Tag: Madonna

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1382

Clean Sweep

Traffic slowed to a near halt on Union this weekend when a Midtown woman decided to sweep the stairs of Idlewild Presbyterian Church. It wasn’t the broom that caught motorists’ attention. It was the woman’s choice of attire, which, in this case, was no attire at all. According to reports, Memphis police took the woman to the Regional Medical Center before taking her to jail. Nobody has satisfactorily explained what she was doing with the milk crate or the bag of Kingsford Charcoal pictured below.

Neverending Elvis

Did the ghost of Elvis Presley briefly possess Madonna just at the moment of his passing? According to Joe Henry, Madonna’s songwriting brother-in-law, the King of Rock-and-Roll may have reached out from beyond the grave to give the Material Girl a birthday surprise. Madonna was born on August 16th, and, according to an Elvis Week story published on music-news.com, “when Elvis Presley died on this date in 1977, [Madonna] professed in real-time that she felt his spirit had passed out of his body and through her own in exodus.”

Hair Loss

Fly on the Wall has asked readers to aid us in documenting the lost hairpieces littering the streets of Memphis. Some discoveries are just too important not to share in print. Take, for example, this extremely rare shot of a “scandal weave,” which was discovered in a sack of shredded documents.

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Opinion The Last Word

Gen X Marks the Spot

CREDIT: Raluca Tudor | Dreamstime.com

I am a Gen Xer. I’m neither proud of that nor defensive about it. It just happens to have been when I was born. I remember a time when AIDS was called GRID. Heck, I remember when Ayds was a chocolate diet pill. I remember when Tab used to have saccharin, Madonna had talent, Bob Geldof wasn’t a knight, and rock stars didn’t brag about sobriety. I was fully present for the Iran Hostage Crisis, the energy crisis, Gulf War One and Gulf War Two: Electric Boogaloo, and the L.A. riots.

And YET, many of my contemporaries seem to think we grew up next to Beaver Cleaver with mom in the kitchen, dad smoking away in his Packard, and a kooky neighbor who called kids scamps.

What happened here? True fact: Nine out of 10 Facebookers aged 40-55 will begin at least one post with, “Back in my day … ” Back in my day what? You had to walk to the video store instead of watching Netflix? Your choices of yogurt were either strawberry or blueberry? Your cellphone was the size of a suitcase?

According to every other post on Facebook, my generation never played in our school clothes, never interrupted adults, roamed the neighborhood like packs of wolves (okay, that one has merit), minded our P’s and Q’s, always did our homework neatly and promptly, and emptied chamber pots without being asked.

Raluca Tudor | Dreamstime.com

What fresh hell is that? Is the secondhand smoke finally kicking in? Is aspartame really killing our memory? We were the first latchkey generation. Our moms weren’t home baking cakes. They were out working to afford Guess jeans and Esprit sweatshirts for us. We grew up in cities, not Mayberry. We sprayed our hair stiff with Aqua Net, wore shoulder pads that made us look like the Razorback defensive line, and snuck our parents’ Winstons and Riunite Lambrusco. We played soccer, not kick the can. Get a grip, people. We had video games. We were the first gamers! We also had VCRs (except for that one family who had Betamax) and home computers.

What has happened here? Are we that frightened of our present we need to create a past which never existed for us except in reruns we watched on cable while we stuffed our faces with pizza rolls? JUST LIKE OUR KIDS DO NOW? I get that each generation wants to play Shut Up, You’ve Got It So Good You Just Don’t Know.

You know who got to play that game? My granny who was born in the 19th century. Not even my granny. Her youngest sister, who was the one who had to carry the lantern to light the way to the outhouse for all her older siblings. My grandfather who grew up in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, during the Depression and ate so much poke he had to dip rags in coal oil and tie them around his ankles to keep the cutworms from eating him. HE could play that game. What’s the worst thing we say to our kids? Back in my day, you had to get up to change the channel? HORRORS. As a friend said, nostalgia is a big fat liar.

It’s scary out there. I think as we get older and things get weirder, we want something familiar to hang on to. Because the thing is, now we have all the weirdness shoved in our faces through E!, Twitter, and CNN. The National Enquirer is downright quaint. The Dowager Countess asked Robert if he was in his pajamas when he showed up for dinner in one of those newfangled tuxedos. And Robert couldn’t fathom getting Rose — that crazy flapper — a wireless.

It’s this idea that the good old days were really good. I don’t want to go back to no air conditioning, no birth control pill, and separate but equal. It isn’t that I want to ignore history — quite the opposite. I don’t want to look at it through gauze and a haze of Giorgio. Besides, it seems very middle-aged to go all cranky neighbor on kids these days and their hippity-hop music and their bra straps showing. Things, by the way, my generation created. I suppose that since we didn’t have the early lives we wanted, we’ve recreated them through annoying memes. We went Walter Mitty on our past.

Now, we’re not as bad as Boomers. You guys are the WORST. Apparently, you weren’t out inventing AIDS and the Internet. No, you were slamming screen doors, baking pies, collecting snails, and generally not doing anything that contributed to global warming. You were all peace and love and pot rather than Reaganomics and Enron. Get a grip. There’s an app for that. I said, THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT. NO, NOT LIKE AN APPETIZER, MOM! I kid.

But really, you guys are the worst.

Susan Wilson also writes for likethedew.com and yeahandanotherthing.com. While not Memphis natives, she and her husband Chuck Elliott have lived here long enough to know Midtown does not start at Highland.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (February 12, 2015)

CREDIT: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Sir Paul McCartney, Rihanna, and Kanye West perform at the Grammy Awards

How fortunate am I that the Grammy Awards should occur on the same night that I write this column? My original opening sentence was going to be, “For the love of everything that’s holy, vaccinate your damn kids,” but the musical-industrial complex’s annual circle-jerk is just too outrageous to go uncommented upon.

Before we enter snarkville, let me tell you what was good about the show. Catering to the aging demographic, the former headbangers AC/DC played their hit song, “Highway to Hell.” Only, it was a hit in 1979, before two-thirds of the audience was born, and it was revealed that the ancient mariners needed a teleprompter, upon which appeared the lyrics to their own song, just in case those tri-focals failed. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett continued their May/December smoochy lounge act, singing Irving Berlin’s, “Cheek to Cheek.” But here’s a secret: The 88-year-old Bennett can’t sing anymore and she’s been carrying him for awhile. At least she didn’t wear meat this year. Beyoncé was divine. Pharrell Williams was terrific. Usher was great. And I was happy to see Beck win Album of the Year, although Twitter erupted with queries of, “Who is this guy Beck?” Which is a shame since I still consider him one of the newer artists.

Annie Lennox was all class singing the old Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ song, “I Put a Spell on You,” in direct contrast to Madonna, who refuses to age gracefully or perform an age-appropriate song. I get it: She’s a gym rat who’s in good shape for her age, and she has great legs. Still, they’re attached to a 56-year-old ass, and her sex-kitten routine, surrounded by back-up dancers wearing demon’s horns, has lasted well past its shelf life. The 60-year-old Lennox, in black slacks, sequined top, and minimal makeup, looked beautiful by comparison and didn’t need auto-tune either. I love Pharrell, who won Best Pop Solo Performance for “Happy,” only he was dressed in a bell-hop outfit reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel. That funny doorman’s outfit will probably be this year’s Smokey the Bear hat. Emotional tenor Sam Smith, who won Best New Artist, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year for his smash hit, “Stay With Me,” neglected to thank Tom Petty, for whom he recently gave a songwriter’s credit and paid an undisclosed, out-of-court settlement for cribbing the chorus to Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

The most egregious pairing of the night, and possibly of all time, was the trio of Kanye West, Rihanna, and Sir Paul McCartney singing a nondescript song called “FourFiveSeconds,” just released as Rihanna’s new single. Sir Paul has all the money and fame in the world. For the life of me, I can’t understand why he would enter into this unholy alliance. Didn’t he learn anything from that heinous duet he did with Michael Jackson? Or is he that desperate to remain relevant? Basically, McCartney was reduced to playing back-up guitar and singing inaudible low harmony while Rihanna warbled and Kanye chirped through auto-tune to cover up the fact that he can’t sing. McCartney was among the nine songwriters on this mess, but he was content standing there like a twit and never even sang a verse. I had to shout out loud, “Do you remember who his partners used to be?”

That faint music you hear is John Lennon, somewhere from the great beyond, singing another chorus of his “How Do You Sleep at Night.” And speaking of songwriters, the winner of the Best R&B Song, Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” credited eight writers. Since when did songs begin getting written by committee? It only took one person to write “A Case of You.”

It was keenly disappointing to see that the “In Memoriam” segment, while mentioning music lawyers and agents, omitted the names of artists and legends beloved to Memphians whom we lost this year: Jimi Jamison, John Fry, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, Jack Holder, John Hampton, and “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the legendary producer who began his career with Sam Phillips at Sun Records. I understand the names were printed in a longer read-out on the Grammy site, but each of these artists deserved an on-air remembrance.

The program’s closing segment, a tribute to the movie, Selma, featuring Beyoncé, John Legend, and Common, was transcendent. I’ve heard Legend sing many times, but I believe this was his finest performance. There’s a lot of great music out there; it’s just not what the near-extinct, corporate labels want you to hear. Personally, I enjoy watching the old, thieving, grimy music “industry” implode. It deserves to. All told, the 2015 Grammys were merely tepid, but it might have been worse. They could have let Dave Grohl play.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Was 2011 the year of the Memphis dancer?

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Lil Buck

  • Lil Buck

2010 was a great year for Memphis dancers thanks in no small part to some great headline-grabbing performances by Ballet Memphis. 2011, however, was the year of Memphis Jookin’ and Charles Lil’ Buck Riley whose molten flow is informed by sounds from Orange Mound and shot through with classical sensibilities he honed working with Katie Smythe and the New Ballet Ensemble. Madonna has spoken. And so has Yo-Yo Ma. And Margret Thatcher. And even Dance Magazine.

On top of all of that look at the love Time Out Chicago is giving to Ondine Geary.

Best. Year. Ever?

I don’t know about all that but 2012 has its work cut out.