Word: droning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When cartoon-show creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera strained their imaginations (ever so slightly) to picture the family of the future, it was a pretty simple exercise. Take your basic nuclear family: the modern, shop-happy housewife, the corporate-drone dad, two rambunctious kids and a dog; house them in a spacy-looking split-level; power their car with atomic energy; equip their home with a robot maid; and, whammo, you had it -- a space-age Cleaver family named The Jetsons...
...Faith No More's targets are the rich and powerful. In the darkly humorous RV, Patton plays to the hilt a fortysomething couch potato who has made a career of failure. He narrates the sorry soliloquy in a gravelly, hangover-from-hell drone to a bluesy piano and guitar accompaniment. "Besides listening to my belly gurgle/ Ain't much else to do," he groans, then concludes by mumbling, "I think it's time I had a talk with my kids/ I'll just tell 'em what my daddy told me/ You ain't ever gonna amount to nothin...
Irish pop music is the art of the drone: the mournful monotone of Enya, U2 and Sinead O'Connor, singing elegies to the millennium. Now comes the Irish quartet CLANNAD (whose lead singer, Maire Brennan, is Enya's sister) and an album, Anam, that has all the right career moves: a duet with U2's Bono, a song from the hit movie Patriot Games. The group merits a listen. Brennan's soprano keenings, in English and Gaelic, are variously backed by cool, Sergio Mendes-style harmonies, a bluesy sax, and a guitar's banshee wailing. But in the tune Harry...
...said was right. It is that Quayle represents an Administration that has only rarely supported the programs that actually promote strong families -- everything from child care and parental leave to infant nutrition, Head Start, apprenticeship training, gun control and -- well, the list is almost endless. In a callous drone, the less fortunate have heard a single Republican note for 12 years: "You're on your own." Quayle's complaint may be smart politics -- the White House is convinced that the November election will be a three-way battle in which core conservatives will determine the outcome...
...until The Drovers find a new song-writerand a new singer, wish them "the luck of theIrish" and let them drone on. Phoebe Cushman