Lew wrote:
"Some more obviously than others" is a huge understatement. The Bee Gees disco of the title song is horridly anachronistic.
Well, yes, but it's very clearly *supposed* to be that way. The film *wants* to draw your attention to the anachronism of Frankie Valli singing over a disco beat. (I can only talk about the movie -- haven't ever seen the original stage version.)
It bears no resemblance to the 1950s at all and doesn't even pretend to. You're a better musicologist than I am, so I'll take your word for it that the faux-1950s songs of the original show are not sufficiently authentic to trick an expert into thinking they really were written in the 1950s ... but if you really hear no difference between the 'manufactured nostalgia' of 50s-style songs like "Beauty School Dropout" or "Greased Lightning" and the blatant disco of 70s-style songs "Grease is the Word" or "You're the One That I Want', then you're just nuts.
If I was claiming there was "no difference," then I wouldn't have written "some more obviously than others," now, would I?
Grease (the movie) is like Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" -- or, for that matter, Mingus's "My Jelly Roll Soul" or Stravinky's Concerto in D. Sometimes it's an *almost* plausible pastiche of a "historical" style, and sometimes it's deliberately, jarringly ahistorical.
That may not be your thing, particularly -- I don't have any particular affection for the movie or the songs -- but it just seems weird to complain that the music is anachronistic when the movie does absolutely everything in its power to make you filter the nostalgic 1950's setting through a 1970's sensibility. That is, as I said, what I take the whole *point* of Grease (the movie) to be. You might be on less shaky ground complaining about the anachronistic music in a show like "Dream Girls," where there doesn't seem to be any reason at all for the music to sound so totally unlike Motown.
Cheers, - Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://secretsociety.typepad.com Brooklyn, NY _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
