Word: loveã
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Listening to “Here Lies Love?? means first coming to terms with the bizarre reality of this album: David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, and a host of guest singers narrating the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. It’s an alt-rock opera about a woman most well known for the appalling excess of her collection of 3,000 designer shoes. As if that weren’t bewildering enough, it fails to cover the most well-known events of its subject’s life...
...thematic focus in this opener: its blend of processed dance rhythms and orchestral accents serve as a fair synopsis of the album’s sound, and the inspiration for the album’s title—Marcos’s asking that “Here Lies Love?? be inscribed on her tombstone—is immediately explained...
...most of the sprawling 22-song album it feels like the difficulty of painting a sympathetic portrait of a woman who wants herself referred to as “Love?? on her gravestone has been brushed over. But there are exceptions, moments in which Byrne chooses to face Marcos’s dark side: “Order 1081,” for example, describes the declaration of martial law enacted by her husband in 1972. Here Marcos’s character sings “Got to stop all this confusion / Got to wipe away the scar...
...problem with “Here Lies Love?? isn’t any lack of musical or lyrical complexity. If anything, Byrne and Fatboy Slim prove that they could make a fun, complex album—or, for that matter, a rock opera—on just about anything. The problem is that the near complete success of “Here Lies Love?? only begs the question of why a more identifiable, emotionally compelling subject was not chosen. If Byrne set out to prove he could find the artful musicality in a seemingly distasteful figure...
...April 10, Harvard will contribute to promoting the genre by honoring saxophonist-composer James Moody—best known for the composition “Moody’s Mood for Love??—in recognition for a lifetime of creative achievements...