Saturday, November 09, 2002 #11 Lorez Alexandria, "Send in the Clowns" Hooray! A version that doesn't make me want to kill myself! The key difference between the previously-reviewed versions and this one: it has a cowbell, which can only mean it has a commitment to hip-shaking the others do not. It's a samba, I think. (Or a mambo. I don't really know the difference.) A high-powered mambo with silvery sharp horn blats and a thumpin' bass. Which can only mean the cover isn't very true to the song. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm not even sure it bothers me, but there is some residual quizzicalness about the approach. Ordinarily drastic revamps don't bother me at all, unless a cover version veers into one-joke snark territory, and even then it's not the sacrilige so much as the low gas-mileage of the humor. In fact, I often love the havoc played with intentions: like the remixers of tommorrow, and the beboppers of yesterday, improvisers like Alexandria use SITC as something to play with, and that playfulness can be a thrill. Humming it to myself when it comes into my head, I can imagine, Alexandria, as a vocalist, joyously running through a million different variations in pitch, intensity, timing and phrasing of the same lines. Yet I still get this nagging feeling that SITC shouldn't be treated as more of a shrug than a statement of quiet devastation. (What a clinical thing to call it -- a 'statement,' as if it was a report from a housing and community opportunity congressional subcommittee.) I don't know why I feel this way. (I don't even know why I should feel vaguely guilty about feeling this way.) Maybe I've become emotionally atttached to the 'canonical' versions of the SITC in much stronger ways than I've been to other oft-covered rock or pop tunes. (link)

Wednesday, November 06, 2002 #10 Liberace, "Send in the Clowns" Kitsch succeeds where surrealism fails. Lots of needless trills and frills, then he sticks a hunk of "I Pagliacci" in the middle there and that just makes no sense whatsoever, the two don't have enough in common thematically, stylistically, lyrically, emotionally or anythingally. It took me a day or two to realize: "Oh yeah. Clowns." You know, I'd probably write more about this if I could stand listening to it. I get claustrophic when I play this on loop because I know what's going to happen. I'm gonna have it on my mind all day tomorrow. I'm freakishly going to go "duh-duh-duh-DUH! to myself at stray moments when I'm at my computer, hating myself for liking it in such a sloppy and thoughtless way and hating myself for not having enough imagination to get out of the feedback loop and think of something else to think about. (It's not the song that I resent so much as the helpless way I react to it.) (link)

Tuesday, November 05, 2002 #9 Marti Webb, "Send in the Clowns (live)" She's been a performer since the early sixties, so I have to assume that Marti Webb knows what she's doing. And what she does is begin nearly every single line scrunching up her voice like Yoda for a split-second before singing the rest of it clearly. Once I noticed this little tic, it became hard to notice anything else: I kept wondering if she really was gonna croak again, and by gum, she DOES croak again, and ends up doing it over twenty times in less than four minutes. It's bad, yeah, but then I noticed other tics, like the tiny little lipsmacks and breathpuffs of exasperation that start other lines. Like I said, she probably knows what she's doing. She's had too much experience in the musical theater not to be aware of what she sounds like and what she does to project emotion. These vocal glitches are used to signify "ache" and "exasperation" and "sorrow," since people also make these little sounds when they feel emotional trauma in non-singing situations. But she does this so often that...well, I really hate to be mean here here, but she ends up sounding like a petulant and prissy sixteen-year-old. This isn't bad singing -- it's over-acting. (link)

Sunday, November 03, 2002 #8 Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Mel, "Send in the Clowns" Announcer: Live From Springfield, the entertainment capital of the state -- The Krusty Comeback Special! Krusty:Send in... THE CLOOOWNS!!! Those daffy, laffy CLOWNS!!! Send in those soulful and doleful, SCHMALTZ! by the BOWLful...clowns. Send in...the...clowns. (Krusty quietly blubbers off.) Sideshow Mel: They're...al...rrreea...dyyy...heeeeeerrrrreeee... (wild applause from audience) I love you, Krusty. Krusty: Quiet! It's a cover, but not an interpretation. Everything in the song about failed love gets cut, so what remains is a song about clowns, and since it's coming from a Krusty, a song about himself. He even gets to refer to himself in the third-person plural (a favorite trick of Hollywood narcissists) as being "soulful and doleful." Yet Krusty's cover of SITC does "say something" about the ways it's been used by performers in the last quarter-century. Krusty and his comeback, hearken back to certain images hardwired and buried deep within my generation's pscyhe: morally dubious Hollywooders, live at Las Vegas or variety TV shows, tugging at the heartsrings in a self-serving way with pathos-smeared songs like SITC. I said earlier that the whole clown thing was one reason SITC is typically viewed as kitsch; this is another. (link)