Word: ballade
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aside from the more humorous bits, Hair has some other songs that, though lacking in originality, still are quite wonderful in themselves. A girl named Shelley Plimpton, who has a voice laced with clear-toned innocence, sings a ballad about Frank Mills, a boy who "wears his hair tied in a small bow in the back." It seems that Miss Plimpton lent two dollars to Frank after meeting him in front of the Waverley and then never saw him again--and now she loves him. It captures a teeny-bopper's romantic vision with an appropriate unembellished lyricism...
...most of the time, Promises, Promises is about love (and its ups and downs), and the songs run deep. Just before a suicide attempt, Miss O'Hara sings an anguished ballad (that has also been recorded by Dionne Warwick) in which she tells of the difficult man she loves. As the lyrics and music move from the barest hope ("However you are/ Deep down whatever you are/ Whoever you are/ I love you.") to a kind of understated terror ("From moment to moment/ You're two different people/ Someone I know as the man I love...
Fosse the director is sometimes redeemed by Fosse the choreographer. But it is the score however, that remains the show's real strength. Cy Coleman's hip-flip music flows freely from pure ballad (Where Am I Going?) to Bachish parody (Rhythm of Life). Dorothy Fields, 63, won an Oscar for the lyrics of The Way You Look Tonight back in 1936. She may win another for her insistence on writing wittily for the characters instead of warily for the charts...
Radical Fringe. Miller certainly provides plenty of conflict. In a typical hour of programming, he devotes 30 minutes to standard middle-of-the-road pop music: a Frank Sinatra ballad, a Lawrence Welk instrumental and, again and again, Andy Williams singing Battle Hymn of the Republic. Sixteen minutes is given over to smoothly delivered commercials, five minutes to news, and nine minutes to "commentaries on our times." Samples: - On law and order: "I don't agree there's a civil war in this country between blacks and whites. I think there's a great civil war between...
...that youth finds it easier to grapple with the social commentary found in Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" or in the political-protest songs of Bob Dylan than with the more complicated work of poets like Berryman. Or it may be that the poem as ballad is simply coming back into its own. In any case, the music world is experimenting with a revolutionary surrealism, and contemporary songwriters and poets are apparently enriching one another's work. Many folk-rock lyrics stand up as poems, and some poets-Michael Benedikt and Canada's Leonard Cohen among them...