Word: lyricisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sing. Imagine a bagpipe full of gravel wailing into a nor'easter, and you have some idea of his doleful song and the others that punctuate the evening. "Ay! Ay! Let your bowels be torn from your body because you don't know how to love," goes one typical lyric...
...exactly, indeed. Byrne's band started out in the punk new-wave era but outlasted and outclassed it. His lyric for their 1979 song Life During Wartime has a spooky pertinence that sounds like sci-fi for a perpetual present tense...
...supported by a dubious narrative device. After Savannah tries to kill herself in Manhattan, Tom comes to town and spends the summer talking to his sister's psychiatrist, the beautiful and unhappily married Dr. Susan Lowenstein. He is a charming Southern storyteller who fills his 45-min. hours with lyric and grotesque tales of his low-country family life. He also plays the defensive redneck to Lowenstein's assured Jewish intellectual, a match-up that begins as a clash of stereotypes and ends as beautiful chemistry. But it is never clear who is paying the psychiatrist's $75-a-visit...
...unmarried woman who decides to go ahead and have her baby despite the consequences. "The song points up the fact that somebody needs to help these girls with their painful decision to give life," says Susan Carpenter-McMillan of Feminists for Life. Pro-choice forces are singing back. The lyric doesn't "show what it really means to be 15 and have a baby," says Joan Coombs of Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, the Material Girl has her own troubles these days. Her new movie, Shanghai Surprise, has derailed at the box office and rumors abound that her marriage to Co-Star...
...consumer marketplace, speediness became an ever stronger selling point. The first mass-marketed instant coffee, the G. Washington brand, appeared in 1909. The next year Florist's Transworld Delivery started sending flowers by wire. The spirit of hustle permeated pop culture, from the World War II-era song lyric, "Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry," to the Road Runner cartoon character who always leaves Wile E. Coyote in the dust...