Word: twains
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There might be far fewer suicides if we did not, as a society, harbor the collective fantasy that Mark Twain plays out so effectively here: that we can attend our own funerals and bask in the sanitized images of ourselves that inevitably emerge after our deaths. If we could get it through our heads that death is the end, the final and irrevocable cessation of consciousness--that there is no grand curtain call where everyone will be sorry and we will be able to revel in having "showed them"--perhaps we would not be so quick to volunteer...
These are just a few of the many alternatives to taxpayer funding. Let's pursue them. Our nation has thrived for most of its existence without federal intrusion into the arts and humanities. That tradition has produced a formidable cultural heritage--Mark Twain, Eugene O'Neill, George Gershwin, James Whistler, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, to name but a few. It is time to restore that tradition. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself...
...seems every country-music juke box has just one song on it these days: Shania Twain's Any Man of Mine. This chirpy feminist anthem, so popular that it has inspired a parody version by a male singer, is generic pop at its most infectious. It has a little festival of familiar tropes: fiddles and steel guitars, drawling humor and tight harmonies, a pounding melody echoing Neil Young's Love Is a Rose and some "yeahs" filched from Ray Charles. There's even a snatch of rap, square-dance style, as it might be rendered by a cheerleader at Buford...
...what catches the ear of any diva devotee is Twain's easy virtuosity. Attend to her reading of this verse: "Any man of mine'll say it fits just right/ When last year's dress is just a little too tight/ And anything I do or say, that'll be O.K./ When I have a bad hair day." The throaty intimacy, the smart selling of each phrase, the whisper of lightly ironic girl talk in "just a little too tight," the clear but not prissy enunciation--these are signs of a true storyteller in song. And since she delivers...
Many female performers, like Twain, compose their own music. Many don't, and are thus handicapped by pop's 30-year tyranny of singer-songwriters. Since the Beatles and Bob Dylan, this is the rule: if you don't write, you're no artist. "Vocal interpreter" used to be an honorable job description--good enough for Crosby, Sinatra, Ella, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, who wrote little of their own material. Now the epithet is often a slur. It suggests a lounge singer crooning Can You Feel the Love Tonight...