Summer’s nearly over (gross), and I’m wondering what you’ve read, watched, and listened to lately. Is a movie you saw in early summer still occupying a major chunk of your consciousness? Any recent YouTube discoveries? What are you singing in the shower?
Here. I’ll start.
(And no, not every item on my list involves this trollop.)
1. Bugsy Malone (1976)
In July I watched a wild movie called Bugsy Malone. It takes place in the 1920s, and Fat Sam Staccetto, mafia boss and owner of Fat Sam’s Grand Slam Speakeasy, is in mourning for the loss of Roxy, one of his best soldiers. He suspects the man to blame is Dandy Dan, a rival mafioso who’s been moving in on Sam’s money making rackets. As the war heats up between Fat Sam and Dandy Dan, Bugsy Malone, a boxing promoter, meets Blousey, a gal tryna make it in the city as a singer. Will they get together? Or will Bugsy get sucked into Fat Sam’s crime ring?
If the plot of Bugsy Malone sounds like something you’ve seen a million times, its execution is what makes it unlike anything else: the entire cast is made up of child actors. A baby faced Scott Baio plays the titular Bugsy, while other kids deliver deadpan performances as gangsters, boxers, and nightclub performers (including a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a chanteuse named Tallulah). There are also 10 original songs by Paul Williams, some of which he sings himself while the young actors pantomime.
Written and directed by Alan Parker (the dude who did The Commitments), Bugsy Malone is not quite a kids’ movie and not quite a gag. But! It’s fun.
2. This Video of Ann-Margret
If Ann-Margret were a sexy young starlet today, people on the internet would call her “cringe.” A google search of her name would auto-complete to “Ann-Margret crazy eyes.” This wouldn’t only happen because she’s a woman (which is often reason enough for the internet to hate someone), but because she’s a woman who isn’t afraid to look a little bit…crazed.
I remember the confusion I felt about 10 or so years ago when I woke up to discover everyone—quite suddenly—hated Anne Hathaway. No one I knew who hated Anne Hathaway could give me a reason why she was so hatable…other than “she tries too hard.” I also remember when people started to sour on Jennifer Lawrence after years of meme-ing her every move. When she tripped and fell on her way inside the Dolby Theater at the 2014 Oscars, Jared Leto—a man who’s never, ever tried too hard, no ma’am, not him, not even one time—made some comment about how her whole personality must be an act.
But…aren’t performers kinda prone to putting on a bit of an act? Isn’t that what makes them fun to watch? And even though I don’t believe Jennifer Lawrence tripped and fell on purpose to win even more attention during a live Oscars broadcast, don’t we all kinda want her to be on her BIGGEST behavior?
Personally, I love seeing a graceful looking woman laugh her ass off when she trips and falls. I love when an A-List actress outs herself as a try-hard theater nerd. I love watching Ann-Margret’s expressions change as she performs the hell out of "Bill Bailey” in ways I couldn’t possibly predict.
Be on your BIGGEST behavior, everyone. All the cool kids are doing it.
3. Just Around Midnight: Rock And Roll And The Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton
I love rock and roll. I love its uniquely American sound, and I’m fascinated by its uniquely American politics (not to mention the complicated, inescapable, and ongoing impact of this trollop).
I’ve read a lot of books about early rock and roll lately, including a fantastic book by a fella named Jack Hamilton called Just Around Midnight: Rock And Roll And The Racial Imagination. When white lefties talk about racism in rock and roll, we often focus on the balls-out-Pat Boone-bigotry of the 1950s. It took reading Hamilton’s book for me to learn about the unique brand of segregation enforced by the liberal folk revivalists of the 1960s.
We all know people like the folk revivalists. For them, “[proximity] to African American culture was key to both political conscience and musical purity.” (IE: “I’m not racist — I love the blues!”) Of course, their collective “political conscience” was oddly clean for a group of white people who shared this definition of “authentic” Black music: “primordial and premodern, definitely divorced from the market and ambitions of mobility.” This meant “authentic” Black music always sprang from suffering, and “authentic” Black musicians never aimed for commercial success. (The folk revivalists’ obsession with spirituals inspired me to scribble “I’m uncomfortable” in more than one margin.) Naturally, this meant one thing for the popular rock and rollers of the 1950s (including those who were, in fact, Black): “The folk revival also boasted a typically fierce disdain for commercialism, and rock and roll music was often a target of scorn […] What many white revivalists could not accommodate was a vision of Black music as fluid and present: to do so would have exposed the contradictions of their intermingled musical and political ideology. The notion of Black music being a product of the same market system as white music might suggest that Mississippi John Hurt had more in common with Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra than he did with with the anonymous authors of the spirituals, and such a suggestion did not conform to certain expectations of authenticity.”
(TLDR: white liberals who believed in Civil Rights still felt comfortable defining the rules and limitations of Blackness. Let’s please be brave enough to admit that such behavior is not a thing of the past.)
Eventually, when Bob Dylan became a symbol of rock’s male genius and everyone forgot about dancing, “rock” lost its “roll” and became important: “By placing the burden of ‘serious’ rock music squarely on Dylan’s shoulders, the music thus became naturalized as the birthright of white men, a development that radically reracialized rock and roll as a cultural form. Heard from this context, the snare hit that opens ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in 1965 sounds less like an explosion into possibility than the opening sounds of a reactionary ideology of white heroism and intellectual supremacy, a move that was no fault of Dylan’s own but was enabled by his symbolic capacity as a young American white male in this period.”
This stuff left me spinning for weeks and only continued when I read Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Biography. As the writer & composer of such songs as “Stand by Me,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” and “Hound Dog,” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller often collaborated with Black artists, including The Coasters, The Drifters, and Big Mama Thornton. When I read the following statement from Jerry Leiber, I nearly shot into space:
“The major labels had little interest in what they considered heavily ethnic music. Sure, Louis Armstrong was on Decca along with Ella Fitzgerald and the Mills Brothers, but the vast majority of Black artists, especially the ones we considered all-the-way authentic, were on small labels…”.
I don’t think I’ll ever lose interest in rock and roll; I think my interest will only intensify as I continue to listen and learn.
Man, there’s a lot to unpack.
Man, I’m gonna need a bigger bookshelf.
4. This video of Little Richard and Tom Jones
I found this video the other day and fully flipped my lid when I learned Tom Jones hosted his own show, This Is Tom Jones, from 1969-1971. A full episode (that I have not yet watched at the time of this posting) can be found here. From scrubbing through it, I can see it contains a lot of singing, a sketch featuring Anne Bancroft, and an appearance by the Ace Trucking Company, a comedy troupe I originally learned about via The Mike Douglas Show (a veritable treasure trove of time warp material).
I promise I am not sharing this clip to further dunk on white people—I just need you to please, please watch Little Richard leave Tom Jones in the dust. The Welshman can sing—I won’t deny him that—but this performance makes me feel like I’m watching a man duet with a Muppet. (I recommend you check out the entire video on YouTube as the first number is the most derp to me.)
More importantly, I have to remind myself that even in 1969, it wasn’t exactly a non-issue for Little Richard and Tom Jones to appear on tv together. One measly year earlier, Petula Clark touched Harry Belafonte’s arm on a tv special and the sponsors threw a fit. Around the same time, a Gallup poll of 977 Black adults revealed that 80% of participants wanted their children to attend integrated schools. They probably weren’t mad at Petula Clarke, but some rich white guys sure were.
What do we think the folk revivalists would have to say about all this? For starters, television is obviously a playground for fat cat capitalist devils—does that render Little Richard’s delightful performance “inauthentic”? Is this display of racial solidarity—however tame—invalidated by the celebration of a hit record? No. Of course not. That’s stupid. If rock and roll is about sticking it to the man (and the man always finds a reason to hate rock and roll), then rock on, you two (even you Tom, you Muppet).
And finally…
5. This Video of Elvis on Ed Sullivan
You didn’t think I wouldn’t include an Elvis video on this list, did you?
This performance of his on the Ed Sullivan Show took place on October 28, 1956. Elvis was 21-years-old and had just filmed his first movie, Love Me Tender. Prior to that, he spent the month of August hanging out with his unofficial girlfriend June Juanico, an 18-year-old gal from Biloxi. She wrote the most darling book about their summer of love, in which she claims that Elvis promised her he’d have a normal life again in three years. They’d get married. They’d have kids. They’d live on a farm and raise chickens…
What haunts me about this video is the screaming—and the silence—of the unseen audience. Elvis stands mostly still and delivers a performance of “Love Me Tender” that sounds almost exactly like the record. Every 15 seconds or so, when he moves a hand or takes a breath, a discernible rumble can be heard off-screen, as if the girls in the audience are audibly exhaling after involuntarily holding their breath. At the 2:13 mark, the sound of one lone, pained wail makes Elvis smile, causing a chain reaction of additional moans that sound like they’re full of tears. Elvis knows he has ‘em right where he wants ‘em, and at the 2:42 mark, he finally makes the crowd scream…by briefly, smoothly rolling his shoulders.
The first time I watched this, I did not scream—I merely yelped.
yessss you should definitely "do it again"
You got the gift girl!!