I feel I have sorely neglected all of you song-poem fans of
late, so to make up for that here’s a brace of badness from the 2008 Hilltop
Records compilation America. Hilltop is
that rarest of song poem outfits, a company that still exists today and is still
taking money from unsuspecting rubes.
Operating out of Los Angeles, in all fairness Hilltop’s
productions are pretty easy on the ear, and many of the songwriters who have
submitted their material seem to be pretty happy with the results - if the
testimony page on the Hilltop website is anything to go by. But like all
song-poem outfits income is more important than the quality of the source
material, and no matter how professional your singers or musicians are, there’s
not a lot you can do when the lyrics supplied are somewhere between mediocre
and downright awful.
Summer’s End is a
perfect example. Nice to listen to but the lyrics are utterly brainless: the
opening lines ‘My eyes looking ‘cross fields of dying flowers with tears of
sadness I see dying as they see each one giving its offspring the same sense of
pleasure, same wonder of colours they gave to me’ are tongue-twistingly
terrible. Composer Charles A. Hopkins should stick to writing poetry for his
church magazine: these words read far better as prose than lyrics.
Crystal Gable’s Jalapena Senorita – ‘doing the salsa, shaking the maracas like hot
sauce’ - is downright peculiar: a thinly veiled lesbian love song to a Mexican woman whose ‘body should be in the Hall of Fame’. The song’s original intention
is obscured by being sung by a male vocalist, one Cody Lyons (who also handles
the vocal on Summer’s End), but
seriously, what on earth could Ms. Gable have been thinking?
Enjoy!
"but seriously, what on earth could Ms. Gable have been thinking?"
ReplyDeleteI think that should have been rewritten as "but seriously, what on earth could Ms. Gable have been smoking?"