Word: popped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They linger in the middle-age memory like invisible friends from childhood--a wisp of melody, an easy rhythm, a naive lyric that sounded like poetry then and rings with poignance today. You hear the old pop songs, and suddenly it's 1960; you are yanked back to the spot where they first assaulted you in all their potent mystery. "When I first heard Ray Charles' Hit the Road, Jack," says Tom Hanks, who was five in the summer of '61, "I literally thought it was about some guy hitting the road with his fist. I remember sitting...
...pop songs of the '60s, before music became all art and attitude, have never disappeared; these ghosts do their haunting on oldies stations and TV commercials, in elevators and showers. A 4-CD set of Burt Bacharach's sophisticated pop ballads has been issued in Britain. The decade's prime confectors are appealingly, exhaustively available on the 10-hr. video version of The Beatles Anthology--more than twice the length of last year's TV special, with many more archival performances of the Fab Four's hits--as an appetizer for the final Anthology CD set, due in late October...
...gold isn't good enough, now there's a heap of pretty paste imitations. Allison Anders' Grace of My Heart, a fictionalized biopic of songwriter Carole King, has '60s-type tunes for girl groups and beach boys. Hanks' new film That Thing You Do!, about the Wonders, an imaginary pop group from Erie, Pennsylvania, features songs in the style of the Beatles, the Ronettes, the Ventures, Jan and Dean, even a little bogus Bacharach. And the ultimate British rip-off group, the Rutles, are cashing in on the Anthology with their own Archaeology CD--satire you can hum along with...
...Hanks and Anders films have big problems as nostalgic history and satisfying dramas. But the music is first-class evocation. The essential artifact for both works is not the movie but the album. Coincidentally, each film's sound track was developed the same way: a dozen or so pop composers--some veterans of the '60s like Bacharach, Lesley Gore (It's My Party) and King's ex-husband Gerry Goffin, others so young they weren't alive when the Brill Building was the Pentagon of pop--wrote tunes with the bounce and pang of the old stuff. As Gore...
There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric...