Word: muzakal
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This wholesale miscasting might have been redeemed in part if the songs and dances possessed ethnic veracity and virility. As it is, the bouzouki music sounds as if it was piped in by Muzak, and the lyrics are insipid. The characteristic tone of Levantine lament is scarcely heard, since music that weeps and words soaked in pain might dismay the theater-party ladies. The dances have the look of old folk dances-any old folk. Greek fire is missing. Zorba danced because words could not contain his vaulting spirit. Bernardi clodhops, while the supporting cast dances by a timetable...
...stiff in voice and movement; I wish he would let himself go more than he does. He obviously loves his stuff, and he would do his audience a favor by sharing this love more. Still, I'd walk a mile just to hear some of his tunes on Muzak, and Hammond's voice is much more than background music...
EDDY ARNOLD: THE ROMANTIC WORLD OF (RCA Victor). Arnold is one of the most successful slickers to tackle a country song. He is invariably sentimental, professional and clean, with a manly but moralizing voice. In this album, he sings more Muzak than bluegrass, including What Now My Love? and that sticky Honey again...
...flute ("With my long, pendulous upper lip, I do better without the flute") and bassoon ("a very romantic instrument"). His musical god is Mozart. Noting that in the composer's day chamber-music playing was as offhand as it is reverential today, Ustinov says: "Mozart provided the Muzak for the period. The Archbishop of Salzburg and other such philistines went on talking through the first performance of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; I'm sure ice cream spilled, dogs barked." After listening to Ustinov, the rest of the recording seems more intimate...
Marie meets up with Spider, a Sunday-school-tongued, sweet-guy Mafioso whose aim in life is to do good by negative actions. Spider halts the installation of Muzak broadcasting in the subways by threatening to unload garbage on the Muzak man's beach. Marie does her bit by joining a major political party and then subverting the party hacks by persuading slum dwellers to organize a rent strike. There are other liberal, square attacks on the illiberal squares, among them the rout of a women's march protesting the establishment of a neighborhood clinic for drug addicts...