High Fidelity as a Musical

It seems that they're making a High Fidelity musical (via Stereogum). This sounds like it has the potential to be incredibly naff, a terrible travesty of a pop cultural milestone. Of course, I thought that when I first heard about the film version, but it turned out to be pretty good.

But checking out the "music" section of the musical's website (and I use the quote marks deliberately), there's only one thing to say: the songs sound atrocious. The Rob character of the book or film would kick the singer of these words straight out of Championship Vinyl - check out the lyrics of "Desert Island Top 5 Breakups":
"These were the ones that tore my heart out / These were the ones that ate me alive
You might squeeze the top 10 Laura / But you're nowhere near the top 5..."
Urgh. "Nine Percent Chance" (which refers to when Laura says facetiously to Rob that there's a 9% chance of them getting back together) has the even more execrable couplet: "You paved the way for romance / When you kept him out of your pants".

Good Lord, at first glance, it sounds like they kept all the plot elements and didn't understand a single bit of the soul of the book.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Synchronicity at work: I was reading about this on Stereogum and my first thought was to tell you about it, but you beat me to actually posting about it.

It does sound like it would be terrible, doesn't it?
10 September 2006 at 03:17
Anonymous said…
All I wanna do is write a stupid song
With a three line chorus, you can sing along ...
Look at me, tell me i'm a loser
A simple minded microphone abuser ...
10 September 2006 at 08:21
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