this week i've been working in a lab with a vacuum pump whose mind-numbing whine drives me batty . so i've taken a stack of cds every day, and ripped and encoded each cd to mp3s so other people could listen to them. we have a file server with some extra space (the disk is 80g but the tape backup system can only handle 40g), and we use the extra space for mp3s. so far the collection is about 4 and a half gigabytes.
in the wake of me putting all these mp3s on the file server, one of my cow-orkers jaunts into the lab where i'm working and plops a cd down in front of me, with a great big grin on his face. "these guys are incredible, you'll love 'em --- have you heard of them?"
i look down at the cd... it's a beaten and worn cardboard boxed set type case, all black, with embossed gold writing, containing a book and a standard jewel case.
the name: The Manhattan Transfer Anthology.
i saw these guys on a new year's eve show once several years ago, maybe '91-'93, i don't remember. an old balding guy that looks like mister roper the landlord who wasn't don knotts on "three's company"; a younger guy that looks like the tall fratelli brother; a chick that you only ever see in glamor shots but really isn't that attractive; and another chick with bronx native written all over her face in bitchy letters. they did schmaltzy jazz in four-part acapella harmony. it was horrible.
then again, that was a long time ago, so i could've been mistaken, and the lab tech was standing there with this excited look on his face, and i couldn't insult him to his face with my extreme degree of disgust. and it's more like dislike for a food that you hate because of smell but have never tasted.
so i took the cd, and i put it into my machine's cd player.
in the words of master clark: oh... my... ghod.
you know how mariah carrey has this absolutely incredible voice and awe-inspiring talent, but she sings annoying worthless tripe? that was all i could think about when i heard this stuff.
here you have four incredibly talented vocalists singing incredibly tightly choreographed, perfectly executed, inhumanly precise... shit.
show tunes. fucking show tunes. you can't even call it jazz (which is where they are always catagorized), it's fucking i-really-wish-they'd-picked-me-for-cats showtunes.
i simply can't stomach broadway schmaltz. in small doses it can be funny and ironic, but these people were taking it seriously.
there are several annoying aspects here:
they sing prose. prose. it's like they took a page out of a novel and put it to music. the rhythm, if you can call it rhythm, is bad, with the accented syllables only matching up with the accented notes by accident. the tune they sing could be a charlie parker solo, all over the map, i imagine mind-numbingly difficult to perform with a larynx instead of a horn, but for fuck's sake, with no rhythm *and* no rhyme, there are no redeeming qualities. it doesn't have to rhyme, and it doesn't have to have rhythm (and if you're bob dylan it doesn't really have to have a tune), but when you leave out too much it ceases to be entertaining or even listenable.
and even singing prose would be excusable if the chicks weren't so damned annoying. i hate people who smile while they sing.
there is an overwhelming sense of glam. everything is ridiculously cosmopolitan, even the cowboy numbers. you can imagine them standing on a stage with big broadway curtains and bright broadway footlights in their matching broadway suits, dancing in front of a minimalistic impression of a desert scene that is actually backed up by very deco-looking skyline scenery. the mood of the performance never once fit any of the pieces, and the mood was always the same -- happy, glamorous, fucking broadway musical sameness mood.
and they brag. sure, every small group of people who do something has from the beginning of time bragged shamelessly about how great they are, and i believe that accounts for roughly 75% of the topic matter of most modern music (rap would be a curve buster)... and in the old days, people bragging about how their god was better than everybody else's was a common theme in music. yeah, this is nothing new, why does it bother me? well, simply because they really suck and they have no right to brag. "we sound like a choir of ten but we're really just four brothers!!!" what the fuck kind of bragging is that?! if you're gonna brag, at least pick something worthwhile! (and i swear that they actually sang the multiple exclamation points.)
and they revel in the whole frank sinatra world. remember the scene in spinal tap where there's the limo driver who obviously thinks sinatra hung the moon? these are people like that. they are probably good friends with bobra strissseand. (it's hard to spell the drawl, but you know what i mean.)
i suppose it boils down to the fact that they waste really good talent on annoying tripe.
there you go, another chapter for the book of "things we hate."
Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:43:08 -0500