Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...children troop into the theater to ask questions of a highly important nature. Their target is the writer Neil Gaiman, whose fantasy book for kids The Wolves in the Walls has just been made into a musical that opened in Glasgow last month and transferred to London's Lyric Theatre for two weeks before going on tour in Scotland next month and England this fall. Gaiman explains to his young fans that the book was inspired by a nightmarish fantasy his daughter Maddy once had. The children are rigorous cross-examiners. "But from where exactly in her bedroom...
...apparently his lyric “Come on baby make sweet love to me”—from “Some Girls’” “Beast of Burden”—didn’t appeal to the morality of those stuffed-shirt mandarins at the Ministry who are most famous for putting the “culture” in Cultural Revolution (before informing on it and packing it off to Upper Manchuria). But perhaps there was a more ideological basis for their concerns...
Perhaps both. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, careened between art-school punk--the song Tick repeated the word tick an ear-curdling 49 times--and vulnerable pop exemplified by the hit Maps, in which O chased after a lover with the lyric "Wait/ They don't love you like I love you." As the rare avant-garde band willing to dip a black-painted toenail into the mainstream, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs attracted a small but protective following that many bands would kill for, but they weren't satisfied. "We don't want to preach...
...songs soar less on writerly sophistication than on Ne-Yo's deftness with a hook and particularly sincere brand of shamelessness. On It Just Ain't Right, he samples '80s legend DeBarge and confesses to an old girlfriend, "I'll be sexing her and I call your name"--a lyric that could have been written by a hundred of his predecessors, but only Ne-Yo would think to deliver it as if it were the world's highest compliment. It's not right, but it's certainly memorable...
...What's surprising is that Goldfrapp (who started out as the wordless howler on Tricky's finest albums) and musical partner Will Gregory also have a sublime pop sensibility. Ooh la la is a sticky homage to Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky and Kylie Minogue's lyric book ("switch me on/ turn me up"). Meanwhile, the synth-rock ballad Number 1 has enough instantly memorable atmospherics to make its title prophetic...