Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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OPULAR MUSIC serves as the timepiece of our decade, measuring attitudinal changes just as a watch compartmentalizes the day. A gaudy but serviceable Timex wristband adequately registers the influence of dull disco and pathological punk. But shoved into a corner as a well-burnished antique, a grandfather clock represents the dignified sobriety of the protest song. With the re-emergence of topical songwriter Tom Paxton, protest music avoids becoming totally anachronistic. On his latest album, New Songs From the Briarpatch, Paxton proves that the '70s cannot excape untouched by barbed balladry...
...magazine would be harmless, indeed dull, if its collection of photo-journalistic essays did not purport to be art. First of all, as in every issue, there are full-page photographs of children of the famous. This month Elizabeth Taylor's 16-year-old daughter Maria Burton and 22-year-old son Christopher Wilding grace pages six and seven. They were photographed by Firooz Zahedi, with whom young Christopher plans to open a photography studio soon in New York. Both of Taylor's children are good-looking, both seem deliberately posed to provoke comparison with Beautiful Mama, yet neither...
...some of the staff may be more playacting than real. And yet there has always been around the Carter camp the thin feeling that they are doing the country a great favor to come to work at the White House. That is a state of mind that tends to dull the nerve ends...
...plane, fight a war, shoot a badman, pull off a sting, impersonate a big cheese in business or politics. Men are presumed to be interesting. A female can play a wife, play a whore, get pregnant, lose her baby, and, um, let's see ... Women are presumed to be dull...
Still, it works. In the end the cabaret style that causes Swados so much difficulty also saves her. The weak points fade into the blackouts, while the mood keeps building with each successive piece. The music--calypso, raga, and jazz tunes especially--dull the overly critical senses with their inebriating optimism. You have to smile after Nightclub Cantata. You have a stringer full of speckled trout on a sunny day. Who cares about the big one that got away...