Word: balladeer
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...grand night for singing. Bob Dylan wrapped his angry adenoids around the Gershwin ballad Soon, and Madeline Kahn, Maureen McGovern and Julia Migenes ganged up gorgeously on Someone to Watch Over Me. Last week's gala tribute to George and Ira at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provided a pretty fine evening of dance as well, with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Harold Nicholas, Gregg Burge and the Mutt-and-Jeff tandem of Tommy Tune and Drew Barrymore finding new steps for some unforgettable old melodies. Nor would anyone think of shooting the piano players. Michael Tilson Thomas opened with Rhapsody in Blue...
...character try to explain themselves through Davenport's musical soliloquies, which come in two flavors: happy, upbeat, major-key ditties, and sad, brooding, minor-key ballads. All the songs have instantly forgettable melodies and lyrics, although some of the ballad melodies are mildly interesting for their complexity. The manic Cider gets the best of these, but his violent rampage during the song makes the audience laugh, destroying the song's effect...
...Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Burn!, brimming with political conscience and passion. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, a witchy reverie of evil and redemption. Terrence Malick's edgy elegy to heartsick heartland America, Days of Heaven, took on the resonance of some dark folk ballad. And all Sergio Leone's pop-folk epics, from A Fistful of Dollars to Once upon a Time in America, have had their mythic dimensions deepened by Morricone themes. The music and the filmmaking are reciprocal: each makes the other indelible...
Similarly, "Wrong In The Charts" uses low vocal distortion to offset some Beatle-esque harmonies, and "San Quentin, CA" muddles a country ballad with a batch of terrific grunge. The best tune here is "Loch Ness Monster," an outlandish love song directed at Scotland's most famous anachronistic ichthyosaurus, more commonly known as "Nessie...
...what will happen in this world if we have to die when we make love? AIDS is the century's evil." That lament, from a pop ballad that is sweeping west Africa, probably seems overdrawn to most Americans. Not so for Josephine Najingo, a 28-year-old mother of five who lives in the dusty Ugandan trading center of Kyotera, near the Tanzanian border. For her, the lyrics describe a bitter reality. Josephine is dying because she had sexual intercourse with her late husband. A prosperous trader, he had contracted "slim disease," a painful wasting away of body tissues...