Word: ballads
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...like They Didn't Believe Me is to realize how elegantly it obeys the laws of melody and mathematics: each succeeding phrase is both surprising and inevitable. In that one song, written for the 1914 show The Girl from Utah, Kern virtually created the prototype for the modern American ballad. From that moment (when his music was already entrancing a couple of teenagers named Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin) to this (when Composers Stephen Sondheim and Milton Babbitt have written appreciations of his work), Kern's revolution has continued unsilenced. It should last for another hundred years, and maybe...
...practice at such radical departures. He not only shaped current American popular music, he changed it irrevocably. Baffled editorial writers and swamped reporters, trying to sort sense from the maelstrom of the late '60s and early '70s, would fall back on a famous refrain from Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. Now don't all sing at once: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones...
...million copies in domestic sales, with 2.5 million more worldwide. Her singles have found 6.3 million buyers in the U.S. (or the same buyer 6.3 million times, exasperated parents may feel). Like a Virgin has sold 1.9 million copies as a single in the U.S., and the ballad Crazy for You recently dislodged USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa's We Are the World single from the top of the charts, though it has now slipped to sixth...
Depeche Mode rips the guts out of Modern Love, and the Modern Love Ballad, by distilling it into its purest form. With a voice oozing tenderness, Alan Wilder sings...
...only study working-class types appear on their album covers. Four uncharismatic youths from Manchester fronted by an ascetic-looking vegetarian with a voice like a choir boy crossed with Slim Whitman, the Smiths burst out in '84 with music that breathed new life into the pop ballad. Vocalist Morrissey (maybe soon singers will call themselves just Sam or Mary) possesses a voice that floats in and around Johnny Marr's guitar riffs in elegant, almost improvised anxiety. Morrissey's lyrics express the range of human emotions from suicidal depression to mild unhappiness; he's the ugly...