Agreed. But a couple of things:
1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.
2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans. He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.
While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.
In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.
"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"
#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...
When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.
Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.
Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.
It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)
A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...
Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).
The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.
"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"
#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.
Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying. Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.
"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."
