Guilty Pleasure: Verka Serduchka (Верка Сердючка)

Have you ever looked at something completely ridiculous and, against your better judgment, not looked away from it even though you just know it’s the nuttiest thing you’ve ever seen? Some people have no stomach for something like this, but others have a penchant for taking pleasure in completely madcap, over-the-top spectacles and enjoy it without irony. I belong to the latter group, but if you have been reading my blog long enough, you’ll know that I have a mild fascination with Eastern Europe and in particular the Eurovision Song Contest in all its insane glory.

Verka Serduchka (Верка Сердючка) is perhaps the most outlandish music artist the Ukraine has to offer. He first came to prominence outside of Europe thanks to his unforgettable entry in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest with “Dancing Lasha Tumbai”. A totally nonsensical song in English, German, Mongolian(!) and Russian, the pop-happy dance single is performed by a drag alter ego of Ukrainian singer Andriy Danylko. Given that Eurovision in 2007 contained an unusually large number of hard-rock entries attempting to ape the previous year’s winner Lordi, seeing an accordion-laced dance-pop single in four languages made up of catchphrases and no clear narrative thread or cohesion made for an unforgettable spectacle.

The single and its star were met with considerable controversy in the rather conservative Ukraine, and the selection committee was heavily criticized for sending a drag queen to represent them. Remember that in parts of the former Soviet Union, effeminate men are still the target of homophobia and Russia is in the process of trying to make any public references to homosexuality illegal, which if you ask for my opinion is just – and I am breaking with my higher level of diction here – totally dumbass and a total embarrassment for the entire country, and I hope they get over it soon. Anyway, back to the fun of Eurovision!

Watch the performance and take note of the genius of it.

Sound Advice: Yoko Ono’s “Open Your Box”

Yoko Ono gets a bad rep. I think it has something to do with her involvement with the Beatles or something.

Few forget that she was a groundbreaking, madly genius (or genuinely mad?) musical artist who introduced free-associating performance art to pop music. Composed of deconstructive beats and graced by her one-of-a-kind vocal stylistics, the art of yodeling and shrieking was elevated to shocking and sometimes hilarious effect. Although ridiculed and vilified for the greater part of her musical career, she had influential admirers who adopted her style and brought its elements forward. In particular, the Icelandic chanteuse Björk has been most remembered in recent years as the primary advocate of using the primal scream in pop music. Much of her performance art and musical recordings were focused on channeling baser mortal desire and suffering through song. It doesn’t have to be verbalized, she argued, it just has to be communicated.

Perhaps no one single piece of music has so summarily captured the art of Ono’s music as her 1971 single, “Open Your Box”.

Babywoman: Naomi Campbell’s Recording Career

Album cover: "Babywoman"

Part of the fun in writing about pop art and high culture is acting as a cultural anthropologist. There are countless one-hit wonders in terms of music, books, films, and other media that at one point or another captured the public’s attention and may have been lost, forgotten, or just dimly remembered. What may have seemed like a gimmick or a high-concept lark may, in hindsight, prove to be highly-executed but misunderstood art, or just a bit of cheeky fun, as the Brits say.

Into the category of one-hit wonders falls supermodel Naomi Campbell’s 1994 album. Christened Babywoman, after one of her nicknames, Campbell’s album was an attempt to cash in on the British R&B-inflected dance music that was in vogue at the time. Artists popular at the time and to whom Campbell’s producers worked with and whose sound they emulated included M People, Eternal, Gabrielle and Soul II Soul.

The "Big Five", Vogue, January 1990

To understand the need of a supermodel to release an album, one had to recall the status in what became known as the era of the supermodel. From 1990 to about 1995, a small collection of the world’s top models gave rise to the term "supermodel". In particular, five were instantly immortalized in Herb Ritts’s iconic January 1990 cover of Vogue magazine. These women were the world’s top models, instantly recognizable and who were known by only their first names. They included Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz. Known as “the Big Five”, they were joined by Kate Moss and became collectively known as “the Big Six”. Their presence immediately elevated the tone and marketability of any product, and they were in-demand by every conceivable designer on the planet. Their status, visibility and near-ubiquity had the residual effect of helping to make fashion one of the most high-profile and serious global industries. Campbell, Evangelista and Turlington in particular were such close friends and so sought-after that they became another subset of the “Big Six”: they were known as “The Trinity”.

It was in this cultural environment that the idea of the multi-hyphenate entertainer first appeared. Although it was not uncommon for actors to also direct and write films, plays, and TV at the time, it was unusual for models to attempt a career in the arts and in business at the same time that they modeled. It was with much media attention, tempered with a good deal of curiosity, that Campbell released her debut single “Love and Tears”.

Sarah Brightman Lost Her Heart to a Starship Trooper

Sometimes, the line between kitsch and camp is blurred.

In 1978, a very young Sarah Brightman, then still in her teens, was chosen to sing with the British dance troupe Hot Gossip. Together, they created a disco single intended to make the latter a legitimate musical act. Hot Gossip is known to nostalgic Brits as being one of the first successful ventures for late 80s pop sensation Sinetta, AKA Simon Cowell’s girlfriend before he became famous. The resulting single, light years (pun intended) away from Brightman’s future classical music output and stint as the original Christine in Phantom of the Opera, was “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper”.

The single is a frothy disco track that opens with a rather cheeky sample of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. It then spins a tale of intergalactic love / booty call between a supple young woman and the unseen “Captain Strange”, presumably a cross between Captain Kirk, Han Solo and / or Luke Skywalker. Given that the single was released in 1978, it is no coincidence that this was thematically produced to cash in on the Star Wars craze. For the purposes of this article only, I will refer to the speaker as “Lana”.

Having been lustily rejected (in both senses of the word) by Darth Vader and Flash Gordon, Lana is for some reason aching for a moment of intense passion with the Captain before Starfleet Command finds out where they are and, one presumes, summons them back to work. This is all set to a series of danceable bleeps and bloops and then-fashionable “futuristic” laser keyboard emissions. “Starship Trooper” contains much innuendo, a sample of which is contained here:

Dream Mash-up: Glee and Björk

Dear producers of Glee:

You have so far given us the Madonna special, built an episode of self-empowerment around Lady Gaga, and gave us a quietly powerful interpretation of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal Rumors album. You are clearly into doing themed episodes and next season you may be looking to do more. I know you’re on summer hiatus, which is precisely why this is the perfect time for me to write this to you, so that you can have time to create the plotline and clear the rights.

My humble suggestion to you is to structure your next themed episode entirely around the music of … BJÖRK.

Yes, Björk.

Think about it. Her music, being so over-the-top and unusual, requiring such complex and unorthodox instrumentation as vocal beat-boxing, Inuit throat-singing, drum machines, triangles and full-scale orchestras, are ripe for choral treatment. It would be the ultimate challenge for your show!

Yes, I know you and she tried negotiating rights for a song of hers to be used in the past but it didn’t work. But still, why not entice the pop iconoclast with an entire episode around her music??? And I LOVE that you tried.

The visceral, violent imagery in Björk’s music is perfectly suited to the uncontrollable emotional diarrhea of the characters. The music is so far removed from conventional musical arrangement and experimental that it would certainly make for some of the most innovative music you’ll have ever produced thus far. Plus, think of just how confused Middle America would be by having you dedicate an entire episode around such an unusual concept, but it would also help them expand their musical repertoire.

Just think of it as Tina and Mike having a weird dream about her when they went out for dim sum and ate too much chicken feet, watched a marathon of Ms. Swan clips from Mad TV, and fell asleep. They wake up, tell everyone about their “weird dreams”, and voila! Mr. Schue gives them all copies of her collected works that he had in high school (which his shrewish ex-wife won’t let him play or listen to, natch) and chooses them all to pick one. Or it’ll just be a bizarro episode like that one black-and-white Felicity episode from 1999.

Here are some brilliant suggestions for each character to sing, and the signature line from each song that would be truest to each character’s essence.