From: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org (lucy-list-digest) To: lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: lucy-list-digest V4 #230 Reply-To: lucy-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-lucy-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk lucy-list-digest Sunday, October 6 2002 Volume 04 : Number 230 In this issue: [lucy-list] while awaiting more reviews [lucy-list] NYT quote of the day [lucy-list] little did I know ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2002 22:55:57 -0400 From: "Benay Bubar" Subject: [lucy-list] while awaiting more reviews I am getting impatient for the last of the UK reviews to roll in...but thankful for the fact that they have been promised. In the meantime, I am wandering the earth in leather-jacketed bliss (well, not much...it has been way too hot for the leather jacket lately...but I WOULD be if it were cooler). And tonight I am watching Austin City Limits on TV and it features Bonnie Raitt singing I Can't Make You Love Me If You Don't. Which reminds me that her Nick of Time was the first CD I ever owned, my first year of college. I wasn't a huge Bonnie Raitt fan and didn't even own a CD player at the time, but someone had given it to me, I think...and one of my first experiences with parody (aside from the takeoff of Bye Bye Birdie I wrote in high school---Bye Bye Birdseed, with chicken-related themes throughout, I'm afraid!) was when some college acquaintances transformed the above-mentioned Bonnie Raitt song into You Can't Make Me Love You If I Don't---their version got pretty sadistic, but it warmed me up to the parody concept. So I've just figured out that if I go back far enough, I can pretty much blame the laying of the cornerstones of my current musical universe on Bonnie Raitt. Which has little to do with Lucy, but I haven't had any Lucy experiences lately aside from the great BBC interview with air guitar conversation! Still, I have been giving some thought to something a friend who has seen Lucy only once, not entirely of her own volition, said to me recently---to the effect that Lucy is a very good singer, but it's too bad her music is so depressing. And I thought---Lucy? Depressing? And then I stopped to consider the lyrics of my current favorite crop of Lucy songs---The Tide, Still Life, Written on the Back of His Hand...hmmm... Perhaps I've mentioned this before, but once when I was home from college, years ago, my mother came into my room in rare familial-bonding mode and decided she was going to understand me by Appreciating My Music, and proceeded to read the lyrics to the songs on some of the tapes I had (Indigo Girls, among others I recall...these were pre-Lucy days) and thereby decided that I was probably quite seriously disturbed and wanted to know if my musical selections signified that there was Anything I Wanted to Discuss. And I tried to argue that I actually ENJOYED the music, it made me HAPPY...to no avail. I think my mother looked at me oddly for weeks thereafter. Anyway, I've come to realize that if my poor mother ever got her hands on Lucy's lyrics, she'd probably be no less concerned...probably MORE so, in fact. It would be easy to present to my mother the lyrics of my favorite Dar Williams songs---You're Aging Well, When I Was a Boy---as they have a generally inspiring, uplifting tone, and conflicts pretty much get sorted out by the end. And yes, Lucy does have some non-depressing songs, mostly the romantic ones (Ten Year Night, Just You Tonight), and all right, This Is Mine is pretty positive too...but there's nothing much under the category of Catchily Inspiring and Uplifting. In pretty much all of my favorite Lucy songs, there's either anger throughout (as in the highly cathartic Angry Trilogy), or else things start out badly, then become vaguely worse, and there is at best a hope for understanding and growth by the end, but not really any foray into actual HAPPINESS. Optimist that I generally like to think I am, it seems kind of weird that these are the songs toward which I gravitate. But in fact I've never considered Lucy's music at all depressing...and though perhaps it should have been obvious, it's funny to realize that some people COULD find it so! I wonder what this says about me... Enough for one evening...waiting eagerly for those last UK reports... Benay ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2002 23:41:27 -0400 From: "Benay Bubar" Subject: [lucy-list] NYT quote of the day From a story on Britney Spears's attempt to reinvent herself as a mature adult singer, spoken by the editor in chief of Elle Girl: "They [the fans] are really tired of that sausage-casing look, that busting out all over the place, and they are very anti-midriff right now...It's a Britney backlash." Aside from how utterly entertaining it is to see "anti-midriff" used as a political-sounding adjective ("Pro-midriff activists clashed today with anti-midriff demonstrators in front of City Hall..."), I have but one comment: Should Britney's "new image" turn out to involve leather (a.k.a. the "seal" look) and/or the preppy/hippie look, WE will all know who got there first! Benay ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 00:02:45 -0400 From: "Benay Bubar" Subject: [lucy-list] little did I know OK, this is going to sound totally contrived, but I swear I was in the middle of the Britney Spears article when I wrote that last post, and then I shut off the computer and went to finish the story and looked further down the page...and there was a picture captioned: "Britney Spears's leather look, at the MTV Video Music Awards in August, drew negative reviews." And there's Britney in this weird leather hat and a skintight leather dress...honestly, I didn't watch the MTV Video Music Awards, so I really had no idea! I'm not surprised THAT leather look got negative reviews for Britney...I mean, I'm sure she was trying not to imitate Lucy TOO obviously, but that hat and dress were kind of bizarre...she should've just stuck with a nice leather jacket and pants if she was gonna go for leather! Unfortunately, that still wouldn't have helped make her a good singer... Benay really, really going to bed now ------------------------------ End of lucy-list-digest V4 #230 ******************************* This has been a posting from the Lucy Kaplansky mail list digest To unsubscribe send mail to Majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe lucy-list-digest" in the body of the message