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Tag: glee

  • It’s Hard to Dance With a Devil on Your Back: Glee Girls “Shake It Out”

    Dot Jones as ”Coach Beast”

    For much of its third season, it seems to have been coasting along towards graduation and a much anticipated farewell to a handful of its charter characters; but occasionally, Glee busts out something special to remind us just how a great a TV show Glee can be, and why we ever cared about it in the first place. Last week’s episode was like that.

    And it wasn’t just because we got to see Rachel (Lea Michele) fail (in spectacularly humiliating fashion) the audition she’d been preparing for her whole life; although watching her flub the words to “Don’t Rain On My Parade” – twice – especially after she’d (very condescendingly) counseled dear Kurt (Chris Colfer) not to do anything risky in his audition, certainly was a lot of mean-spirited fun (or maybe it was just sweet justice). When you heard Rachel say that she wasn’t nervous about her audition, you knew she was doomed.

    Her character’s flameout even delivered some satisfying meta-schadenfreude for those of us who love love love to hate actress Lea Michele. In my head, when I saw Rachel Berry sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading for another chance, I imagined Lea Michele in Ryan Murphy’s offices sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading to let her character flunk out and have to return in Season 4 as a fifth-year senior.

    Regrets collect like old friends
    Here to relive your darkest moments
    I can see no way, I can see no way
    And all of the ghouls come out to play
    – “Shake It Out” by Florence + the Machine

    Kurt, meanwhile, shook off Rachel’s advice, and nervously made an eleventh hour (fifty-ninth-minute) switch to a less-rehearsed audition piece. He performed the number (the very very gay song “Not the Boy Next Door” from the Peter Allen bio-musical The Boy from Oz) with exuberant confidence; he had a blast doing it, and the audition’s jury of one – Whoopi Goldberg, impersonating Mount Rushmore – was duly impressed.

    Hugh Jackman “Not the Boy Next Door” (2003)

    Still, the episode’s other major plotline managed to upstage even Rachel Berry’s epic Streisand-fail. When Coach Beiste (“Beast”, the always amazing Dot Jones) shows up to school with a black eye, some of the meaner Glee girls make a joke about Coach’s boyfriend Cooter “going all Chris Brown” on her. It’s a joke – a mean one – but clearly a joke: it’s absolutely unfathomable (to the girls on the TV show, and to us watching) that any man in his right mind would even physically threaten Coach Beiste, much less do something so foolish as commit actual violence against her. She’d kick his ass, right? Not that Coach is invulnerable. We’ve seen her break down when, as a new teacher to the school, she was ridiculed and excluded by her fellow teachers. Still, the girls are comfortable making the “Chris Brown” joke because it’s self-evident to them (and us) that Coach is no victim.

    But the joke was made within earshot of a teacher played by this Real Housewife of Atlanta, and she, having grown up around domestic violence, is determined to impress upon the girls just how unfunny their joke was. She notes that the American pop songbook is full of songs that commit some sort of violence against women, and (you know this is coming) gives the girls a Glee-signment for the week: take one of those songs and perform it in a way that takes back the woman’s power. Suddenly, visions of the Glee-girls singing this infamous Phil Spector “classic” danced in my head:

    The Crystals “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” (1962)

    It’s probably a good thing Glee didn’t go there.**

    To this point, the plot is a little bit ABC After School Special-ish. We’ve seen these “special” sitcom episodes before, and we’re expecting a tidy, meaningful, lesson-learned moment. But what may have been a self-evidently preposterous proposition – Coach Beiste as the Tina to Cooter’s Ike – turns out to be exactly what’s going on. While this conveniently proves NeNe Leakes’s point – domestic jokes aren’t funny, no matter the context – that’s the last concession this episode makes to “special episode” tidiness. We learn that self-esteem issues aren’t so easily healed with just a stirring pep talk, a touching musical number, and a hug just before the credits roll.

    As far as touching musical numbers go, though, the Glee girls’ nearly a cappella cover of “Shake It Out”, last year’s near-hit by Florence + the Machine, was unexpected, beautiful and incredibly powerful. Florence Welch’s lyrics about confronting the “demons” and “ghouls” that haunt a relationship and play havoc with a woman’s sense of self and worth feel as if they were written specifically for this episode of this show – and they get added sting from the scenes interspersed throughout the song.

    Glee Cast “Shake It Out” (2012)

    Where Florence + the Machine’s performance of the song is loud, anthemic, cathartic – it fills a room even at a soft volume – the Glee girls’ performance is intimate and quiet, as if giving voice to Coach Beiste’s seemingly unlikely but nevertheless very credible, very real vulnerabilities. The girls think they are singing an apology to Coach for their insensitive jokes, and giving her the support she needs to move on with her life. But instead of moving on, we see Coach moving back in. The girls are finally fulfulling the assignment they were given; sadly, no matter how empowering the song might feel, no amount of pretty harmonies can make Coach Beiste empower herself.

    Florence + the Machine “Shake It Out” (2011)

    **This song is 50 years old, and it feels – appropriately – shocking that it was ever released as a single marketed to a teenagers. But let’s not shit ourselves: teenagers made Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” featuring Chris Brown a major hit this year. “He Hit Me” didn’t chart.

  • Glee’s Gaga Episode Leaves Me… “Speechless”-less

    Though the show’s most beloved (for her unapologetic hatefulness) character, Sue Sylvester (played with all the purposefulness and empathy of a power drill by Jane Lynch) was pretty much absent from tonight’s Lady Gaga themed episode of Glee, the show still had a lot of great moments. Unfortunately, none of those great moments were musical. Tonight’s show was useful not only in demonstrating the essential commonality between the artistry of Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand, and KISS – that is, in a word the show beat us over the head with tonight, theatricality – but also in explaining the symbology behind the KISS members’ made up personae. Who knew, right?

    It also boasted two of the season’s most dramatic and surprisingly uncartoonish plot developments. Kurt’s father’s confrontation with their potential future stepbrother/son over Fin’s use of the “F” word (not the four letter one) was powerful and moving, and suggested a new layer of complexity in the three characters’ relationships with each other.

    Meanwhile, Rachel’s thwarted reunion with her birth mother – rival glee club coach and disappointed former Broadway aspirant Ms. Cochrane (played by real life Broadway star Idina Menzel in a brilliant bit of lookalike-soundalike-no-way-these-two-don’t-share-genes casting) – felt almost underplayed. It was emotionally three-dimensional, as the relief of confession turned not into a happily-ever-after ending, but into a sort of relationship limbo. Moreover, when Rachel (Lea Michele) admitted with some degree of regret that she just didn’t feel a daughterly need for her mother, the show seemed to honor her relationship with her adoptive dads in a way the show, which has never really shown us her adoptive dads (which, as an adoptive dad, infuriates me!), never has before.

    Unfortunately, the show’s musical numbers tonight were uniformly duddish, from strictly imitative versions (in both staging and arrangement) of Streisand’s “Funny Girl”, KISS’s “Shout It Out Loud”, and, of course, Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, a performance so synthesized and Autotuned that the show momentarily felt like a trailer for RockStar: Lady Gaga Edition, to a boy-band-on-stools rendition of KISS’s “Beth”, similar to their take on Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” a few weeks back. But at least in that performance, there were, y’know, harmonies and stuff. Here, the Glee boys couldn’t be troubled to throw in even the most rudimentary harmonies, instead singing key lines of the song’s chorus in an emotionally empty unison. It was like Kidz Bop performed by teenagers. Or rather Kidz Bop performed by 28-year-olds playing teenagers.

    But the show, sadly, saved the worst for last. Seriously, what were the writers thinking when they had Rachel and Ms. Cochrane (biological mother and daughter, remember) sing a duet on Gaga’s “Poker Face”? Confoundingly, this was the one musical number in tonight’s episode that did anything new with the song. In this case, it was given a cutesy, playful, old-timey vaudeville melodic treatment that rendered the song virtually unrecognizable – quite a feat given its 18-month pop-cultural omnipresence – while preserving the song’s aggressively graphic sexual innuendoes. It wasn’t just disappointing. It was sort of disgusting. Let me clarify: if this were a duet between Rachel and one of her peers – say, Quinn Fabray, her longtime rival for Fin’s affections – the song would have had a fun, kinky, but ultimately harmless, sexual tension. But the Michele/Menzel duet on the song had an unintended (I hope I hope I hope) incestuous undertone. It was just all kinds of wrong.

    Compounding my disappointment is the fact that there actually is a Lady Gaga song that could have served the scene well, and though it’s not one of The Lady’s hit singles, it’s no obscurity either. She’s performed it in numerous television appearances, and it even makes a cameo in tonight’s Glee episode – in an early scene, Kurt’s got it playing on his stereo. “Speechless”, from The Fame Monster, is a big Elton John-style ballad (which she performed with Elton John at this year’s Grammys) that she says was inspired by her own relationship with her father. The song is a full-throated, gut-wrenching emotional plea pounded out with big arena-rock power chords, and seems made for a moment like the one Rachel had with Ms. Cochrane at the end of tonight’s show – a moment full of conflicting emotions, a moment that was neither hello nor good-bye but rather “see ya ’round, I guess”. Unfortunately, especially after their gorgeous duet on “I Dreamed a Dream” (i.e. that Susan Boyle song from Les Mis) in last week’s episode, I can only imagine what Lea Michele and Idina Menzel could have done with “Speechless”.

    I could say, to the tune of “Speechless”, “I’ll never watch again.” But that would be dishonest. I still love the show. But as tonight’s episode has proven, it can be wildly – wildly – off the mark.

  • Sing Off with Glee

    NBC wanted a singing reality show too so the network dusted off Nick Lachey and decided to reinvent doo-wop and scatting by creating an a capella competition.   This pale imitation of American Idol has a couple of good things going for it and some things positively cringe-worthy.  You’re excused if you missed the flurry of three shows in 3 nights from the same network that brings you prime-time Jay Leno five nights a week.  That’s actually one of the good things.  Someone give me a backbeat and let’s talk about Sing-Off.

    Great Stuff About Sing-Out

    1.  No reality show back stories.     You sing, you mug a little for the camera, you get some judging criticism and you’re off the stage.

    2.  The lightning fast eliminations.   The show started with 8 groups and began cutting mid-show immediately.  That’s a fun concept. I love watching judges cut acts in mid-show.

    3.  Sing-Off is getting tons of song clearances with the winners promises a Sony/Epic contract.  Mind you, no one said anything about promoting that record, but you get a studio, and probably a producer too.

    4.   A couple of the performances have been fun to watch.  A capella isn’t for everyone.  I don’t know if it’s for me, but that’s where the show’s lightning pace helps.

    5.  Watching Shawn Stockman from Boyz II Men in the Simon Cowell role is a treat.  Think some amateur a capella singer is going to argue with Stockman?  And on last night’s show he rocked a bow tie and argyle sweater that still made him look like the coolest guy in the house.

    Not So Great Stuff About Sing-Off

    1.   Ben Folds is my man.  I love Ben Folds.  I have everything — the rarities, the imports, the whole catalog.  He has 100% musical credibility in my eyes. C’mon, he covered Snoop as a tender ballad!  Unfortunately, he’s Randy Jackson on Sing-Off.  I don’t know whether that makes me like Folds less or Jackson more. It’s just weird.

    2.   There are times that the show is trapped in a Glee casting session.  Watching the SoCals do Journey last night was actually pretty darn good until they went straight into Don’t Stop Believin’.    Between the Glee kids, the final episode of The Sopranos and now this, I don’t want to hear this song for another five years.  Amazingly well-crafted song.  Really good album.  Stop playing the song, and Lord, please stop covering the 30 year old track.

    3. The Beelzebubs are a hoot to watch.   They did campy stuff in the Straight No Chaser vein until last night when they did a Who medley (catch it below) that has 3 songs I would pay to download.

    Things I Hate About Sing-Off

    1.  Nicole Sherzinger, the Paula judge, makes Paula Abdul sound like a Rhodes Scholar lecturing on music theory.    Like Paula, Nicole can sing, had a string of hits off an album (although Abdul had bigger hits over a longer period of time), but this is one boring judge.  By the time she offered her opinion a third time, we were yelling at her through the television to shut up.  Alas, she did not.  Money Mike promised us Pussycat Dolls were no more, but I forgot to check if Nicole would continue talking.  Perhaps that’s a New Year’s resolution.

    2.  No one expects Nick Lachey to be Seacrest or Dick Clark.    Maybe next time we roll out Wayne Brady or someone who actually, you know, doesn’t sound like a young John Tesh.

    Bonus Thing I Loved:   Simon and Randy (I mean, Shawn Stockman and Ben Folds) arguing over a cover of Man in the Mirror.  Stockman ripped into the group, told them they were technically sound and missed the emotion of the song, which he happily sang to them.  Folds defended them, told them not to be afraid of the original, and Stockman leaped over the table and beat Folds with a chair calling him a “sissy cracker who makes fun of black people in songs”.    Actually, I made that last up.   What Stockman did was interrupt Folds and chastise the kids again.  He made his point by Slapping. The. Desk. With. Each. Word.    Got it?  Good.   Although I have a Franklin down on Stockman if he and Folds decide to throw hands in the finale.

    The finals are Sunday on NBC.  I do love that lightning fast get-em-outta-here aspect.   Meanwhile, enjoy The Who as sung by a bunch of a capella geeks.  I’m guessing Pete is smiling because it’s pretty darn good.