Word: balladeer
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Granted, Lifetime's highest-rated series ever, which takes place on a Stateside base, never sets a dusty foot in the combat zone. It's a guilty pleasure first, soapy and clichéd; there's rarely an emotional moment without a big-eyed kid or a Jude Johnstone ballad to cue the waterworks. There are affairs, alcoholism and girl-talk sessions in which the characters chat about nicknaming their "lady parts" ("my fine china," for instance...
...behind is memorable phrases ("It can't all be wedding cake/ It can't all be boiled away") and choruses that keep your hips moving. Anything that gets in the way of velocity has been jettisoned. The closer, Black like Me, is as near as Spoon gets to a ballad, but even it steps on the gas halfway through. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga doesn't have any tricks up its sleeve, and it won't make you a better person. But give it a chance, and it'll work wonders nonetheless...
...bloated industrial-Pat Benatar knockoffs ("Haunted," "Don't Waste My Time," the single "Never Again") that dominate the album. When they aren't in that mode, Clarkson and her new, hardly avant-garde producer David Kahne (Bangles, Sugar Ray) dabble with proven formulae: They know a solemn ballad must start with a lone strummed guitar ("Sober") and that a horn section and a throaty delivery can lend a bit of earthy Christina Aguilera cred ("Yeah...
...turns out, though, "Rise Up" is far more despicable as an idea than as a song. It's a ballad of course, and opens with a sample of a female Tech student saying how the school must be known not for what happened but for overcoming what happened. It also features the inevitable whispering choir whose volume rises in the chorus and gets punctuated by a cymbal clap...
...trunkful of classic pop - Rodgers and Hart's"Manhattan," Dietz and Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" - I found a few surprises: the 1952 "Guess Who I Saw Today," a quietly devastating ballad of Cheever-like yearning and betrayal, and "Pack Up Your Sins," a Berlin number that was new to me, and wittier than the songs of his I know from this period (1922). Just reading some of the lyrics, you can feel the rhythm and the revelry: "Pack up your sins and go to the Devil in Hades...