Vogue

I had a dream that Madonna was my "lady-friend" and that I was buying her a pair of heels as a gift. It was all very butch-femme. Only, in the dream, I realized I couldn't possibly afford shoes that Madonna would actually deign to wear.

I woke up with "Vogue" in my head.

Artist: Madonna
Year: 1990
Rating: Warm

Note: Unbelievably, this is the first Madge song that's made it into the blog. I've had other songs of hers in my head over the span of the project, but none upon waking til now.

Little Mouth

My, but Carrie Brownstein can lay down a guitar riff. Pant, pant.

Artist: Sleater-Kinney
Year: 1996
Rating: Luke Hot

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

This is exactly the sort of song lodged in the collective consciousness that makes writing this blog worthwhile! Why I woke up with it, I've no right idea. A look at the lyrics reveals a serious genderqueer narrative in the song that I'd never noticed before: not only is the girl described as "handsome" by the narrator (I know, not an uncommon description for a woman in those days) but at length, the daring young trapeze artist has purloined the singer's love away, trained her for the trapeze, made her "assume a masculine name" and by the last verse, she's wooing the girls in the audience who take her for the daring young man. Handsome, indeed!



It's possible (though I can't say for certain) that my first encounter with "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" was in the Popeye short from 1934, which of course I didn't see til I was a kid in the '70s, some 40-odd years later, and more than a century after the song was first published in 1867. If, in fact, my neuronal association with this song connects to Popeye, then perhaps this earworm manifested itself due to some references my pal Scott and I made several days ago to Popeye, the Robert Altman movie. Songs from said movie are also still stuck in my head from its debut thirty (gulp!) years ago. Music and memory: kind of awesome.

Artist (original): Gaston Lyle, Alfred Lee, George Leybourne
Year: 1867
Popularized: 1930s, various artists
Performed above by Henry Hall and His Orchestra, Len Berman on vocals, c. 1930s
Rating: Warm

Tzena Tzena Tzena

No idea why this Israeli folk song was in my head this morning. Its melody is most familiar to me, because it was repurposed as the Camp Shalom alma mater that I sang on an almost daily basis every summer of my life from age five til my early twenties. The above version is by the Wellingtons from 1964.

The most popular version of the song was the Weavers' spin, in which the simple Hebrew lyrics (encouraging the girls to go find a good army man) were replaced by English words with an entirely different narrative (about dancing and celebrating in the city square). The web search for this song yields some surprisingly wonderful results, including an Arlo Guthrie rendition in which he riffs, in signature trickster style, on the "Gaelic" language in the song, and even a cover of the Weaver's version by trashpop icon Mink Stole and L.A. drag queen Vicky Boofont! Enjoy 'em.

Artists: The Wellingtons, 1964; The Weavers, 1950; Arlo Guthrie, c. 1978; Mink Stole/Vicky Boofont, 2005.
Written by: Issachar Miron, c. 1941; English lyrics by Gordon Jenkins
Rating: Warm

Too Darn Hot

Awesome cover of Cole Porter's song from the 1990 Red, Hot, and Blue AIDS benefit album.

Artist: Erasure
Year: 1990
Rating: Sizzlin'

Galileo

Awesome! Props to Emily and Amy for looking so dykey on the Tonight Show with Leno in 1992! They were my idols in those days. It gave me some goosebumps to see this clip. Haven't had Indigo Girls in my head yet, even though I mentioned them way back in the entry about my musical DNA when starting the blog. Artist: Indigo Girls Year: 1992 Rating: Luke Hot Note: Jackson Browne features in this clip, and also provided backing vocals, along with David Crosby, on the album version.

Self-Loathing Queer

What the fuck? You're a fag*,
Everybody knows that you're totally nelly!
What a queen! And you're not foolin' no one, not this time
You self-loathing queer.

Infectious, irreverent, and incredulous! This tune about a gay boy's tirade at seeing a compatriot engaged in hetero-hand-holding at the grocery store has been circling through my mental soundtrack for days and days, to the point that Amber has asked me to stop whistling it. It's a great track from Chicago's dearly departed grungy post-punk act Three Dollar Bill, founded by Jane Danger and Chris Piss, and active in the queer music scene in the late '90s and early Aughts. Nope, I've never spent time in Chi-town. But I happen to know Mr. Piss. Yes, that's his real name.**

I'm not certain, but this may be the first time I've blogged about an artist I know personally. Does it merit a new tag, I wonder...? And what would I call this tag?

Artist: Three Dollar Bill
Year: 1998
Rating: Luke Hot

Notes:
*I love that you can hear Chris's Upper Midwest accent when he says "fag." It almost rhymes with "keg" rather than "bag." It's one of my favorite regional accents in the States.
**No, it's not his real name.

Tarzan Boy

Oh my god! I haven't thought about this song in ages - it's a classic. And the video is so pleasingly, flamboyantly gay! I'm not sure why queers seemed so invisible when I was a kid in the '80s. All you have to do is open your eyes.

Artist: Baltimora
Year: 1985
Rating: Luke Hot
More about Baltimora/Jimmy McShane here.