Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Coming to a cutout bin near you.

Glenn goes ga-ga over "Upstairs at Larry's," an unnecessary collection of Lawrence Welk dance club remixes.

The reviewers at Amazon all seem to love it, too.

So I guess I'll be the only one covering my ears in horror. This is just the second coming of "Hooked on Swing," a big-band follow-up to the enormously popular "Hooked on Classics," a short-lived novelty genre which added synthesized drumbeats and handclaps to a mishmash of your grandparents' favorite records. Perhaps it was an attempt to insert Benny Goodman and Mozart back into the Top 40 Countdown again. (Yes, I owned both the "Swing" and "Classics" albums back in the early 80's. [I have that on vinyl!] I'm ashamed now.)

"Upstairs at Larry's" moves the "Hooked on . . ." formula to the rave scene, resulting in frighteningly dark and psychedelic renditions of "Blue Velvet" and "Let it be Me." Other cuts immediately call to mind those awful Six Flags commercials with the dancing geezer.

Furthermore, the original version of "Baby Elephant Walk" was the most painful earworm of its day, and even one remix version is too many. So of course "Upstairs at Larry's" includes two.

Kids these days don't know what's bad for 'em.

2 Comments:

At 2:39 PM, Blogger Bigwig said...

Got a song for you. :)

Just put the Welk remixes in my shopping cart at Amazon. The wife was nuts for Welk growing up.

 
At 7:08 PM, Blogger Drew said...

Aaaaaiiiee! My ears! My ears! (And my brain cells!)

Okay, this isn't exactly . . . "bad" . . . particularly during the segments where they leave that infernal melody behind and get all improvisational.

On the plus side, at least it's not "Popcorn"

 

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