Tuesday, October 30, 2012

New Catty Micro-Reviews

Something I find particularly fun to write is the one-sentence review. Must be my Canadian sense of humor...

Here are some previous posts, starting in the second month of this blog:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/07/catty-micro-reviews.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/07/more-catty-micro-reviews.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/10/catty-micro-reviews-new-edition.html

Now don't tell me those aren't funny!

I'm shocked to see that I haven't done an edition of the micro-reviews in over a year. So here goes. A little different this time. I'm just going to pick some composers/musicians and deliver a one-sentence comment. To start off, I'll plagiarize from myself in a recent post where I described Rihanna's oeuvre as:
every music video by Rihanna I have seen has seemed like a brassiere commercial with an annoying soundtrack
Let's try some others:


  • Handel: Bach with 73% of the counterpoint removed
  • Shakira: Hips don't lie, but they do tend to be the most interesting part of the music video
That's ok, but we really need some clips, don't we? Let's go to YouTube and see what we can find.


The last time I listened to Jason Mraz I said he sounded like the love-child of Bob Marley (for the reggae-style music) and Donovan (for the sweet singing and lyrics). Yep, he still does.


This is Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, better known as Kid Cudi. This song did very well on the charts and this video has over 83 million views, but I can't help thinking that they spent five minutes on the music, a couple of hours on the lyrics and weeks and weeks developing the fantasy women.

This is Rebecca Stella. It's as if Lady Gaga decided to hire the special effects guy from Alien and a fashion consultant from Brides Magazine.

The next several clips I went to randomly, by typing in a single letter in the search field, were all so, uh, explicit that I couldn't find anything humorous to say about them. Some of them made the Kid Cudi clip seem refined!

2 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

twenty years later and I still can't stand Mraz.

I hear more as a pop bro purveyor of patter songs a la Gilbert & Sullivan. That whole strain of songwriting is just endlessly rewriting "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

But then I admit I don't quite get the Marley love a lot of people have. I am not against reggae as such. I have albums by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Judy Mowatt, but Marley just never "clicked" for me.

Bryan Townsend said...

When I listen to pop music these days it feels like I am visiting an alien planet.