Archives for January 27, 2016

I think it’s fair to say that most people think of me as a highbrow-egghead type whose tastes in pop music are meticulously consistent with his tastes in the other arts. For this reason, I thought you might possibly enjoy perusing the following non-comprehensive but nonetheless suggestive list of fifteen pop singles that you’ll almost certainly be surprised to learn that I like—a lot.

Don’t ask why. The reasons vary widely and in some cases inexplicably. Suffice it to say that I like the musical aspect of all these songs very much:

• Blue Öyster Cult, Before the Kiss, a Redcap

• Kim Carnes, Bette Davis Eyes

• Pixies, Gigantic

• Huey Lewis and the News, I Want a New Drug

• Right Said Fred, I’m Too Sexy

• Olivia Newton-John, Magic

• Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis

• The Pointer Sisters, Neutron Dance

• Melissa Manchester, Nice Girls

• Alice Cooper, No More Mr. Nice Guy

• Chesney Hawkes, The One and Only (best known in this country as the theme from Doc Hollywood, which is where I first heard it)

• Murray Head, One Night in Bangkok

• Hall & Oates, Private Eyes

• The Bangles, Walk Like an Egyptian

• Toto, 99

Ethel Merman sings Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” on NBC’s Texaco Star Theater. She is introduced by Milton Berle, the host. Merman introduced the song in the original 1934 Broadway production of Anything Goes. This episode was originally telecast on March 22, 1949:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

“She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease—of suffering as opposed to doing. To ‘do’—it hardly mattered what—would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.”

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady