Dispatches 13 October 2000

Which is the funnier piece of music news this week: that Barry White is scheduled to speak at Oxford this week (a deep house remix of his "You See the Trouble With Me" was one of the biggest hits in England this summer, so his star's on the ascent), or that 'NSync are going to star in Grease 3? Now why in the world, if you're a multiplatinum-selling group, do you choose to star in the sequel to a terrible sequel? I hope this isn't them trying to "do a Bjork" and win prizes at Cannes. What makes people want to cross over from one medium to another? What makes them think they can succeed in multiple fields? In related news, KISS bassist Gene Simmons is creating a sitcom for VH1.

Actually, maybe we should get Barry White to speak at Harvard. I want voice lessons.

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

So it's like a time warp (Rocky Horror show 25th anniversary!) in the music store this week. On the new releases shelf sits a bizarro collection of performers that seem like a catalogue of my musical consciousness in the past: the Wallflowers, Collective Soul, Slash (recording with his Slash's Snakepit band, not with Guns N' Roses) and Tiffany. Tiffany!

Cover to Cover

Which reminds me, I have to enter annoyance-management (anger-management's little kid brother) classes soon, since I get overly upset when people don't realize songs are cover versions. It's sort of understandable when the original is obscure (Soft Cell covering Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love"), but when the original was once a fairly big song (Tiffany covering Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now", Sixpence None the Richer covering The La's' "There She Goes") it just riles me.

And does anyone else get annoyed when people have the wrong artists' names listed in Napster? I feel like Ned Flanders in that Simpsons episode where he goes ballistic.

Still, it's hard to truly hate cover versions. I'm of the opinion that anything that brings the original back to attention is a good thing, even if the cover is execrable. So Marilyn Manson is going to cover "Suicide is Painless" – the theme song to M*A*S*H – on the soundtrack to the Blair Witch Project sequel. Is it just me, or is the whole Manson thing way too tired? But it's a great song, so bleak ("suicide is painless / it brings on many changes / and I can take or leave it as I please") that the lyrics had to be excised for the TV version of M*A*S*H, and the attempt to return it to cultural consciousness is well appreciated. (Actually, a great cover of the song already exists: the Manic Street Preachers did one way back in the early 1990s.)

Concert News

Classical music aficionados should note that Symphony Hall is holding an open house this Sunday (Oct. 15) to celebrate its centenary. Local band Seventeen and Irish group the Young Dubliners perform at the Hynes Convention Center for CollegeFest, which has apparently made one Crimson arts executive all excited not because of the presence of classy indie bands, but over the presence of two people from MTV's The Real World.

But the big concert is hipster du jour Moby, performing at Avalon on Thursday. I would try to be excited, but since I'm instinctively anti-hype and since I think Moby is pretentious, I'm feeling blase. Plus, I'm getting rather tired of hearing Play, since people keep proclaiming it to me to be "the greatest electronic music album ever." More sense of music history, please.