Big Science album:

    Laurie Anderson “From the Air” (1982)

  • Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    It Must Be Love

    Always much more popular in their native Britain, the seven-man new wave ska band Madness are mainly (and somewhat erroneously) known here as a one hit wonder. That hit, “Our House” which hit the Billboard Top 10 in the summer of ’83, remains a staple of 80s party playlists. It’s a great song, but it’s tended to overshadow the rest of the band’s copious singles catalog from their classic 1979 45 “One Step Beyond” (The best instrumental single of the 70s? Oh yes, probably.) to quirky numbers like “Baggy Trousers” and the so-adorable-so-heartbreaking “My Girl”: “Why can’t she see, she’s lovely to me, but I like to stay in and watch TV on my own every now and then.”

    Madness “My Girl” (1979)

    “My Girl” was the second of more than a dozen top ten singles the band had in the U.K. But it took four years for the band to get any airplay here. After “Our House” finally broke the band to a big American audience, instead of releasing a new song as the follow-up, they reached back into their catalog for one of their most beloved previous hits, “It Must Be Love”, a cover of a 1972 song by folk-pop singer-songwriter Labi Siffre which went to #4 in the UK in 1981. (This selection only made sense in that the group’s self-titled U.S. debut album was essentially a greatest hits compilation – Labi Siffre was even more unknown to U.S. audiences than Madness was. He still is.) “It Must Be Love” wasn’t a total flop – it still managed to break into the American Top 40, but it never made it into the second hour of Casey Kasem’s weekly broadcast. Nevertheless, it remains the band’s second-biggest American hit, and until Volkswagen started airing commercials for the new Passat, it was mostly forgotten, even by the 80s kids.

    Madness “It Must Be Love” (1981)

    Madness’s cover of “It Must Be Love” was and remains Labi Siffre’s biggest American hit. Most of his albums weren’t even released in the U.S. until the last couple of years (and even then, only by digital download. You want a hard copy, it’s gonna be an import.) That said, Siffre does share a writing credit on Eminem’s 1999 single “My Name Is…” due to the fact that it samples Siffre’s 1975 song “I Got The…”, a very sexy song with one hell of an awesome breakdown. At that time, Eminem was getting a lot of flak for his apparent homophobia. Ironically, it was the openly gay Siffre’s bassline and electric piano hook from that sexy, sexy mid-song breakdown that anchored Em’s first really big hit. Check it out:

    Labi Siffre “I Got The” (1975)