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If I Were a Boy on YouTube

Beyonce has a new double CD — I Am… Sasha Fierce — and I think it’s a pretty good set of music even though some of her hardcore fans feel she sold out.  I understand she wants to widen her fan base.  She doesn’t want to be Beyonce.  She wants to be Barbara Streisand. 

The biggest hit from her CD so far is — If I Were a Boy — and when you listen to the song, you are taken on a fascinating journey of gender identification and sexual role playing.  Of course, the video ruins the song by hammering you over the head with the twist of the story by adding ridiculous and unnecessary dialogue.

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American Idol Tune Dropping and Tone Deafness

I am a big fan of American Idol, but I cannot get over the fact that so few of the contestants that make it to Hollywood can carry a tune and how so many contestants — and fans! — are tone deaf.

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Roy Orbison is Singing in the Shower and Crying with k.d.

Twenty years ago Roy Orbison and k.d. lang — making her first, big, mainstream media  appearance at the tender age of 25 — appeared on the Tonight Show together to sing a live duet of Roy’s classic song, Crying.

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Madonna and Melody

In Salon the great critic and intellectual Camille Paglia rips apart Madonna for being creepy and old and trying to incorrectly recapture her angst and youth instead of blazing a path that matches her temperament and established philosophy of performance:

Even allowing for the fact that she must strenuously maintain her hipness for a busy husband 10 years her junior, Madonna is starting to morph into the mature Joan Crawford of “Torch Song,” still ferociously dancing but with her fascist willpower signaled by brute, staring eyes and fixed jawline. In cannibalizing her disco diva days, Madonna runs the risk of turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Will she become a whooping Charo shaking her geriatric hoochie-coochie hips on TV talk shows? Or should we expect a sudden, grisly collapse from glowing beauty to dust, like Ursula Andress as the 2000-year-old femme fatale in “She”? Too hungry to connect to the youth market, Madonna goes on childishly using naughty words and flipping the finger (as onstage at Live 8 last summer). Marlene Dietrich, her supreme precursor, knew how to preserve her dignity and glamour.

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Joaquin Phoenix is No Johnny Cash

Joaquin Phoenix plays the genius country singer Johnny Cash in the Hollywood production of Walk the Line and Phoenix is getting rave reviews for singing Cash’s songs and “sounding just like him.”

If you have spent any time at all listening to Johnny Cash, you know just how much Phoenix DOES NOT sound like Cash at all. It isn’t even close!

There is no terror, depth of despair or rain in Phoenix’s voice and the movie would have been better served if he had lip-synched the great Johnny Cash instead of just aping him.

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Jason Opsahl is Dead

I was sorry to learn from Rosie O’Donnell’s blog that Broadway actor/singer/dancer and all-around-great-guy Jason Opsahl is dead. She misses him and so do I. Jason died of a brain tumor called “anaplastic astrocytoma” on Oct. 25, 2002. He was 39.

Jason Opsahl Head Shot

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