Monday, May 03, 2010

A song for Janis

Leonard Cohen sings his song "Chelsea Hotel #2". Another sad love story written by Leonard Cohen as a middle-aged man... for he was indeed a middle-aged man as he was wooing a young Janis Joplin in the halls and lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. It could be a maudlin song, yet somehow you feel like you got a glimpse of Truth when listening to it...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

4 comments:

  1. Since you mentioned Janis: do you ever watch American Idol. I don't, but my boss sent me a youtube of Crystal Bowersox (she's local, so everyone here is in love with her). Comments were comparing her to Janis. I was unimpressed. Her voice, while pretty, just didn't have the raw emotion I heard in Janis' singing.

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  2. "Pretty" and "Janis" don't go together in the same sentence. Janis, and her voice, were raw and wild and uncontrollable, but "pretty" only in the way of internal beauty. I don't own a television, and I can't watch YouTube at my present location, but if Bowersox sings "pretty", she's *nothing* like Janis. Janis woulda spit on the very notion of singing "pretty", she was all about wild emotion in all its glorious rawness, not "pretty".

    - Badtux the Music Penguin

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  3. Aha, I thought I was the only person in America who did not own a television! I did have one, gave it away when I dropped my cable connection. With the increasing number of commercials, I felt they should be paying me to sit through that crap, not making me pay to watch it. And with youtube, hulu, netflix and a computer with dvd player, I'm not missing anything really important. But people still look at me as if I'm an alien, when I let it slip that I've never watched an episode of American Idol, or any of the 'reality' shows.
    If you don't have youtube, how are you finding all these great bits for your blog?

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  4. I do have Youtube at home, but I am not at home.

    Note that I queue up videos sometimes weeks in advance. Thus if we're talking about Janis today, if a song by Janis shows up a couple of weeks from now, you'll know that's how long my queue was at the time of this discussion...

    - Badtux the Migratory Penguin

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