Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (04/06/87)
Really-From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu
First, a special thankyou to L-H Joe Turner.
IED'll be looking forward to your gift.
He already has a few of the items you listed,
(the German LPs, live "After the F." and
"Walk Through the F.", for example), but
the vast majority is new to him.
KT News:
^^^^^^^^
The Ferry Aid single is in L.A. shops,
and herewith is a description blessedly devoid of
the kind of sentimental drivel that attended the event itself;
a review that has not been affected by the sanctimonious,
a-critical thinking that the ferry disaster seems to
have inspired in the majority of musical critics.
"Let It Be" begins with the
original McCartney vocal superimposed
over a typically sleazy 80's pop arrangement. This is followed
by Boy George's slimy lounge-act vocal; which in turn
is succeeded by an increasingly chaotic and tasteless
assault of British pseudo-soulsters (why do British black
singers have to assume American black idioms, accents,
pronunciations and vocal embellishments, all of which are a denial
of their own vastly different cultural heritage?; what is wrong
with a British black sounding British?). Then there is
a smarmy guitar-ridden instrumental bridge and a wildly
over-blown chorus.
KTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK
TK KT
KT And then, folks, in the middle of all this JUNK, time TK
TK blushes, delays: and Kate sings two lines. She uses KT
KT her lowest register, and sings in an understated, precise TK
TK English style that communicates volumes of emotion with a KT
KT minimum of words and sound. It has nothing -- ABSOLUTELY TK
TK NOTHING -- to do with the rest of the record. KT
KT TK
KTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK
Her vocal ends, and is succeeded by a predictable
unison chorus of monumental seaminess that could not
be more out of context with Kate's
contribution than a volley of cannon-shot.
The haste and bad taste with which this enterprise was
undertaken is everywhere apparent except in Kate's tiny
musical aside. Her distance from the recording as a whole is
very clearly audible -- right down to the absence, even,
of the most rudimentary drum-fill to lead the music out
of her tiny, poignant reliquary back into the diseased,
slobbering excess of the climax and denouement -- that's how much
an afterthought Kate's part was in the foul, musically syphilitic
mind of Boy George. Her part could have made eloquent sense of a large
part of his concoction had it immediately succeeded the embalmed
extract from McCartney's original. But, obviously, Boy George
had already determined that that honoured position on the totem
pole should go to himself. As a result the progression from Beatle
to Boy is one from writ to rotten; whereas a direct move from McCartney
to Kate might have brought into beautiful, microcosmic focus
the true progression of British music from Beatles to Bush.
Instead, Kate is thrown into a mire of yUcKy contemporary pap
that does the rest of the musicians a disservice by emphasizing their
hopeless inferiority as it does her a dishonour by soiling the sacred
garment of her music in the diseased puddle of their sonic offal.
Nonetheless, Kate's two little lines in Ferry Aid's "Let It Be" are
like two glittering, holy eyes shining the light of perfeKTion from the
center of the entire dirty storm, and more than redeeming the otherwise
sordid enterprise. Strongly recommended.
-- Andrew Marvick