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Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Impressed a Hit Music, Dies at 76

Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and oversized character from Los Angeles, who was immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’ breakout hit “Chuck E.’s in Love”, died on July 20 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles . He was 76.

His brother Byron said the cause was kidney failure.

Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, drummer, songwriter, and widely recognized villain who moved from his Denver home to his friend, singer-songwriter Tom., In the mid-1970s Los Angeles Landed Waiting.

At the Troubadour, the venerable folk club in West Hollywood where Mr. Weiss worked as a dishwasher for a while, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became one item, and the three became inseparable as they wandered Hollywood, stealing lawn trinkets and joking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip on their palms).

“Sometimes it seems like we’re real romantic dreamers stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as their family at the time.

They stayed at the Tropicana Motel, a shabby 1940s bohemian on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a normal DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except that they were all tan and good-looking.”

In the fall of 1977, Mr. Weiss called his pals in Los Angeles on a trip home to Denver, and when Mr. Waits hung up the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E. is in love! ”

Two years later, Ms. Jones’ fanciful riff to that explanation had – “What’s her name? (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it wasn’t Ms. Jones that Mr. Weiss fell in love with; it was a distant cousin of his.)

The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’ debut album “Rickie Lee Jones” and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1980. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)

In a July 21 essay in the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she could not tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”

In a telephone interview, she has since said of Mr. Weiss: “It was nonsense in him, he was our trickster. He was an exciting guy and a disaster for a while, as exciting people often are. “

Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father Leo was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat shop, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.

His brother is his only immediate survivor.

In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music organizer, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colorado. When blues performers like Lightnin ‘Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as the drummer.

In 1973, Mr. Morris opened a nightclub called Ebbets Field in Denver (he was born in Brooklyn), which attracted artists such as Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss also took part there.

At that time, as Mr Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and had a habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was that one night I saw Waits doing some finger pop things in Ebbets Fields,” he said, “and I went to see him after the show. I was wearing a pair of platform shoes and a chinchilla coat and slipped on the ice in the street outside because I was so high and asked if he wanted to take me on. He looked at me like I was out of space, man. “

Still, he said, they quickly became friends.

Mr. Waits, interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a human, a liar, a monkey, and a pathological vaudevilian.”

Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up working together on a number of things, in one case they co-wrote the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom lament on Mr. Waits’ album “Nighthawks at the Diner ”, published in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool”, in 1999, was described in a review as “a silly, eclectic mix of loosely played blues and boogie-woogie”.

Although his songwriting was unique – “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the perspective of a neighbor’s cat – Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravelly, scruffy and long-winded, he was a blues man with a Borcht-belt humor.

For much of the 1980s, Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called Central, accompanied by his band The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the house with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-speckled nightclub from the ’90s.

He has been asked many times how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’ hit. “Yeah, I was amazed,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know we’d both be known for the rest of our lives.”

But the rest of her life would no longer be intertwined.

“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ disappeared from the sky and disappeared into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, which it still hasn’t really recovered from, he and I became estranged and everyone became different from everyone else Cut.” Ms. Jones wrote about Mr. Weiss in her article for the Los Angeles Times. “Wait left, the short Camelot on our street corner is over. I had made fictions out of us, made heroes out of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did. “

Later on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but Chuck wasn’t, and he knew a lot of people.” She added, “We think being the most famous is a win, but I’m not sure. Chuck did everything right. “

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A Rap Tune Lays Naked Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

A Rap Song Lays Bare Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

BEIT YEHOSHUA, Israel — Uriya Rosenman grew up on Israeli military bases and served as an officer in an elite unit of the army. His father was a combat pilot. His grandfather led the paratroopers who captured the Western Wall from Jordan in 1967.

Sameh Zakout, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, grew up in the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Ramla. His family was driven out of its home in the 1948 war of Israeli independence, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. Many of his relatives fled to Gaza.

Facing each other in a garage over a small plastic table, the two hurl ethnic insults and clichés at each other, tearing away the veneer of civility overlaying the seething resentments between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority in a rap video that has gone viral in Israel.

The video, “Let’s Talk Straight,” which has garnered more than four million views on social media since May, couldn’t have landed at a more apt time, after the eruption two months ago of Jewish-Arab violence that turned many mixed Israeli cities like Lod and Ramla into Jewish-Arab battlegrounds.

By shouting each side’s prejudices at each other, at times seemingly on the verge of violence, Mr. Rosenman and Mr. Zakout have produced a work that dares listeners to move past stereotypes and discover their shared humanity.

Mr. Rosenman, 31, says he wants to change Israel from within by challenging its most basic reflexes. “I think that we are scared and are controlled by fear,” he says.

Mr. Zakout, 37, wants to change Israel by overcoming their forebears’ traumas. “I am not emphasizing my Palestinian identity,” he says. “I am a human being. Period. We are human beings first.”

At first viewing, the video seems like anything but a humanistic enterprise.

Mr. Rosenman, the first to speak, launches into a relentless three-minute anti-Palestinian tirade.

“Don’t cry racism. Stop the whining. You live in clans, fire rifles at weddings,” he taunts, his body tensed. “Abuse your animals, steal cars, beat your own women. All you care about is Allah and the Nakba and jihad and the honor that controls your urges.”

The camera circles them. A guitar screeches.

Mr. Zakout tugs at his beard, looks away with disdain. He’s heard it all before, including that oft-repeated line: “I am not a racist, my gardener is Arab.”

Then Mr. Zakout, his voice rising, delivers the other side of the most intractable of Middle Eastern stories.

“Enough,” he says. “I am a Palestinian and that’s it, so shut up. I don’t support terror, I’m against violence, but 70 years of occupation — of course there’ll be resistance. When you do a barbecue and celebrate independence, the Nakba is my grandmother’s reality. In 1948 you kicked out my family, the food was still warm on the table when you broke into our homes, occupying and then denying. You can’t speak Arabic, you know nothing of your neighbor, you don’t want us to live next to you, but we build your homes.”

Mr. Rosenman fidgets. His assertive confidence drains away as he’s whisked through the looking-glass of Arab-Jewish incomprehension.

The video pays homage to Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist,” a similar exploration of the stereotypes and blindness that lock in the Black-white fracture in the United States.

Mr. Rosenman, an educator whose job was to explain the conflict to young Israeli soldiers, had grown increasingly frustrated with “how things, with the justification of past traumas for the Jews, were built on rotten foundations.”

“Some things about my country are amazing and pure,” he said in an interview. “Some are very rotten. They are not discussed. We are motivated by trauma. We are a post-traumatic society. The Holocaust gives us some sort of back-way legitimacy to not plan for the future, not understand the full picture of the situation here, and to justify action we portray as defending ourselves.”

For example, Israel, he believes, should stop building settlements “on what could potentially be a Palestinian state” in the West Bank, because that state is needed for peac

Looking for a way to hold a mirror to society and reveal its hypocrisies, Mr. Rosenman contacted a friend in the music industry, who suggested he meet Mr. Zakout, an actor and rapper.

They started talking in June last year, meeting for hours on a dozen occasions, building trust. They recorded the song in Hebrew and Arabic in March and the video in mid-April.

Their timing was impeccable. A few weeks later, the latest Gaza war broke out. Jews and Arabs clashed across Israel.

Their early conversations were difficult.

They argued over 1948. Mr. Zakout talked about his family in Gaza, how he missed them, how he wanted to get to know his relatives who lost their homes. He talked about the Jewish “arrogance that we feel as Arabs, the bigotry.”

“My Israeli friends told me I put them in front of the mirror,” he said.

Mr. Rosenman said he understood Mr. Zakout’s longing for a united family. That was natural. But why did Arab armies attack the Jews in 1948? “We were happy with what we got,” he said. “You know we had no other option.”

The reaction to the video has been overwhelming, as if it bared something hidden in Israel. Invitations have poured in — to appear at conferences, to participate in documentaries, to host concerts, to record podcasts.

“I’ve been waiting for someone to make this video for a long time,” said one commenter, Arik Carmi. “How can we fight each other when we are more like brothers than we will admit to ourselves? Change won’t come before we let go of the hate.”

The two men, now friends, are at work on a second project, which will examine how self-criticism in a Jewish and Arab society might bring change. It will ask the question: How can you do better, rather than blaming the government?

Mr. Zakout recently met Mr. Rosenman’s grandfather, Yoram Zamosh, who planted the Israeli flag at the Western Wall after Israeli paratroopers stormed into the Old City in Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Most of Mr. Zamosh’s family from Berlin was murdered by the Nazis at the Chelmno extermination camp.

“He is a unique and special guy,” Mr. Zakout said of Mr. Yamosh. “He reminds me a little of my grandfather, Abdallah Zakout, his energy, his vibes. When we spoke about his history and pain, I understood his fear, and at the same time he understood my side.”

The video aims to bring viewers to that same kind of understanding.

“That’s the beginning,” Mr. Zakout said. “We are not going to solve this in a week. But at least it is something, the first step in a long journey.”

Mr. Rosenman added: “What we do is meant to scream out loud that we are not scared anymore. We are letting go of our parents’ traumas and building a better future for everyone together.”

The last words in the video, from Mr. Zakout, are: “We both have no other country, and this is where the change begins.”

They turn to the table in front of them, and silently share a meal of pita and hummus.

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She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Tales. So She Advised Them in Music.

She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Stories. So She Told Them in Song.

Diana Jones is known as a singer-songwriter of uncommon empathy, an astute observer of the human condition whose heart goes out to those who suffer and are oppressed.

Since her 1997 debut, Jones has crafted indelible narratives from the point of view of, among others, a battered woman who contemplates turning a gun on her abuser and of a coal miner trapped underground while writing what would prove to be his last letter to his wife.

Released overseas last year, her latest project, “Song to a Refugee” (due Friday), lends compassion to the struggles of immigrants fleeing terror and persecution in their homelands.

Produced with David Mansfield, whose uncluttered Neo-Appalachian arrangements deepen the pathos of her lyrics and vocals, Jones’s record is an inadvertent concept album. It evolved rapidly, after a bout of writer’s block, during a flurry of songwriting triggered by the horrors she witnessed in news stories from the United States border with Mexico and beyond.

“I was trying to make sense of what was happening, first of all for myself,” Jones, 55, explained. She was speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan’s West Village, describing her response to daily accounts of the treatment of immigrants, most of them people of color.

“At the same time, I felt this responsibility to report on what was happening,” she added. “I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away.”

Jones, who was adopted at birth and raised on Long Island, N.Y., comes by her empathy naturally. “I was always searching for something, a face or a home, anything to connect with,” she said of her early pursuit of her family of origin. “I was also without a home when I was 15 years old. I never lost sight of what it means to have food to eat and a roof over my head. I have gratitude for physical safety every day.”

Her latest project received unexpected early encouragement from someone with a very different background: the actress Emma Thompson. The two women met, coincidentally, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where they struck up a conversation about their mutual commitment to human rights. Shortly afterward, Jones wrote “I Wait for You,” a song about a mother from Sudan who seeks asylum in England, hoping to be reunited with her children eventually.

Thompson had served on the board of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British organization originally established to care for Holocaust survivors that now serves victims of human trafficking and other atrocities.

“It’s the people to whom we owe nothing, as Helen Bamber said, whose treatment reveals our humanity, our spirit, the quality of our social fabric,” Thompson wrote in an email. “I have an adopted son, a refugee from Rwanda, and what is most important to say about him is that his joining the family made us all immeasurably richer in every way.”

The folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger, who appears on the album, said the power of Jones’s album is in its ability to paint vivid portraits. “It’s so easy to discount, when you see so many refugees, the individual story — and these are individual stories,” she said of the 13 songs on the album. “Diana’s record is a relentless hammering home of how we ignore a huge body of people who are living through the results of human cruelty and insanity.”

Backed by Mansfield on mandolin and fiddle, the song “Where We Are” is narrated by the older of two brothers who were taken from their parents and detained at the border of the United States and Mexico: “My brother is a baby, he doesn’t understand at all/Freedom, there’s freedom outside the chain-link wall.”

“We Believe You,” the album’s centerpiece, was inspired by congressional testimony from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, detailing the dehumanizing conditions she observed at the border.

I believe your eyes are tired of crying
and all the reasons you said you came here for
I believe you lost your mother and your father
and there ain’t no sleeping on a concrete floor

Jones intones this lament in an unadorned alto, her words cradled by the tender filigrees of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar. Steve Earle, Thompson and Seeger take turns singing the stanzas that follow, only to return to bear witness alongside Jones on the song’s final verse and chorus.

As Jones explained, “It’s important that we have people in our lives who believe us, especially for traumatized people — people who, in this case, are being demonized or ‘othered’ for wanting a safe haven and, eventually, a home.”

Written from the underside of history, “Song to a Refugee” finds Jones steadfastly siding with the oppressed, much in the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads.” One of the most powerful things about the record is how, on tracks like “I Wait for You” and “Mama Hold Your Baby,” the voices of migrant women are centered. Talking about her protagonist in the song “Ask a Woman,” Jones asks, “What must it be like for a mother to have to pick up her baby and start walking to another border, through deserts and with no safety at all?”

“Being a refugee,” Thompson wrote, “simply underlines and exacerbates the areas where all women are already challenged — not being heard, not being educated, not being paid, not having power.”

Jones wrote and recorded the material for “Song to a Refugee” when President Donald Trump was in office. But the nightmarish realities the album evokes speak as poignantly today.

“This is such a big problem that it has to be dealt with in small ways,” Seeger said, referring to the global migration crisis. “But the small ways are not small. This is not a small album.”

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Allison Russell Faces Her Previous in Tune

Allison Russell Faces Her Past in Song

It was a long time before Allison Russell was ready to sing her own full story. As soon as it was her, the songs came out.

Her solo debut “Outside Child” speaks bluntly about sexual abuse by her adoptive father. She puts it through an unwavering Memphis soul beat in the first song she wrote for the album “4th Day Prayer”: “Father used me like a woman / Mother turned the slightest eye / has my body, my mind , stole my pride / He did it, he did it every night. “

In this song and on the entire album, however, she also sings about liberation and redemption, about places and people and realizations that have helped her survive and claim her freedom. It’s an album of strength and validation, not victimization.

“When you are with her and her family, she is just pure joy,” said singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who met Russell on May 21, after listening to the album and admiring it from her face the entire time. And you’d never know she came from a brutal and harrowing childhood situation other than the fact that she honors it by telling you. “

Russell, 41, wearing a Brandi Carlile rainbow t-shirt (admiration is mutual), was chatting recently from her home in Madison, Tennessee, near Nashville. Behind her stood overcrowded bookshelves, her clarinet and banjo, a sign that read “When Women March, Stuff Gets Done” and an LP by the undoubtedly African-American folk singer Odetta. “She’s an inspiration,” said Russell.

Russell has recorded extensively as a member of eclectic roots rock groups. She founded Po ‘Girl in the early 2000s and founded Birds of Chicago in 2012 with songwriter JT Nero (Jeremy Lindsay). They married in 2013. Their music is based on folk rock, blues, Celtic ballads, gospel, field hollers, country, klezmer, bluegrass and much more. Your voice can be smoky or steely, genuinely firm or sinuous jazz.

Singer, songwriter and folklore researcher Rhiannon Giddens invited Russell to join Our Native Daughters along with Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla – all four black banjo players – to create an album for Smithsonian Folkways in 2019 called Songs of Our Native Daughters to do that celebrated the West African origins of the banjo and included tales of slavery, perseverance, and resistance.

Working with our local daughters broke writer’s block for Russell. She wrote “Quasheba, Quasheba” about her birth father’s original ancestor in the New World, an enslaved Ghanaian woman who was transported to Grenada. And in the summer and fall of 2019, Russell wrote the songs on the tour bus Our Native Daughters that would land on her solo album. She and Nero started building the songs by sharing their ideas online.

“The story we unearthed on this project really made me understand my own story in the context of this continuum,” she said. “Bigotry and abuse are intergenerational trauma. It’s not just my story. “

Russell was born in Montreal to a teenage Scottish Canadian mother and a visiting student from Grenada who returned home before her mother knew she was pregnant. Allison spent her early years in nursing. But when her mother got married – to a white man who grew up in a separate, so-called “sunset town” in Indiana that prohibited blacks from staying in town after dark – the couple took custody of the five year old Allison. “They just gave me to them,” she recalled. “He was seen as the savior.”

Instead, Russell said, “It’s been a terrible decade.”

She went on to explain how the situation seemed to her as a child. “It is someone you depend on who appears to be kind and loving. Kids are incredibly good at double thinking, borrowing from Orwell – just to separate your brain. And that worked for me until puberty. And then it was like I couldn’t keep the worlds separate anymore, and it was devastating. “

At 15, she ran away from home. She was still in high school, slept in cemeteries or friends’ homes, hung out in student lounges at McGill University and the cathedral, and had a cup of tea in 24-hour cafes. The album begins with “Montreal”, her gentle thanks to a benevolent city: “You wouldn’t let me hurt,” she sings.

In rural Persephone, Russell remembers a teenage friend who offered refuge and comfort. “Blood on my shirt, two torn buttons / Could have killed me back then, oh, if I let him,” she sings. “I had nowhere to go but I had to get away from him / My petals are broken but I’m still a flower.” She escapes to Persephone’s bed; The music is optimistic and hopeful and enjoys the comfort.

“It was that awakening to regaining a part of you that was all about pain, shame, and misery,” Russell said.

Russell moved across Canada to Vancouver. She was still in contact with her mother, and in 2001 she learned that a niece and nephew were moving in with their parents. She flew back to Montreal to file rape and assault claims against her adoptive father. “The detective sat me down and said: 90 percent of these cases will not be brought to justice. Of the cases brought to trial, very few can win conviction. Are you sure you wanna do this? There is no longer any physical evidence. ‘

“And I said,” Yeah, I want to do that, “she said,” because my niece will be next in line if I don’t. “

Music has always been a haven. Russell grew up singing; One of her earliest memories, she said, was hiding under the piano when her mother was playing classical music. One of her hangouts in Montreal during her adolescence was Hurley’s Irish Pub, where a violinist, Gerry O’Neill, strongly encouraged her to become a musician. In Vancouver, she bonded with her aunt Janet Lillian Russell, a songwriter who got Allison into studio sessions. Russell also met Trish Klein, who was in a group called Be Good Tanyas; They founded Po ‘Girl together.

Even then, Russell’s songwriting hinted at her past. She wrote the line “He used me like a woman” in Part Time Poppa, a Po ‘Girl song from the 2004 album “Vagabond Lullabies”. It was based on a song from a compilation of vintage blues women from the Library of Congress – Bandanna Girls ‘“Part Time Papa” from 1939 – and Po’ Girl’s song sounded stylized and distant. Another Po ‘Girl song, Corner Talk, was based on conversations with a local sex worker. Russell re-cast it for her solo album as “All of the Women”, a stark, modal banjo ballad.

After police found other women who had attacked their adoptive father, he pleaded guilty to reducing charges and was given a three-year prison sentence with a chance for earlier parole. Russell wrote “No Shame,” which was released in 2009 by Po ‘Girl. “He took 10 years of childhood away from me and spent a maximum of three years in prison,” she sang bitterly. “How can a country’s judicial code be such a world that is not fair?”

But those songs were exceptions on the albums she made with Po ‘Girl and then Birds of Chicago. “At the time, I was trying to do something I wasn’t ready to do,” she said. “I really feel the difference this process is going through now. There are conversations that we have in the mainstream now that we just haven’t had it. There wasn’t this network of survivors that we have now, there wasn’t #MeToo back then. And I’m a mother now, and that changed everything. That gave me courage and armor. “

In 2017, Russell and Nero moved to Nashville, attracted by the musician community. English songwriter Yola stayed with them often on her visits to Nashville as she made and promoted her 2019 debut album. She officially moved in with them during the pandemic.

“When I was visiting and we were hanging out, there was this process of preparing to tell this story,” Yola said in an interview. “We would definitely have conversations in which we worked on this strength and the feeling of existing, of daring to be yourself and of telling your truest truth. It’s really nice to see her get to this place where she is. Now is the time. “

In September 2019, the annual Americanafest had brought roots musicians to Nashville, and Russell took the opportunity to record their album with guests like Yola and the McCrary Sisters. With producer Dan Knobler and a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Russell made “Outside Child” in just four days: three or four takes per song, most of them live in the studio with a full band. But the music is brilliant and varied, from the troubled minor key rock of “The Runner” to the eerie, feedback-capable “Hy Brasil” to “The Hunters”, which has a touch of Caribbean flair, while Russell sings a kind of fable about scooping wolves to escape the hunters: their parents.

Carlile got an early copy of the album and was “blown away” by it. “As a songwriter, her abstract poetry mixed with a literal mind is just amazing,” she said. “It can lead you into the ether and describe something to you in an abstract way and then bring you straight into a brutal reality. I remember thinking this was one of the best conceptual albums I’ve ever heard. “

Carlile was on the phone. She had recently finished producing a Tanya Tucker album for Fantasy Records and when the label heard “Outside Child” Russell signed it. “I didn’t get Allison to get a record deal,” insisted Carlile. “Allison gave Allison a recording deal. I was just trying to find a real way to express my affection for music. “

Recently, Carlile collaborated with Russell and country singer Brittney Spencer on a remake of “Nightflyer,” the album’s first single, which was inspired by an old Gnostic poem with a divine narrator. The track is released to support the Free Black Mama initiative of the nonprofit National Bail Out Collective.

It was both cathartic and exultant for Russell to get “Outside Child” completed and eventually released. “One of the things that I don’t think we talk about as survivors is the extreme joy that comes from being on the other side,” she said. “Part of posting this record is just showing that there is a roadmap in place. You are not defined by your scars. You are not defined by what you have lost. You are not defined by what someone did to you. Yes, that’s part of the story. It’s part of who you become. But it doesn’t define you. “

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Olivia Rodrigo Calls Out Sexist Criticism of Tune Lyrics

BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 1: Olivia Rodrigo attends the Disney + premiere

Image source: Getty / Rachel Luna

Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift’s lyrics are raw, emotional, and catchy at their core. They have a lot in common, and the Drivers License singer has already faced the same criticism that Swift has dealt with since day one. Before releasing their debut album on May 21st AngryRodrigo said recently The guard for noting that “sexist criticism of songwriters like me is told that they only write songs about boys”.

Aside from the fact that songs about love and relationships are bops, criticism like this is inherently linked to gender stereotypes that perpetuate harmful ideologies about women’s sexuality. Fortunately, Rodrigo doesn’t have any of this. “I write about things that I feel very intensely – and I feel heartbreak and longing very intensely – and I think that’s authentic and natural,” she said. “I don’t really understand what people should write about. Should I write a song about income taxes? How should I write an emotional song about it?”

In addition, Rodrigo pointed out how nuanced songs about heartbreak and romance can often be. “Something I’m really proud of is that this record talks about emotions that are difficult to talk about or that aren’t really socially acceptable, especially for girls: anger, jealousy, defiance, sadness, they are called b * tchy frowned and moaned and complained or whatever, “she said. “But I think they are such valid emotions.” With Rodrigo’s debut album out just around the corner, we can’t wait to learn every lyric about love and sing them from the bottom of our hearts.

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‘Greatest Summer season Ever’ Evaluate: Not Simply One other Music and Dance

‘Best Summer Ever’ Review: Not Just Another Song and Dance

“Best Summer Ever” is a high school musical. It’s not a “high school musical” – it’s better. Delicate and exuberant, it contains set pieces based on the model of “Footloose” and “Grease” and feels closer to these films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This type of film vibrates with the energy of the people who made it and whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen. The actors and filmmakers seemed to have had a very good time bringing “Best Summer Ever” to life. Seeing it made me happy.

In Michael Parks Randa’s and Lauren Smitelli’s film (available upon request), Tony (Rickey Wilson Jr.) is the star quarterback who privately longs to become a ballet dancer. Sage (Shannon DeVido) is the daughter of hippies who work in the pot trade and whose nomadic lifestyle has made it difficult for her to settle down. Tony and Sage fall in love at summer camp, but when summer ends and Sage ends up in Tony’s school, the young lovers are besieged by the usual teen movie crises – the scheming cheerleader (MuMu), the soccer rival (Jacob Waltuck). and of course the big game, the outcome of which rests heavily on Tony’s reluctant shoulders.

It’s all very familiar. What’s new is the cast, largely composed of actors with a range of physical and mental disabilities. These disabilities are never mentioned, and disabilities do not play a role in the plot. The effect of this inclusivity is a sense of amazing warmth and camaraderie that is most compelling during the film’s many original musical numbers, which are staged and shot with panache. The cast has a wonderful screen presence – especially DeVido, whose turn it is as the heroine in love. Representation is important. And in “Best Summer Ever” the film comes to life.

The best summer ever
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators.

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Watch This Cowl of Elton John’s “Your Track” on The Voice

Watch This Cover of Elton John's "Your Song" on The Voice

In spite of The voice Since the performers are a group of highly talented singers, not every performance is given standing ovations by the judges. Nick Jonas, John Legend, Blake Shelton, and temporary team leader Kelsea Ballerini don’t stand up for anyone, but Rachel Mac and Bradley Sinclair’s cover of Elton John’s “Your Song” made them jump from their seats. Even Shelton yelled, “Finally! Finally! Standing ovations!” At the end.

Jonas had a tough decision to make when choosing Mac and Sinclair for his team, especially since Legend said both singers sounded “perfect” during the performance. Ballerini advised Jonas to pick Sinclair, but Shelton left Mac more thinking when comparing the 16-year-old to Jonas’ experience in the industry as a teenager. We do not envy who is allowed to stay! Check out the full performance above and decide who you think Jonas should have picked for himself.

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Eurovision Track Contest Disqualifies Belarus Over Political Lyrics

Eurovision Song Contest Disqualifies Belarus Over Political Lyrics

The long unrest in Belarus has had an impact on this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The organizers have excluded the country from competing for songs that have been found to have repeatedly violated rules that exclude political content.

The country’s original song entry, “Ya Nauchu Tebya” (I’ll teach you) by the band Galasy ZMesta, was criticized by opposition groups who claim that lyrics like “I’ll teach you to keep the line” endorsed President Aleksandr G Lukashenkos violence against protests against the government. Eurovision fans launched an online petition urging organizers to withdraw Belarus from the competition.

This month the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the international music spectacle, wrote to the Belarusian national broadcaster BTRC that the program was not eligible for participation in the musical talent show in the Dutch city of Rotterdam this May.

“The song calls into question the apolitical nature of the competition,” said the broadcasting union’s statement.

Belarus was given the opportunity to submit a modified version of the song or a new melody. After evaluating the replacement, the union issued a further statement on Friday evening that “the new submission is also against the rules” and that Belarus will be disqualified.

Belarus was ravaged by large-scale protests for weeks last year after Mr Lukashenko won a landslide victory in a sham election for many Western governments in August. His security forces then brutally cracked down on mass demonstrations.

Both songs, which the Eastern European nation submitted for Eurovision this year, have been criticized because they were viewed by many as texts and images close to the government. The band performing the songs, Galasy ZMesta, also found something on their website that could be interpreted as an anti-protest message. Targeting people who are “trying to destroy the land we love and live in,” she added, “We cannot remain indifferent to them”.

The rules of Eurovision state that the event is non-political and that “no texts, speeches, gestures of political, commercial or similar nature are allowed in the competition”.

Belarus started participating in Eurovision in 2004 and has hired one participant every year since then. So it knew what it was doing when it entered songs with political news, said Oliver Adams, correspondent for Wiwibloggs, a widely read website for Eurovision news.

Although the coronavirus pandemic stopped the 2020 Eurovision grand finale, more than 180 million people saw the competition in 2019. As the world’s longest-running annual television music competition, it has amassed a highly dedicated following of enthusiastic fans.

The competition, which began 65 years ago, cemented its place as a cultural phenomenon last year with a Netflix movie gently mocking its eccentricity and obsessive fandom.

It is rare for countries to be attracted to Eurovision for submitting tunes with political overtones, but it has happened before. Georgia submitted the song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” for the 2009 competition in Moscow, but the organizers turned it down because it contained obvious references to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, including the play on words in the song title. Georgia withdrew from the competition that year, but denied that the song contained “political statements”.

That year, Armenia also withdrew from Eurovision. The public broadcaster attributed the decision in part to the political consequences of the conflict with Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“This is not the first time political tensions have found their way into Eurovision,” said Mx. Adams, who uses the gender-neutral courtesy title instead of Mr or Mrs.

“These problems with the Eurovision outer bubble sometimes intrude into the competition,” he added, “but ultimately they will never break it apart.”

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Inside Husavik’s Oscar Bid for a ‘Eurovision Track Contest’ Movie Anthem

Inside Husavik's Oscar Bid for a 'Eurovision Song Contest' Film Anthem

HUSAVIK, Iceland – In the back room of an empty seaside hotel one Monday, a group of locals anxiously gathered around a computer to broadcast live the 93rd Academy Awards nominations, waiting to see if their campaign was successful.

The good news came shortly after 1 p.m. and residents heard the name of their town say again in an American accent: “Husavik”, a song from the Netflix movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga”. was nominated for the best original song.

The song takes its name from this tiny coastal town that is also home to the main characters in the film, and residents have been working for weeks to give the song an Oscar nomination.

“I’m sick of it,” when I heard the news, said Orlygur Orlygsson, 37, one of the activists gathered at the hotel. “The film gave Husavik worldwide recognition, and we wanted to do the same for the song.” Still, he was shocked by the nomination, he said.

Orlygsson is possibly the most famous fan of “Fire Saga” among the 2,300 people who live in this port city on the north coast of Iceland. He owns a cafe called Ja Ja Ding Dong, named after a silly song from the movie. And in February, when “Husavik” was one of the 15 titles on the academy’s longlist for best song, Orlygsson launched the campaign to convince members of the academy to nominate him.

“Fire Saga” tells the story of two musicians from Husavik, played by Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams. The couple – who are “probably not” brother and sister – are selected by default to represent Iceland in the Eurovision Song Contest after a ship exploded with more prominent Icelandic singers.

Let’s go into the world of “neon lights and billboards”, although in the end they find that there is no place like home. “Husavik” is their Eurovision act, the triumphant climax of the film.

When the film hit Netflix in June, critics weren’t impressed. Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for the New York Times: “This covered farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.”

But fans of the Eurovision Song Contest, which draws 200 million television viewers each year, embraced the film in a pandemic year when the actual competition was canceled for the first time since its inception in 1956. And once the residents of Husavik started their online campaign, thousands of these fans spread the word on social media.

The campaign shows a fictional Husavik resident named Oskar Oskarsson, who raves about the city in a video published on the campaign website, in which only “another Oskar” is missing.

In the ironic video, a woman pretends that a fish is an Oscar statue and residents leave gifts to elves to help with the campaign. “People in Husavik are very excited,” said the campaign website.

The video was viewed up to 200,000 times on YouTube and social media platforms, according to the organizers.

The actor in the video is Sigurdur Illugason, a local house painter who is now performing in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors” in the Husavik Theater Club for a masked audience of 50 people.

Kristjan Magnusson, the mayor of Husavik, said the main value of the campaign is to lift the spirits of the people in the city. “The fun of getting together for a big project is the most important thing,” he said. “The rest is a bonus.”

Molly Sanden, who sings for McAdams’ character on the track, praised the Husavik people for gathering behind the song. “The campaign shows that the city has the heart and the spirit that the song is about,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Sweden.

She said she hoped to visit Husavik once the pandemic is over to see the mountains, northern lights and seagulls described in the song lyrics.

The lyrics could apply to most of Iceland’s coastal communities, and the demo of the song was written with Husavik as a placeholder before the film’s director and producers visited Iceland to decide on a location for their film.

“I first heard a demo of the song when we were driving around Iceland looking for locations,” said Leifur Dagfinnsson, who runs the local production company True North that worked on Fire Saga.

The original plan, he said, was to find a town in the southern half of the island near the capital, Reykjavik, in order to save money on transportation. Husavik is closer to the Arctic Circle and has never been the setting for an international film production.

But the strong demonstration with Husavik was the decisive factor in favor of the northern city.

“Husavik is easier to pronounce than other Icelandic city names,” said Dagfinnsson. That gave him a clear textual advantage over Stykkisholmur (Stikk-is-hohlm-ur), a town he said “made sense from a budgetary point of view”.

Husavik has more whale watching boats than fishing vessels, and unlike the town in Fire Saga, there are half a dozen bars.

Tourism is the city’s main industry, and part of the reason a group of adults had time to campaign for the song is the widespread underemployment created by the pandemic. Residents hope that tourists will sing the city’s name in their car’s GPS as soon as Iceland allows vaccinated foreign visitors.

Leonardo Piccione, an Italian artist who lives in Husavik, noted that the tiny town had linked “two of the greatest television events in the world” and added, “I think you can work with that.”

The activists hope to build on the popularity of the Oscar nomination to open a Eurovision museum next to Café Ja Ja Ding Dong with memorabilia from Icelandic contestants who have never won the competition. And of course they will post more Oskar Oskarsson videos when the Academy members start voting next month.

It is widely predicted that “Speak Now” from “One Night in Miami” or Golden Globe winner “Io Si (Seen)” from “The Life Ahead” will win the best original song. Also nominated are “Fight for You” from “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “Hear My Voice” from “The Trial of the Chicago 7”, the third Netflix film in this category.

Win or lose, “Husavik” is now part of the urban fabric. The local soccer team, the Volsungs, play the pre-game soundtrack, and the children’s choir regularly plays the Icelandic portion of the song.

Fire Saga executive producer Savan Kotecha co-wrote the lyrics for the song using Google Translate for the Icelandic lines and Google Street View to get a feel for the city.

“It never occurred to me that the song would have a special meaning for the people there,” he said in an interview. “Now we really want to win for Husavik.”

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Watch Courteney Cox Play Associates Theme Music on Piano

Watch Courteney Cox Play Friends Theme Song on Piano

Courteney Cox knows how to hold that Friends Nostalgia alive. On February 17th, the actress played the all-too-famous theme song from the ’90s sitcom “I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts on her piano with the legendary clap. Musician Joel Taylor accompanied Cox on guitar, and together the duo made it. “How did I do it?” she asked fans in her caption.

This is not the first time Friends Star has shown her musical talents. In the past, she has teamed up with her 16-year-old daughter Coco Arquette for duets, with Cox on piano and Arquette on vocals. The two covered a mix of songs, from Demi Lovato’s “Anyone” to “Burn” by Hamilton. I think Cox Friends The cover has to hold us up while we wait for the highly anticipated reunion, which has been postponed for next month’s shooting. In the meantime, the actress asked for recommendations on what to learn next. . . How about a piano rendition of “Smelly Cat”? Take a full look at Cox’s cover above.