Word: anthem
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...error occurred while processing this directive] dabbled in writing scores for theater, film and ballet, and directed a documentary about Brazil's candomblé religion. Since then, his work has embraced public art, sound installations, sculpture, drawing and - somewhat implausibly for the man who co-wrote the underground anthem Psycho Killer - embroidery. It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that Byrne is also an accomplished photographer. The subject and location of his next photo exhibition is the capital of the Philippines, Manila - a place that is hardly ever on the radar of the artistic élite. "Photographs for Manila...
Most of the album is fine, if a little boring, taken song by song. The problem with the album as a whole is that every song aspires to be an anthem. Nearly every track ends with twice the volume, three times the vocals, and five times the instruments it started out with. Piling on the drama time after time, however, just becomes fatiguing and a little silly, especially when it’s achieved each time simply by adding more and more of everything...
...Voting in primaries! Dirty looks from other nationalities! But the truth is that right up until I became an American, I was an Extraordinary Alien (Really, that's what my green card was called.) I could work and live in America and not have to stand for the national anthem. Ah, those were the days. You got to go on the short line at the airport but you didn't have to own up to being the same nationality as Mark Foley. Plus I probably had the same type of green card as Charlize Theron...
...Flying Circus ("Eric the Half-a-Bee," "The Lumberjack Song," "Dennis Moore") and their films. Idle's blithely idiotic ditty, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," helped make Life of Brian that rare Crucifixion movie you could hum your way out of. And the Jones-Palin anthem from The Meaning of Life ("Every sperm is sacred / Every sperm is great / If a sperm is wasted / God gets quite irate") could be choraled today by half the U.S. Senate. These musical interludes set the Monty-men firmly in the tradition of the English variety show, as well as making...
...real thing, a straightforwardly banal inspirational? Which is not to say that a song can't also be what it makes fun of - that a faux-inspirational song can't be inspirational and incorrigibly, addictively, sing-alongable. Remember that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" became the anthem for English football clubs. That's the lovely thing about parody: nothing is so silly that someone won't take it seriously...