[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 14: A Song No one Would Expect Me to Love

Or maybe, after seeing the first 13 days of these, it won’t be so surprising that I adore “One of Us” by Joan Osborne. Or maybe, if you know me pretty well and have read my blog for a while, it’s not so shocking to you that I don’t share the rabid atheist, anti-theist beliefs of many of my political compatriots. (I will freely and gleefully mock and deride the cruelly un-Christ-like behavior and personages of demagogues and loons like Kirk Cameron, Tony Perkins, Miles McPherson, Maggie Gallagher, Jim Garlow, William Donohue, and their hideous friends. Donahue, who is an opponent to free thought, compassion, love, and anything remotely Jesus-like, attacked the song for being anti-Catholic, though he couldn’t explain how referencing the Pope talking to God on the telephone would be considered anti-Catholic. That said, I don’t have any need to be anything but appreciative and amazed and just a tad jealous of the non-fundie faithful.) And this song makes the quest for the belief in God into a searching, questioning, and deeply populist process, which as an agnostic and someone often told he’s going to Hell, I find quite endearing, even moving. Also, the tune has a hook and a melody that make it singalong-in-the-car awesome.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 13: A Guilty Pleasure

I think it may seem weird, even hypocritical, of me to trash KISS in my previous post for being so commercial, so pandering towards a tasteless demographic and then declare that “Tell Him” by Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand is my guilty pleasure. But when I hear Dion sing, I completely believe her. I know she’s cheesy, and I know her songs were written by committees that got their instructions from focus groups and corporate suits, but Dion could sing the phone book and I’d believe that every number mattered. The woman owns her cheese like no one else. (Check out the great little book on her cheesiness, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.) She’s an unabashed dork, and the video for this song, which features all of her kooky facial expressions and jerky neck twitches, warms my dorky soul. As for Barbra, I don’t feel guilty for loving her at all. The woman is unarguably one of the greatest singers of the last 50 years, just as Dion is in her own special way, and when they harmonize, it’s like butter.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 12: A Song From A Band I Hate

There are single artists that I dislike a great deal — sampling-crazed hacks like Jason Derulo, or politically abhorrent creeps like Toby Keith — but most of the bands that irritate me just irritate me. Nickelback’s almost creepily catchy milquetoast really grates on me, and the Black Eyes Peas have create some of the most cynical, over-sampled and misguided pop songs of the last 10 years. (“I Gotta Feeling“? “The Time (Dirty Bit)“? “Don’t Phunk With My Heart“? Horrid.) But the former band is just boring, and the latter created “The Boogie That Be” and “My Humps,” a song so awesome that they get a Get Out Of Jail Free card for a long time. I think when it comes to crimes against music, KISS is the most villainous to me. What Bing Crosby did to jazz and Pat Boone to early rock and roll, KISS did to 70s hard rock. They took everything that was edgy, interesting, and subversive about Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones and packaged it for the teen-aged masses with about as much authenticity as a Backstreet Boys reunion tour. I went to a KISS concert in the late 90s, and it was fun in the way that Michael Bay movies can be fun. Pretty lights! Loud music! Screaming fans! Here’s a video of one of their wretched double entendre anthems, “Lovegun.”

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 11: A Song From My Favorite Band

A “30 Day Song Challenge” blurb isn’t enough to — isn’t the right place for — describing my love and awe for Arcade Fire, which is arguably the greatest rock band in the world right now. Not only is their music gorgeous, complex, inventive, and yet still populist, it is also relevant, in the best sense of the word. They make music about something, not just love, sex, and revenge, like most bands you find of pop and rock radio; they create work that deals with politics, war, sprawl, ennui, hope, and want. They are the heirs of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and REM. And they’ve probably recorded 10 or 15 songs for the ages, but the one the gets me in the gut is the great anti-war anthem “Intervention,” from Neon Bible. The first video is a fan-made video that uses clips from The Battleship Potemkin and the second is the band performing live in Paris.

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Everything Must Go, but you should stay at home

Most of the time, I love Will Ferrell. I think Anchorman and Talladega Nights are two of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I want him to do well, and I wanted Everything Must Go to be good. But it was not. Here’s the opener of my review:

The world is supposed to care about Everything Must Go because it stars Will Ferrell in a dramatic role. He’s trying to be taken seriously as a serious actor, to follow the route of great comedians who became great actors, guys like Tom Hanks and Robin Williams. Jim Carey tried to do it, and while he gave two stunningly great dramatic performances, in The Truman Show and Man in the Moon, he’s nevertheless been relegated to his trademark Jerry-Lewis-on-crack shtick.

Ferrell refuses to succumb to Carey-itis, even after the box office failures of his dramatic turns in Stranger Than Fiction and Winter Passing. He continues to try to convince audiences that he can do more than make them laugh playing arrogant buffoons like Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby and George W. Bush.

I’m not convinced.

Read the rest of the review on the LGBT Weekly website or pick up a print edition anywhere gays are served.

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