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Tuesday, 13 June 2006 20:00 |
| John North
Editor & Publisher
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?®Although he has never earned the respect of critics or much of the public, Barry Manilow was one of the most successful recording artists of the ?¥70s and remains the undisputed No. 1 adult contemporary artist of all time.?∆
?? www.classicbands.com
?ÿ
Reports keep popping up of different entities using a dose of Barry Manilow music ?? cranked up and played over loudspeakers ?? to chase off hooligans.
Just
last week I read a story by Reuters about how officials in the Rockdale
neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, were irked that their streets and
parking lots were infested with young toughs.
Reportedly,
the authorities were annoyed by the presence and the racket eminating
from the hooligans, or ?®hoons,?∆ with their souped-up cars with loud
engines and pulsing music.
?®There are restaurants nearby, and people can??t park in the car park
because they??re intimidated by these hoons,?∆ Councilor Bill
Saravinovski told The Daily Telegraph of Sydney. ?®Daggy music is one
way to make the hoons leave an area because they can??t stand the
music.?∆ (The Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary defines ?®daggy?∆ as
?®unfashionable, or lacking style, even eccentric or stupid.?∆)
Based on a
successful experiment that routed teenage loiterers from an Australian
shopping center several years ago, Rockdale council members decided
that Manilow??s music might be sufficiently uncool to empty a parking
lot favored by ?®hoons.?∆
So a dose of Manilow is the supposed antidote ?? and we will have to
wait and see if the plan works. I think the strategy will succeed,
based on the many other reports I have read of Manilow??s music being
used ?? successfully ?? to drive off so-called undesirables.
Notwithstanding, the aforementioned raises the following questions in my mind:
?ÿ Is it
Manilow??s ?®uncool?∆ image or something in his music itself, especially
when it is turned up, that causes hooligans to flee?
?ÿ Is Manilow??s music that bad? (Ironically, his music has a quite different effect on many women ?? it makes them swoon.)
While I am not a
Manilow fan, I certainly would not categorize myself as someone who
despises the man or his music. In fact, I admire Manilow for his
success. After all, this son of an Irish beer truck driver and a Jewish
woman who soon divorced, rose from the mean streets of Brooklyn to
become, arguably, the world??s most popular singer.
After his parents?? breakup, he and his mother moved in with her family,
the Manilows, who bought a piano. Young Barry found a distraction in
playing the piano, which, coupled with his singing, proved to be his
calling.
Regarding Manilow??s music, critics have described it as nothing more
substantive than sweet-sounding ballads, excessively sentimental or
even schmaltzy. Yet those seem to be the very traits his fans seem to
love.
Manilow the performer has been characterized variously as impossibly
annoying ?? and even ?®a cheeseball.?∆ To that end, critic Jody Rosen of
Music Box noted that Manilow ?®can??t resist turning his signature trick:
the swelling half-step jumps at the outset of the final chorus that
announces things are about to get really emotional.?∆
While the terms ?®cool?∆ and ?®uncool?∆ are relative to different groups, I
feel certain that Manilow and his music will take their rightful place
in history and that his songs will be listened to by generations to
come.
I also think Manilow??s music merits further study, inasmuch as his
songs seem to elicit such radically different responses from those who
hear them. Why? I wonder.
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