Un juego muy bueno:
Video
The Art of the Remake XV – Deconstructing Metal
As I was growing up in the 80’s I listened to heavy metal music of all types and had a great time doing so. I went to a lot of shows as well and that is part of the reason that my hearing is fading at an early age, I assume. No regrets.
Art of the Remake XIV
This is an unusual entry in this occasional series. A demo from a songwriter that is later recorded by another artist is not exactly a remake. Nonetheless, the contrast here is interesting, so I pass it on.
Here is the demo of Pleasant Valley Sunday, sung by Carole King, who wrote it:
That is a lovely bit of vintage pop, with the feel of that musical annus mirabilis of 1966. It would have been a good single by itself, and possibly a hit just as it is. Carole King had a very nice voice. She wrote a lot of hit pop songs in the Sixties, which were great. I am not a fan of her later solo career music, which is pleasant but does nothing for me.
Here is the version of her song which was a well deserved hit for the Monkees:
The Monkees are more rockin’ with it.
The changed lyrics are interesting. The Monkees sing “My thoughts all seem to stray, to places far away. I need a change of scenery … .” Carole sings “My thoughts all seem to stray, to places far away. I don’t ever want to see … another Pleasant Valley Sunday.” The Monkees leave their rejection of the bucolic suburban scene more ambiguous, which is a lyrical improvement.
Note that there is a lot of utterly unjustified disparagement of the Monkees. Dr. Frank once provided a total rebuttal to that stance, which he described as Monkees Derangement Syndrome. It is worth reading if you care about these controversies.
The Cosmopolitans
Twenty-four years after the release of his first feature, “Metropolitan,” and two years after the release of his fourth, “Damsels in Distress,” Whit Stillman—the cinema’s novelist of manners, who reveals deep and enduring patterns beneath the shimmer of apparent frivolities—has written, directed, and produced the twenty-six-minute pilot of a TV-like series, “The Cosmopolitans,” for Amazon (where it premières tomorrow). It has a classical setup—Americans and other foreigners, members of a self-anointed social whirl, tripping through Paris—that, from the start, Stillman makes entirely his own, rendering it both contemporary and anachronistic, of the moment and rooted in time.