by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent the rest of the evening watching the 45th
American Music Awards on ABC, one of
those rump “awards” shows produced by Dick Clark Productions (the man finally croaked, but his production company lives on, though
I remember reading that it’s either been sold or is in the process of being
sold to a Chinese company — oh, well, the Chinese are going to end up owning
America after all this is over, especially if the Republican tax bill goes
through and leaves us owing an even larger national debt to them) but mainly an
excuse to present a succession of music stars in more or less representative
performances. The big news about this show was that they were presenting a
lifetime achievement award to Diana Ross — and quite frankly, one of the
attractions of the show for me was to see how well she’s held up, both
physically and vocally. The answer is “quite well” — you had to wait until the
very end to hear her, of course, but she did a medley that showed off her voice
as it stands now. Her voice sounds pretty much as it did in the glory days —
most of the songs in her medley were her solo hits from the 1970’s (the host —
more on her later — said that
probably everyone remembers the lyrics to all Ross’s songs, to which I
naturally responded, “I don’t think too many people out there still know the
words to ‘Muscles’,” her attempt at a hit when she briefly left Motown Records
for RCA in the 1980’s) and they started out pretty forgettably, but the voice
itself is in excellent shape and she didn’t have to resort to the dodges a lot
of white singers of similar vintage need: taking down the keys or just dropping
the top notes they can’t sing anymore to safer, lower ones. Ross’s medley started
with “I’m Coming Out,” then did “Take Me Higher” and “Ease On Down the Road”
from The Wiz (of course I’m going
to recount my reaction when I heard Diana Ross was being cast as Dorothy in the
film of The Wiz — “Not content to
trash the legacy of Billie Holiday, she’s going to trash the legacy of Judy
Garland as well”) and “The Best Years of My Life” before she closed with a great song, her cover of the Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell hit
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” that was one of her first solo hits. Before
that she was saluted with a montage of her film and TV appearances, including a
clip of her singing “Strange Fruit” from Lady Sings the Blues (“They had to ruin it for you,” Charles joked), after which they showed a montage
of clips from her film Mahogany
and boasted that in addition to starring in the film Ross designed her own
outfits for it (remember that she was playing a fashion model who had three men
lusting after her, including Anthony Perkins doing essentially Psycho lite and the one she finally ended up with, Billy
Dee Williams, her co-star from Lady Sings the Blues this time cast as a Black community activist in
Chicago clearly modeled on Jesse Jackson). When I saw Mahogany I thought it was comparatively inoffensive next to Lady
Sings the Blues but it also wasn’t much as
a movie — it was essentially a 109-minute music video for one of her best solo
records, “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?”
Ross’s segment came at the end of
a three-hour extravaganza hosted by her daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, one of the
stars of the hit sitcom Blackish
which by pure coincidence (not!) just happens to air on ABC, and as La Diana wrapped up the show she was surrounded on stage by
her children and grandchildren, many of whom looked awfully white (remember
that both Ross’s husbands have been white men). The show opened with a duet by
Pink (blessedly earthbound, which was not the case for her later appearance on the show — see below) and Kelly
Clarkson doing R.E.M.’s classic “Everybody Hurts” as a tribute to the recent
terrorism victims in New York, Texas and elsewhere. It was one of the best
moments of the show, largely because it was one of the few times a song of real
weight and power was sung by voices capable of doing justice to it. Then, after
they gave out a few awards — as usual in a show like this these days, the
“awards” just seemed like an afterthought to the performances — Demi Lovato,
who somehow got the reputation as a lightweight but strikes me as a singer of
real power and soul, did “Sorry/Not Sorry,” a show about male-female relations
and the different expectations straight people of both genders bring to their
encounters and yet another anthem in which women are saying that they’re no
longer going to take being exploited by sexist, domineering or abusive men.
Next up was Nick Jonas attempting to pursue a post-boy band career with a song
called “Where to Find You” (some of the titles are my best guesses because the
titles weren’t always announced on air, a recurring annoyance to me about music
shows), after which Hailee Stansfield (another young singer who’s quite
impressed me, not only because she’s a strong, emotionally powerful singer but
she’s written a piece with a positive message to young women to believe in
themselves and not follow the entertainment and fashion industries’
expectations of what a “beautiful woman” must be) and someone named Bebe Rieza
(or something like that) joined Florida Georgia Line, a more or less “country”
group, for “Let Me Go.” After that “adult contemporary” award winner Shawn
Mendes sang “Ain’t Nothing Holding Me Back” — it was a nice song and Mendes was
easily the sexiest guy on the show (Nick Jonas has not weathered the years well — even though he’s still
young, he’s got an angular face and those Clark Gable ears: if I were he I’d
grow my hair longer to cover them up), but it’s interesting that the men on the
program were doing old-fashioned (lyrically, not musically) songs about
manipulating women into having sex with them, while the women were singing
anthems of strength, defiance, independence and autonomy.
Though there were a
few of the now-obligatory “digs” at Trump and his politics, mostly at the
beginning and the end, what moved me
most about the show’s politics was precisely the messages of independence that
came from virtually all the songs sung by women — and it also confirmed my
belief that for the last quarter-century (ever since the emergence of Tori Amos
in 1990) the torch of creativity in popular music has passed from men to women:
both the biggest stars and the most artistically advanced musicians of today
are female. Another woman with a voice of strength and power, Selena Gomez,
made a rare TV appearance with a song called “To Get to You” and was the first
performer on the bill to do one of those overwrought productions that annoy me
about many modern music shows — all too often I’ve seen a singer whose voice
was powerful enough to move people without all the frou-frou drown herself in
production values (the worst example these days is Beyoncé, whose real talent
is as a soul singer in the Dinah Washington/Diana Ross mold but who’s drowning
herself in ridiculous production numbers even Busby Berkeley would probably
have regarded as over-the-top) — though it was a good enough song to withstand
the video assault. After that came an inexplicable salute to the 25th
anniversary of one of the worst movies ever made with a major musical star, The
Bodyguard (if you want to read the gory
details of how I feel about this film, see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/bodyguard-warner-bros-1992.html),
and instead of doing what I would have done if I wanted for whatever reason to
pay tribute to The Bodyguard —
bring on the still-living Dolly Parton to sing “I Will Always Love You,” which
she not only wrote but sang far more understatedly and, therefore, more
powerfully than Whitney Houston did — the producers gave Christina Aguilera a
medley that include “I Will Always Love You” and two other songs from the film,
“I Have Nothing” and “I’m Every Woman.” Aguilera seemed determined to
out-Houston Houston on “I Will Always Love You” and take the song even farther
from its plaintive white-country origins, practically screaming out the last verse
in a higher key than the rest. I generally like Christina Aguilera but her
voice is considerably better than some of the uses she and the people running
her career have put it to, and that was certainly true last night.
Then, after
a snippet of one of the contestants of the revitalized American Idol — an intriguing singer named Masia doing, of all
things, a bit of Billy Eckstine’s early-1950’s hit “Fool That I Am” (there were
a few instances in which you could actually vote on some of the awards, but true
to form, ABC allowed you to vote only if you lived on the East Coast: in the
contemptible tradition of East Coast media mavens once again reminding us on
the West Coast that we suck hind tit as far as the media establishment is
concerned, they showed the program out here on a three-hour tape delay and by
the time we got to see it, all
the public voting opportunities had been closed), Lady Gaga was shown from the
middle of a performance in Washington, D.C. (the main part of the program was
done in L.A., which makes the West Coast being made to suck hind tit again with
a time delay even more
infuriating), doing something called “I’ll Fool You with My Love” and looking
great, in a white knit outfit over a flesh-colored body stocking. The piece
wasn’t much but at least it was well structured — one of the things I like
about Gaga is that, unlike a lot of dance music artists who just bark a few
words out over a dance groove and call it a “song,” her songs have identifiable
beginnings, middles and endings, and this one in particular began with a long
piano-and-vocal introduction which Gaga, playing the piano herself, used to
remind us that she’s really a classically trained musician. Then rapper
Macklemore did a duet with a woman whose name I wrote down as “Spartan Grail”
(I highly doubt I got it right!), something supposedly inspirational which I
assume was called “I Feel Glorious” after the refrain the woman was singing in
counterpoint to Macklemore’s too-fast rapping. After that came an odd number by someone who calls himself
Portugal: The Man, “Feel It Still” — the lyrics proclaim his desire to re-live
the 1960’s, and the stage set and in particular the light projections did evoke the 1960’s rock shows, but Portugal: The Man
wears his hair super-short and has little glasses that make him look much more
like a nerd than a hippie. Still, it’s a nice song. Then one of my current
favorites, Alessia Cara, came out with someone named Zed for one of her
emotionally wrenching songs, “Stay,” and after that a Black artist named Khalid
(heavy-set and with way too much
beard, but cute enough I couldn’t help but wonder what was under those baggy
tan shorts) joined the rock group Imagine Dragons for “Lightning and Thunder”
(usually those two words come in the reverse order in song titles, but Imagine
Dragons deserve credit for putting the L-word first, since because light is
faster than sound you see the
lightning flash before you hear the thunderclap).
Then Pink came back for a
song called “Nothing but You” — and ramped up her Cirque du Soleil antics to
totally absurd lengths, rappelling herself and her backup singers and dancers
up the side of the Marriott Hotel and singing the song virtually in mid-air. I
couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if a Vegas-type shooter had
decided to attack the event and been able to pick off Pink while she was
floating helplessly with nothing to keep her in place but a thick wire cable.
Then someone named Niall Horan did a song called “Slow Hands” — Charles, who’d
come home by this point, joked, “Where is Alicia Pointer when we need her?” —
though I answered that Horan’s song could be considered an answer record to the
Pointer Sisters’ big hit. The final numbers before Diana Ross’s tribute were a
medley of two songs by Kelly Clarkson — one her first hit from her star-making
win of the first American Idol
and one her current record (she’s got pretty heavy-set by now but that voice is
still powerful, and 15 years later it’s still intact) — and a bizarre
performance by a six-man South Korean boy band called BTS, whose song was
pretty incomprehensible because its lyrics are a mishmash of English and Korean
and are spat out at such a rate it would be hard to understand them even if you
knew both languages. The 45th annual American Music Awards was quite a good show in may respects — especially
when women were performing; as I noted above, for the last quarter-century
women in music have been considerably more creative than their male
counterparts, both in terms of performance (the voices of modern-day pop women
are strong and powerful, while most of the men sound pretty wimpy and the few
that don’t, like Frank Ocean and Drake, weren’t on this program) and in terms
of songwriting: men are still writing songs about wearing down women or
tricking them into sex, while women are writing songs that say, “Oh, no, you
don’t! I’m just as strong and powerful as you are, and we’re not having a
relationship unless you meet my
needs!”
