Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are some songs that work. Relative to pop music's more recent trends, Zappa recently observed, "Disco music makes it possible for mellow, laid-back, boring kinds of people to meet each other and reproduce." Marshalling his talents to forge a particularly scathing attack on disco, Frank wrote "Dancin' Fool," which is due to be spun at Boston-Boston any night now. In this song, some lame guy decides he'd rather be a fool and get laughed at than not dance at all. "I got it all together man / With my very own disco clothes,hey! / My shirts...
...Young Radios, who played with a lot of energy, intensity, and spirit of their own. After an instrumental bit and a quasi-reggae tune called Scratching (Ruskin: "say sort-of reggae, don't put down that I said quasi-reggae"), the Radios launched into "Modern Day Leper Man," a song about the Three-Mile Island near-disaster, before finishing up with "South Africa." Because the march was not ready to start on time, they did "South Africa" again, a little stronger the second time...
...were the prime exhibit in an article called "Italians Are Lousy Lovers." Opera Star Siepi has a voice of hurricane force, but he seems to have graduated from the formaldehyde school of acting. Carmelina's dances look like a jogger's nightmare. There are some songs that might bear rehearing-It's Time for a Love Song, One More Walk Around the Garden, I'm a Woman-but in some other musical. -T.E.Kalem
Robert Markowitz's direction, which puts great stock in mushy dissolves, is slightly below the level of a TV perfume commercial. Whenever the action trails off, he brings on a Jimmy Webb theme song that sounds like a cross between You Light Up My Life and I Will Wait for You from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Stars Irving and Ontkean can be vibrant actors, but Markowitz straitjackets them into cutie-pie poses. If Irving comes off the better of the two, it is because of her character's affliction. Somehow silly dialogue does not seem quite so embarrassing...
...also knows how to leaven suspense with satire. The book's grim five-day siege is softened throughout by memorable set-pieces. At one vodka-high point, captive Russian tourists and a bunch of Yale alumni swap song for song, while American wives instruct their captors in the Hustle. In another, bone-weary Alyosha beds a beautiful Intourist guide in Czarina Elizabeth I's Petersburg sled. Outside, in tune to the jouncing springs, a group of toasting Russians rhythmically applauds the lovers' vigor. For such flamboyant scenes and scenery, the saline Salt Mine deserves an ovation...