They adore performing and take their music seriously, but their love for music is stronger than their loyalty to one group or sound. Despite the tensions that run high between the band members, it’s a fun little trifle, because the musicians do have lives outside of their music. While it doesn’t touch at all on the rich history of white musicians co-opting or straight up stealing the music of black musicians, it treats everyone pretty calmly. I was worried, a bit, when I picked this up that the novel might mock the band. Jimmy acquires several new members, from a trio of girls to a wildman vocalist, but the oddest is Joey “The Lips” Fagan, an older man who claims to have played with the greats. According to Jimmy, they’ll be the new face of Dublin Soul. Jimmy appoints himself their manager, introduces them to James Brown, and renames them the Commitments. In the late eighties, a pair of young men decide to abandon their budding synthpop band (the name And And! And is too much for them) and take their talents to Jimmy Rabbitte, the one person they know who knows music inside and out. The Commitments is about that love, in a cozily haphazard way, and not the specific kind of music (although the novel does try to get some comedic mileage out of several Irishmen taking to sixties soul so whole-heartedly). (Which is why I like Ke$ha so much see the Ke$ha-only version of “ Timber.”) As the ancient fannish saying goes, it’s not what you love, it’s how you love it, and that’s helped me understand music and sports fans over the past few years. I was an angry preteen with a bad haircut who expressed herself through copious meta.Īnd it’s through that fannish lens that I’ve come to embrace and accept my camp taste in music-the more overproduced and cheesy, the better. Eventually, I reached out with a rigid right hand and played a few notes, but it was already clear to my brother and I that I wasn’t a shy young musician bursting to break free through song. I stared at the keys, which, even a few years into my musical education, remained so alien to me that I couldn’t play without alternating madly between looking at the sheet music and looking at my hands. (Currently in rotation: “Let It Go” and “Happy,” two songs that I heard, felt meh about, and knew I would be in love with in a week.) I took piano lessons for several years, but the main thing I remember about the instrument is my brother, an actual musical-type person, asking me to improvise something without sheet music when I was about twelve or thirteen. True, you can catch me singing at all times, but that’s mostly because my eternal internal monologue involves a mixtape. I have a complicated relationship with music.įirst and foremost, I am not actually a musical person.
0 kommentar(er)
