a division of the Chersonian Institute

Author: Cher Scholar (Page 4 of 5)

Continuing On With the Cher Specials

So the Christmas album, huh? That was fun!

The bad thing about Christmas albums is that they have a short shelf life for hits and appearances. They end abruptly at the end of the year.

So anyway, where were we?

We were cataloging Cher’s TV appearances that’s where we were, specifically the TV and concert specials.

I’ve been looking forward to doing the early 1980s specials, Cher in Concert from Monte Carlo (1981) and Celebration at Caesars (1983). They are so under-appreciated and yet so unobtrusively crucial in the  timeline of Cher’s slow transformation into becoming a rock singer by the mid-to-late 1980s.

The shows were so important, I kind of procrastinated starting these summaries. I had pages and pages of notes!

Here we go with the rougher but still deliciously ambitious Monte Carlo show!

Cher Scholarin Out in the World

So I noticed a few things at the end of last year while Cher Scholarin.

One was when I was coming home from a family reunion in Cleveland, (where my parents now live), and I was using Spotify logged in as Mr. Cher Scholar to locate Cher’s new Christmas album.  I noticed that the Cher Scholar playlists were coming up kind of high. (See left.)

But then I thought maybe that’s because Mr. Cher Scholar might have played those playlists once before and he was getting a personal shuffle. It’s hard to be scientifically objective in the universe of algorithms.

Results are definitely not consistent. You don’t even get the same major categories searching via phone app versus phone browser or desktop app.

I also visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this visit to Cleveland. Julie had gone earlier in the year and saw the electronic board of fan votes. At that time (May, 2023) Cher was in the #8 position and Britney Spears was the next female #10. She sent me a picture.

Cher was at #4 by the time I visited in November and shockingly Cher was not only the highest-ranking woman but still the only woman (solo or in a band) in the top twenty! Britney Spears was the next female listed at #21. Unbelievable.

But you can chalk all of this up to the kinds of people who visit the Hall of Fame (it’s not a cheap ticket). It’s also  not a pristine sample of everyone’s views by any means. It’s just a sample of the views of people who have the money and interest to travel to Cleveland and visit the RnR HoF.

I myself dutifully voted for Cher, as did Mr. Cher Scholar but I think that was probably just unspoken peer pressure. I don’t think he honestly cares a whit about Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artists.

Some of us have been theorizing the many reason’s Cher, as a record breaker, is not in the HoF: the silly perception of her from the varsity show, the lack of her cool factor in music, dislike of Sonny’s promotional (possible payola) background. My friend Christopher told me last weekend that HoF founder Jenn Wenner (recently removed from the HoF board due to some asinine comments he made about female and black artists), vowed never to let the band Foreigner in due to a personal grievance, which Christopher said was particularly egregious due to the impressive variety of their output.

But then on some basic level I just don’t understand Hall of Fames. We went through the Football Hall of Fame (also near Cleveland) on the same trip. To make sense of them, (and don’t get me started on museum theory and the idea of false scarcity: we’ve been there already), I spent the time counting both footballs (103) and guitars (167). There were no guitars at the Football HoF and no footballs at the Rock and Roll HoF. Go figure.

ASMR

So ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and it’s like the pleasure sensations you might get from certain tactile ambient soundtracks. I first heard about it from the trendy kids at the community college here in Albuquerque. It was a “thing” a few years ago to seek out ASMR videos which include things like people tapping their fingernails on hard surfaces, quietly whispering or silently unwrapping things, samples of vocal fry (okay, if that’s what you’re in to).

I was already primed to like this shit. Mr. Cher Scholar says one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence, is just one long ASMR movie. I can also locate it near my love of really prominent movie foley (like from the 1970s-era) and my love of the sound of my feet walking over the plethora of varieties of New Mexico dirt paths.

So for a while now I’ve wanted to collect up all the Cher-related ASMR videos. Years ago these videos were very pleasant. But I’ve noticed a trend for ASMR practitioners to be too too repetitive (and almost too loud) these days. Full minutes of tapping the outside of a Cher shirt is just silly.

Also, unboxing videos have taken on a life of their own and some don’t even have any ASMR quality. People just like watching things be unboxed as it turns out.

Here’s a playlist for you of both ASMR and unboxing videos:

  1. Unboxing the Christmas album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z24VNjbzgFQ&t=46s
  2. Unboxing a Believe CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF2zUUo5IXo
  3. Unboxing the Believe CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpz4UWLa1B4&t=231s
  4. Unboxing the It’s a Man’s World CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAN99o3mXk
  5. Unboxing It’s a Man’s World  vinyl box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OneddA7ZTOg&t=124s
  6. Cher’s Eau de Couture perfume unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKGcxNgmNM (classic ASMR)
  7. Unboxing the Chersace shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F1uc7rz6lI&t=146s
  8. Some lucky fan got a box of Cher stuff and unboxed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywlU2kdvPV4&t=2154s
  9. Unwrapping the I Paralyze CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgAoAStxayA
  10. Unwrapping the Living Proof CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdONiBIIdA
  11. Cher samples of vocal fry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKJxbNynro8&t=261s
  12. This funny lady enthusiastically whisper-reads a Cher magazine while chewing gum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NZ4rLUvrGQ&t=238s

Cher in Literature

I’m always surprised when I find references to Cher in very fine literature. Last year I found two instances of this. Earlier in 2023 I started reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I really enjoy Murakami and have been working my way through his books. 1Q84 is a tome at 1,157 pages of awesomeness. And the book kept coming back to references of Sonny & Cher and the song “The Beat Goes On.”

Here’s the novel summary from The Encyclopedia Britannica: “Set in Tokyo in an alternate version of the year 1984, Murakami’s reality-bending novel explores star-crossed lovers Aomame and Tengo’s involvement with a mysterious cult. References to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four abound explicitly and thematically.”

Page 499

Page 534

Page 544

Then right before Christmas I read a Donald Barthelme story from the book Forty Stories called ‘Porcupines at the University.” In the story the Dean of a college thinks an oncoming herd of porcupines are all about to enroll at his understaffed university. But a cowboy porcupine wrangler is simply driving them across the country in order to seek his own fame and fortune for his trail songs. He dreams about appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Sonny & Cher Show (which were never concurrently showing but never mind.)

 

Massive New Year Cher Wrap Up

New Dolls

By the way, the new, blonde Cher FunkoPop is out. Sweet!

Christmas is Over

It seems the end of last year got pulled into the vortex of Cher’s Christmas album. And I must say, the convergence of Cher and Christmas was so thrilling to me that I ended up buying something like 31 copies of the album and not just because I was encouraged to buy multiple copies by that cynical practice of an artist releasing multiple covers on the same day, which is not a modern practice, my friend Christopher reminds me but one going back to rock albums of years past, including The Police (Synchronicity), Led Zeppelin (In Through The Out Door which apparently had 6 variants), Genesis (Abacab) and The Rolling Stones (Some Girls).  Hardly, crass pop-album ventures those.

But anyway, everyone at the chile-relleno-making party got a copy as did everyone at my family reunion as did all my family and friends who I exchange with.

But I have a pretty draconian rule that Christmas stops on New Years Day, not on Epiphany (6 January) like many people extend it. It starts on Thanksgiving weekend (this year was an exception) and ends on New Year’s Day. I was out of town this New Year’s Day. Otherwise the ornaments would have been re-boxed already. And we have a snow storm coming now so I probably won’t get everything down until January 6. D’oh!

Anyway, we do need to wrap up two Cher interviews from last year in major magazines, the UK’s You magazine and its U.S. cousin Parade. The covers are even similar.

In You, Joanne Hegarty does a great interview with Cher, remarking on her “vast entourage: PR teams, record-company executives, make-up artists [plural] — even assistants to put on her wigs [again plural].”

The attention to the ring Alexander Edwards purchased for Cher at Christmas in 2022 is getting so much attention, it reminds us of the sapphire ring Sonny gave Cher that she wore throughout the late 1960s.

 

 

 

 

 

Hegarty says at the beginning of her piece, “an unexpected exchange tells me straight aways that this will be no bland, cold Hollywood interview.” [They talk about pants.]

“The first thing to report is that, at 77, Cher doesn’t have a wrinkle on her face. She’s had that ‘good work’ done that very few, wealthy people manage to pull off.”

[This is a cryptic allusion to the plastic surgery but in truth it seems a lot of people who see Cher up close with makeup are fooled but how good the makeup is (compare these to paparazzi shots of Cher without makeup), which may explain the fleet of staff around to do makeup. Cher was honest about it years ago on The Today Show where she joked that at her age the makeup has to be “troweled on.”

Cher says a normal day sees her up at 6 or 7 am (which conflicts with our idea of her as a night-owl). She says she has coffee on the veranda with Alexander if he’s over. Then she works out and goes to see friends or invites them over. “Just regular stuff.”

She lists her friends as Laurie Lynn Stark (of Chrome Hearts), Loree Rodkin (the jewelry designer), her sister Georganne and their new Russian friend Masha Adonyeva, an art collector and philanthropist.

Cher says “I am a godmother–and a fairy godmother–to so many.” Truth.

The articles seems interested in her imbibing habits. She says her friends tease her for being a “stick-in-the-mud” for not drinking more than an occasional glass of champagne. “I smoked with I was young but gave it up after I got pregnant with my son [Elijah] and never picked it up again.”

She calls Edwards “intelligent, kind, funny and very talented.”

Her career highlights she lists as singing “I Got You Babe” every week on her variety show with Sonny, doing her solo variety show. Oddly this interview tends to conflate different time periods, or maybe Cher is doing this. The period of leaving Sonny in 1974 then skips to “Believe” as if nothing happens in between but a manager dropping her. Later it happens again, converging the yearlong slog up to the success of  “I Got You Babe” with the hotel-circuit days before the Sonny & Cher comeback of the early 1970s.

Cher says after leaving Sonny she wasn’t “looking forward to going on the road by myself because I had always been a duo. To be Cher without Sonny seemed impossible….When I was putting my own show and songs together, only then did I begin to feel myself.”

[We’re about to talk about just this time period in our next review of Cher’s shows in the late 1970s for the Take Me Home tour, the Monte Carlo TV special and Cher at Caesars special in the early 1980s,]

“People used to make fun of how extravagant my performances were, but now everyone is doing it.” Truth.

“I had so many people telling me every year that I was finished. You just have to keep going. I always think of myself as a bumper car. I’ll hit a wall, but then I’ll back up and go in a different direction. You always have to be prepared to step out of your comfort zone, always, always.”

Cher talks about making movies and her friendship with Meryl Streep from Silkwood, Nicolas Cage from Moonstruck and Jack Nicholson from Witches of Eastwick (“Jack’s wonderful–we’ve been friends for so long and he is always hilarious.”)

She tells a story about how men are much nicer to blondes than brunettes.

She talks about being married to Sonny and how it was “rough” because it was integrated with work. “I’d always do as I was told.” She talks about how Sonny discovered her singing while she was making their beds [before they were sleeping together and he was letting her live with him if she would clean his apartment] and he thought he was hearing the radio. Cher says, “My whole family used to sing songs when we got together. I thought it was what every family did.”

Cher has been saying since the 1970s and she says it again here, “If I hadn’t met Sonny there never would have been a Cher. I was just a young chick with all this insane energy that wasn’t channeled in any direction.”

Cher says she’s been an outsider before. She knows what that feels like. But as a famous person she doesn’t “want to go that many places now. I don’t go to Hollywood parties any more. I’m  not doing the red carpet. Now I just like hanging out with my friends.”

She talks about her mother’s tough upbringing without a mother and an alcoholic father who she lived with on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Cher says her mother told her she was special back when Cher felt like an ugly duckling. “You have to trust me on this,” Cher says Georgia would say. This quote made me a little verklempt.  A parent telling a child to “trust me” is so moving because it’s such a difficult situation full of tension (and disbelief) and one that Cher is going through right now with her own son.

She says Sonny was a great father to not only Chaz but Elijah. She said parenthood taught her that “I’m not the only person in the world. I was the center of my universe, but when Chaz was born in 1969, it was so exciting….I always wanted to be a mother, but nothing prepares you for it….you always try to be a mother to them, even if they want you to stay out of it. But sometimes you just can’t. They’re your kids.”

There’s a break-out discussion about Christmas where Cher admits she doesn’t cook. “The food is on an island in the kitchen…” She talks about how loud and rowdy the occasion is and how she loves to give presents.  She reminisces about family Christmases and how she was the tinsel putter-upper on their family tree (“my sister would just plonk it on.”)

The article also brings up the record of Sonny & Cher having five singles in the top 50 at the same time, “an achievement equaled only by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.” (Is this still true, post streaming and Taylor Swift?).

The article also states that The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was watched by more than 30 million viewers across its three-year run” and that Cher was “the first female singer in the U.S. to have four number ones at the time of “Dark Lady” and that the song “Believe” went to number one in 23 countries.

I love that Hegarty takes a picture with Cher and the magazine publishes it. I wish more print interviews would do this. It’s nice.

Nicole Pajer interviews Cher for Parade“There’s the music, the singing, the dancing, the acting–and then there’s the ice cream. Cher talks about Cherlato…with just as much enthusiasm as she does anything else…”

In fact, Cher has been talking about how at Christmas everyone loves her mother Georgia’s cheesecake recipe and even that flavor has made it into the Cherlato line of products with “renowned Gelato artisan Gianpaolo Grazioli….Cher is in the process of making it available for others to enjoy outside of SoCal.” [Good news, because my most recent LA-work-trip has been postponed. Boo.]

Again they talk about Cher’s Christmas traditions including getting out all the childhood ornaments, her collection of Christmas plates (that she jokes take up half her pantry), and the stockings for her kids she needlepointed during the making of Silkwood. She talks about the expensive dolls and cowboy jackets and boots she and her sister received even though her mother had no money. She also remembered a fuzzy kitten her mother found for her with her name on it. She also has memories of watching It’s a Wonderful Life with her mom.

She says along with the amazing diamond ring Edwards gave her last year, she also received some beautiful handmade books from him. She says she worked on her Christmas album night and day for months. She says her new album will have songs Edward’s has found for her, another P!nk track (there was on Closer to the Truth called “I Walk Alone“) and Cher is working again with Sarah Hudson.

She jokes she wants to do a compilation album of her “greatest bombs.”

Pajer says, “Love it or not, Cher has stayed authentic to herself, doing things unapologetically her own way.” Thank you.

When Cher says about her hair color that “sometimes, it’s just so boring,” Pajer quips “says the least boring person on earth.”

The article lists some music and movie stats as well, noting that Sonny & Cher were once nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 1966 but lost to Tom Jones. Seems fair.

And that Cher’s first acting appearance was probably her 1966 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. guest stint with Sonny.

The Believe 25th  Anniversary

Speaking of “Believe,” there have been articles and reminders in interviews about its 25th anniversary, including another boxed-set release on CD and vinyl.

NRP did a short piece. The article talks about auto-tunes influence with rappers and pop-singers like T-Pain and Jennifer Lopez.  NPR reminds us, via a quote from T-Pain, that auto-tune cannot turn a bad song into a good song, “No, you’ve still got to make good songs. You can’t throw on Michael Jordan’s shoes and think that you’re going to be the greatest basketball player of all time. It’s just not going to happen.” [And haven’t the slow renditions of “Believe” proven that, really.] NPR plays auto-tune songs by Bad Bunny, Drake, Lil Durk and Sza. NPR talks about how auto-tune was created in 1997 by Andy Hildebrand but that his original algorithm was developed for oil companies “to use seismic data to map subsurface strata to find oil.” He won a Grammy award in 2023 for his invention.

I did break down and purchase the LP boxed set (although the album was already previously released on vinyl). It’s another disappointing box-set “retrospective” without any actual retrospection happening in it. The box set for It’s a Man’s World last year at least had the distinction of never having been released before on vinyl.

But fun colored vinyl, corralled remixes and an additional “exclusive numbered lithograph” do not a retrospective make, especially something so career-defining and industry-changing as this album was, it deserved an essay and behind-the-scenes commentary, artifacts and photos. Huuuge missed opportunity.

I mean I do like the compilation box sets, as I’ve said. But the box sets need a big hefty think-tank of a booklet to go with it.  These feel half-assed and I felt guilty for buying it. Comparatively, I did not feel guilty buying 31 copies of Cher Christmas.

The reverberations of Believe, however, continue unabated and this remake by Alexa Wildish from The Voice last year reminds us that we have a good song in “Believe” without any of the technology (thanks to Cher scholar Michael for sending).

The Biopic Problem

In many recent interviews Cher has been lamenting over and over how impossibly unwieldy screenwriters are finding her life story to be, how this has prevented the movie from proceeding.

This is so majorly NOMB, but…

I have thought about this problem of the biopic over the years (anyone’s biopic) and specifically Cher’s meandering case, if only in the daydreaming realm.

And I’m so not trying to be a Nicolas Hyams here. I have no desire to contribute to this biopic project or write Cher’s story for the screen. I don’t feel this is one of my missions in life; and these thoughts below are just in the spirit of brainstorming.

One of the best biopics of someone like Cher was probably done by Barbra Streisand playing Fanny Brice in the movies Funny Girl and Funny Lady, another prototypical song and dance heroine navigating life in the big show biz.

However, on a recent Graham Norton episode, Cher recently stated her distaste for any kind of serial version of her story, like Julia Roberts’ miniseries suggestion. Although that was handled super amazingly well in the mini-series Fosse/Verdon.

A TV miniseries doesn’t have the opulence of a motion picture.

So if you simply must contain the Cher story in one movie, even say a 2.5 hour movie, I would imagine you would have to do what Joyce Carol Oates calls synecdoche, having one thing symbolize the many things. In her MasterClass Joyce Carol Oates talked about novelizing the life of Marilyn Monroe and the example was that one of her abortions stood for something like eight of them in total. There was no need to talk about each one. In Cher’s case that would be husbands/lovers, records, tours and movies.

You simply can’t address this life literally in a movie-amount of time.

In the movie Lincoln they used one heroic political (and miliary) battle to represent Lincoln’s entire life. I don’t think you could do that with Cher because of the mutli-faceted nature of her career. Liconln was mainly a politician. One political battle could stand for them all. But Cher has no single battle that wouldn’t neglect entire swaths of who she is and what she’s done.

Like Silkwood for example, a  representative battle for sure but telling the story of the making of Silkwood is without the world of pop music and precludes the large sub-story of Sonny. Similarly, the movie Coal Miners Daughter tells the story of a lifetime and music career through the lens of one marriage, but that doesn’t work for Cher either because she went on to have a life beyond her life with Sonny.

And I want to say an autobiography as book is exactly the time and place to address a life in a literal way and should do so. It should include experiences of every man, friend, family member, record, movie and tour.  It can be War and Peace, and in Cher’s case it probably should be (if anyone’s should). Infinite Jest it up. Mark Twain’s autobiography is two 700+ page volumes and he didn’t know Phil Spector.

It can be Lord of the Rings, each book a veritable epoch.

A movie can only contain so much, can only tell a simple story, a stripped-down, simplified version of reality, say two symbolic men: the Svengali-type and the boy-toy type and the tension between the two. The story isn’t about Cher’s children, (they have their own life story to tell), but can have a few scenes about Chaz and Elijah in regards to the tension between parenting and a career in entertainment.

And I keep focusing on tension because a movie has to have one archetypical struggle. And I think in Cher’s life that struggle is not “working through fear” as it was in the Broadway show. Although that’s part of it, for sure. It’s just not big enough. Because what caused the fear to manifest in the first place over and over again?

It was, I would suggest, that bulwark of intimidating judgement. Judgement from the establishment of Hollywood and the establishment of rock music. Judgement from fellow compatriots scratching out an existence in show business. The judgement of Cher upon herself.

It’s looking deep inside and admitting what you’ve have to prove to the world. That’s the thread. Because maybe everyone else would have just capitulated at the threshold of that fear. Why keep going?

The central idea is that fight for legitimacy and respect. If only because the story arc goes from lack of it to an overabundance, the fight against being seen as a joke.

And how Cher turned that around over a very long period of time, over a whole lifetime.

And maybe the movie ends right at the precipice of legend-hood, right before she steps onto the stage of respect and standing ovation. The moment bigger than the biggest hit or the Academy Award, some symbolic stage of acceptance.

After all, we all know what comes after. We’re all here for it.

It’s not about the songs, movies, co-stars or husbands as they stand individually. It’s about one person’s struggle to get from 1946 to 2023 in show business and battling the snobs and hipsters. And not just as a woman (although that’s part of it) but as a human being.

The movie can even show how it was never about reinvention but about a consistent self evolving and dealing with the constant assumption of a cynical reinvention. It’s really about self-actualization and the friends and men along the way who helped or did not help.

All told with representative, partially-fictional character mashups. Because sometimes to tell a concise truth, you need to fictionalize the elements.

It’s taken Cher full lifetime to achieve her turnaround from lack of respect to her current top-of-the-heap status. It’s quite extraordinary. And so I feel the movie should be a life story, not just a representative-event story.

Even the music could be mashups of unlikely combined songs. The Broadway show worked with this a bit with medleys and songs placed out of context. But truly bizarre mashups of old songs threaded into surprising new songs reflects more how Cher’s career has come to pass in this most recent decade, her old rediscovered material playing beside her new material. We watch Moonstruck or Good Times mashed-up beside Christmas  and “Believe.”

A biopic doesn’t need to be literal and maybe shouldn’t be. It can have characters designed to represent ideas and common experiences.

Possibly the creators of this effort have thought about all of this already and they’re still stuck. But there are very good life stories out there. It can be done.

 

Anyway, this may be my last post of the year due to some illnesses in my family.  So if we don’t talk until the New Year, have a Merry Christmas, a happy holiday season and a very, very Happy New Year.

I’ll try to wrap up all the remaining Christmas album festivities next year.

I leave you with these two songs as a season’s greetings: “honest men know that revenge does not taste sweet” and “just follow the day and reach for the sun.”

Countdown to Christmas

So we’re within two weeks of Santa’s descent.

The LPs and the In Conversation at the Odeon record guide and cassette tape have landed. We should have the bulk of the artifacts for this album.

And it all feels so huge everything considered. Like massively bigger than “Believe” in many ways. That song was such a slow-starter in the United States, the evolution of its success such a long tail experience.  And Cher was still just getting begrudging respect.

Cher’s iconic status has seemingly now hit the roof and even stars like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are fan-girl and fan-boying over her on talk shows, to the point where the A-list stars were crowding Timothée Chalamet off the couch due to wanting to sit back and watch Cher on the other end of the couch. Julia Roberts tells Andy Cohen about it.

It feels a little bit unreal. Imagine what it must feel like for Cher.

And the appearances are so numerous, it’s challenging to keep up with them. I’ve created a static Cher Christmas page so I wouldn’t have to track down that wrap-up blog post of all Cher’s Christmas assets and appearances, including the new album stuff and the album guide from the In Conversation at the Odeon event.

The album guide came with a special Christmas message from Cher:

Christmas Interviews

So Cher has been doing a plethora of interviews for the new album.

Recently she was on I Heart Radio talking with Mario Lopez about not wanting a true blue Christmas album but once she got the DJ song, she felt, “I can do this. I can find myself in here.”  She wanted songs that didn’t “scream Christmas.” She likes the album’s different kinds of music and emotions.  Lopez calls the DJ song a “banger,” Cher says it was her assistant’s idea for her to sing “Home.” She says her best childhood gift was a white leather cowboy jacket with fringe. She says she was already into clothes and “so thrilled.” She remembers decorating the tree that year and says she was a stern Taurus taskmaster for decorating the tree that year, only letting everyone put on three pieces of tinsel at a time.”

You might remember this photo from one of Cher’s biographies.

She recently did a lip synch of  “DJ Play a Christmas Song” during The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (but per Mr. Cher Scholar, it was so cold and open-air that so did everyone else) and on Wetten Dass. Macy’s kept her to the end of the parade (with teasers all morning), like they always do, only to be followed by Santa Claus himself. Savannah Guthrie,  Hoda Kotb and Al Rokerall agreed it was an “epic” ending.

On Thanksgiving Day she was also on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.  Fallon told a funny joke at the top about how her Macy’s parade performance wasn’t planned. Cher just drives down the street and parades form around her.

Fallon also sent a cardboard standup Cher crowd surfing. He tried to imitate her but sounded more southern than Cher. He kept saying to the surfing standup, “Be careful Cher!” And that made me laugh.

The studio audience wouldn’t stop yelling when Cher first appeared in the cute freezer skit where she pretended Auto-tune was how her voice normally sounded. She also joked that her name was really pronounced “Shure.”

Before the interview, Fallon introduced her as “the most iconic on the planet” and noted that she’s had a number one single in each of the last six decades. She said most of the album was recorded in her house, except for a few of the songs in England. They talked about Cher’s love of the frozen hot-chocolatier Serendipity 3 and they made jokes about what her autobiography should be called, none of them good. Cher admitted she was uncomfortable with some of the stories she needed to tell, that she’d chickened out but needs to go back to it and put those stories back in. She complained that her life is so long, the book would need to be an encyclopedia.

Well, it just so happens Barbra Streisand’s career is just as long and she recently put out a tome, an autobiography weighing 3 pounds and  totaling 992 pages.  So…yeah, I’m gonna read that one too. Don’t worry Cher, we’ll read an encyclopedia. Think of this as your effort toward bringing back literacy.

But seriously, I was recently talking to Cher scholar Robrt Pela about the movie Chastity and if we would ever get word about who may have really directed it. Because this Alessio de Paola guy doesn’t seem to exist or to be a real name. Things like that. Will Cher ever “set the record straight.”

Cher recently said in one of the print interviews that she doesn’t care about her legacy. And that’s understandable. Her legacy will already be what it is. It’s done. People know things already or will think they know things.

The fact is, Cher doesn’t owe it to anybody to set the record straight. Everybody probably disagrees with what happened anyway. Nobody “deserves” to know the private part of anybody else, the backstory of anybody.

Personally speaking, there’s just something to be said about leaving this world in an honest way. There’s an integrity in that.

But what form that honesty takes….who knows. It may just be a slew of deathbed confessions.

Perspective is always good in a biography (and seems to be what Streisand’s book may be providing). But I am always interested in influence. What are all the things that made Cher who she is, like from what music Sonny liked to what music she was listening to before and after Sonny. Family history, dramatic experiences and stuff people gravitate towards even as kids.

Anyways, one exciting piece of news from the press junket of interviews, (and the resulting deluge of clips were overwhelming, from long interviews to click-bait clips), is that Cher will be working on a new album on the heels of this one. She says she has “one more in me.” But then again, she keeps saying that about tours, too.

Paper

https://www.papermag.com/cher-cover

The first thing that killed me about this cover story is that the interviewer, Justin Morgan, first heard Cher being played by his mother from her CD The Very Best of Cher in 2003!! Morgan says the cover of that best-of “seemed to foreshadow the defining high-gloss imagery of our digital age.”

Morgan notes that Cher wears track pants and this harkens back to interviews in the 1980s where Cher would hold court in her bedroom wearing sweatpants.

Cher said she gave songwriter Sarah Hudson specific instructions for “Drop Top Sleigh Ride,” that it be “something that sounds like it would be a kid thing, but I want you to turn it into an adult thing.” We learn that Tyga wrote his verse.

Cher says of her voice: “I just never liked my voice that much. If I had my choice, I would have another one….it doesn’t sound like a man, it doesn’t wound like a woman. I’m somewhere more in-between. I have this strange style. I do what you do when you can’t hold a note: I don’t pronounce my Rs. I guess some consonants are hard to sing, so I just gotta leave them open…..it’s definitely my mom’s voice. My mom’s is softer, mine is edgier.”

Cher questions Morgan on the quality of her greatest hits, “Well, was it the very best?” They then talk about all Cher’s non-hits, songs Cher thought would do better: “Song for the Lonely,” “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” and “Walking in Memphis” and how people love these songs at live shows. “The audience makes it sound like they were hits, but they weren’t”

(I call this the “River Deep Mountain High” phenomenon. Some hits were never hits.)

Cher says, “I thought Closer to the Truth was a really good album, but it just didn’t happen.”

Morgan calls the song “The Music’s No Good Without You” “such a weird, amazing, almost cult-sounding pop song.”

Cher talks about “Save Up All Your Tears” and how “that was one of my favorite songs and I was singing about a boyfriend who had broken up with me. So it had a special feeling for me and I thought it was something that everybody could relate to, but not so much….I was really pissed off when I was singing it.”

Morgan argues “you have incredible instincts, though” and they talk about the auto-tune in “Believe” and the story about how it came to be, how “it really picked up the verses, because I could never make the verses really work. And all of a sudden, they were so amazing, they just pulled you in. Also, it didn’t sound like me, so I was really excited. We high-fived…the first thing [Warner head Rob Dickins] said was, ‘It doesn’t sound like you,” and I said, “I know, it’s glorious.’”

She says of “DJ Play a Christmas Song” that the producers “did a lot of really interesting things if you listen hard.”

She talks about dancing in the 1970s and 1980s at Studio 54 and with Michelle Pfeiffer in Saint-Tropez (“until our hair was wet.”) She talks about Studio 54 being “heaven” and also dancing at Café Central.

Cher says success is “a fleeing thing….I don’t like failure, but success is not a thing. Success is like different moments, like pearls, and if you string them on long enough, you’ve got a necklace….I’ve had lots of failures [laughs]. It’s like I always thought reinventing myself is such bullshit because it was just that I feel out of grace or I didn’t have a job or wasn’t doing something and then I did have a job.”

Thank you. Cher has remained consistently Cher. The reinvention story was attributed to her and Sonny as early as 1971.

Justin insists she must have intuition on how to make it happen and she says “I don’t really. I just don’t quit….it’s the only thing I know. So when I couldn’t get a record deal, I made movies. She tells the story of her mom being friends with Robert Altman’s wife and how then Robert Altman discovered Cher was in New York auditioning. Cher said she read for the Jimmy Dean part and thought “I don’t know how to do this part, but I’d be good in this part.” (Sounds like Witches of Eastwick, too).

Of the Christmas album Cher says “Even though the songs are not relatives, they live well together.”

And she tells of her plans for a new album with songs like “Fairness” brought to her by her boyfriend Alexander Edwards and how the 96-year old vocal teacher, Adrienne Angel, helped her get her voice back just as she did in 1987 when she recorded “I Found Someone.” She might have even thanked her on the liner notes if I remember correctly. Yup, just checked. (See pic to the left.)

They talk about world events. Cher says “the more people in the mix [the better], and different sounds and different voices….art is still art and the more it is circulating the better. It’s like paintings: there’s every style, there’s millions of painters, but it doesn’t diminish anybody else.”

I LOVE that!

On the idea of her manifesting songs or parts, Cher says, “I don’t overthink it. I open my mouth and sing or get in front of a camera and act.”

Morgan asks if she thinks about her legacy and she says, “I don’t care about legacy….I’ve done what I’ve done and people will do with it what they will.”

She talks about the movies her mother introduced her to and admiring Etta James and how it’s always scary for her to play Madison Square Garden (I saw her there for the Believe tour). She says it’s so big and how you are judged differently there. (From my experience, New Yorkers love Cher though…reverently).

She talks about being frightened for [vulnerable] people now. “You have to be one thing….all the things that add spice and excitement and beauty, unless you do it in their way, it’s not good and they want to get rid of it….it’s just a terrible, terrible period.”

Vanity Fair (Spanish)

Those crimped wig shots are great.

I first saw a portion of this article on Facebook as part of the press junket. The article is in Spanish, (which you can have Google Chrome browser translate or actually, now the article gives you an official translation) and below are excerpts from the English translation.

The cover reads, “On the successes, the mistakes, the politics, human rights and love (yes, again). The legend speaks.”

The article is by Simone Marchetti who says, “What’s going on in Cher’s head isn’t just a show. It’s a firework.”

And again Cher says, “I’m not a Cher fan. Cher is just a part of me. Cher’s my job.” Cher talks about being stubborn, neurotic, childish and funny and “kind of adorable” and this is pretty adorable the way she says it in the video.

She talks about singing with her grandfather when she was young as he played the guitar.

She says something I can’t quite understand about when she left Sonny she was still “practically a child. I had no idea what it meant to make a decision, to be an adult. Two record companies abandoned me. I changed my skin, my music, my image. But with Sonny I felt very small just when he needed to realize that he wasn’t small.” (I didn’t think that was translating properly but the official English isn’t much clearer).

She says she’s like her mother but also nicer, similar to her father. In ten years she thinks she might be dead. “I wish you all the luck in the world. But I won’t be here anymore.”

The Guardian

This was a good, long interview by Jim Farber. Cher says she should be in Guinness Book of World Records for her six-decade career. She always believed Christmas albums were a cynical cliche, “Everyone has done one.” Faber tells her the album doesn’t “scream Christmas every second and isn’t filled with songs you know by name.”

Half the songs are new and he says the DJ song “evokes a night that’s anything but silent.” He also mentions the Zombies’ rapturous “This Will Be Our Year.”

Cher wanted the album to be fun. Farber calls “fun” Cher’s brand from the very beginning and the bubbly “I Got You Babe.”

And he comments on her resilience: “The long years when critics saw her as a joke, Cher always found a way to have the last laugh by embracing the most garish aspects of her career – the over-the-top costumes, the self-satirizing gestures, the songs Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves – while simultaneously delivering performances of genuine distinction, passion and pluck.”

Of the Darlene Love Christmas song in 1963, Cher says, “I can see Darlene singing full-tilt boogie right in the room, not even in a booth, and me, Sonny and the other backup singers standing around one mike that was hanging down. It seems so archaic now, but it worked.”

She has a home studio now and rolls right outa bed. Times. Changed.

Cher continues, “I kept thinking, I’m only 17 and I’m exhausted, what are these other people doing? What I didn’t realize then was they were all doing drugs!…The big joke was that I had to stand far back from the other singers. Phil would say, ‘Cher, take a step back. And another step. And another.’ At that point everybody said, ‘If she takes one more step, she’ll be in Studio B!’ Somehow, my voice just cut through.”

She talks about how on the day of the album release was the day President Kennedy got shot.

She was the lone female backup in “You’ve’ Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” She talks about how Phil Spector wasn’t as crazy at the time, just eccentric, and that she could hold her own with him even when he wanted her to spy on The Ronettes.

Cher says she wasn’t crushed about the failure of “Ringo, I Love You.” She says, “It wasn’t a very good song anyway and Phil didn’t even want to do it. He wanted me to stay in my place and not do a solo thing.”

About IGUB: “[Sonny] brought it to me in the middle of the night. With him singing it, it sounded horrible. When I first sang it, id didn’t sound that much better. But Sonny didn’t care. He knew what he had.”

Cher talks about how lucky England has been for her over the years, from her first success there with “I Got You Babe.”

She talks about getting dropped from Geffen and finding success in England with Warner UK and “Believe” and that song hitting #1 in ten countries and spawning songs in auto-tune, particularly in hip hop .

She talks about the empowering twist in the line of the song she wrote: “I’ve had time to think it through/ and maybe I’m too good for you” and how she thought at the time, “a girl can be sad in one verse, but she can’t be sad in two verses.” She says she failed to ask for a writing credit for that.

They talk about Adam Lambert’s performance of the song at the Kennedy Center Honors. “That’s one of the greatest vocal performances of any song by anybody. “ Faber notes the Lambert’s clip has 32 million YouTube views (33 now).

Jim Farber thinks her voice “never sounded stronger” than it does on the Christmas album.

She’s demure about her love life with Edwards: “There are things people get to know and there are things people don’t get to know.” (Not a bad policy.)

They end on politics and the Cher references “something like 500 [anti-trans] bills they’re trying to pass” around America.

She talks about her connection with Armenia and her visit there thinking, “Wow, everybody looks like me! How could I not have strong feelings about this?”

She talks about how long women in her family live, her mother living to 98, her great-aunts living to 101 and 104.

 

AARP

Edna Gundersen interviews Cher for this article. She talks about not wanting to be traditional with the album and Gundersen says, “and that could be the mantra of her 60-year career.”

“I wanted it to be a Cher Christmas album, whatever that means. I knew what it meant in my emotions, but I didn’t know how it was going to manifest.”

Gundersen, like Morgan, notes Cher attends the interview in black lounge pants and a gray fleece hoodie. Gundersen notes that “Edwards has been a high point in a period of loss.”

Gundersen says “Your voice sounds better than ever, especially on ‘Angels in the Snow’ and ‘ Like Christmas.'” Cher says her doctor told her she has the vocal cords of a 25-year old.

Gundersen likes that Cher “dug up a wonderful but somewhat obscure song, the Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year” from 1968 and Cher admits she didn’t “love it in the beginning. I just had to have an extra song for Amazon, and it was there. It was kind of the redheaded stepchild. At first, I didn’t have the respect for it that it deserved. But I listened to it a few times and thought, This is great. It works for me.”

Of the Darlene Love session of 1963, Cher says, “Darlene opened her mouth to sing, we all stopped breathing. She was just genius.”

Of Tyga singing her “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” she says, “I was gung ho. It just lifted it for me.”

They talk about “Believe” and Gundersen says, “Your altered vocals revolutionized hip-hop. Do you feel you got proper recognition for the leap into Auto-Tune?” Cher says, “a lot of young people love ‘Believe’ because it sounds current, but they don’t know who Cher is.”

She talks about Christmas and how she does love Christmas and how the house is always full of strays, kids and friends and how her mother always did a great job with Christmas even though she had no money.

She talks about dyslexia and Tina Turner and how Tina asked her how she left Sonny back in the 1970s and Cher said, “I just walked out one night” and how Tina then did the same. Cher says that over the last four or five years she had been visiting Tina, how they were opposites in many ways but kindred sisters. (Tina had stuff everywhere but Cher likes cleaner surfaces, how Tina never swore and Cher swears like a sailor.)

Cher says nice things about Madonna. And she talks about she came together with Alexander: “I just didn’t think it would be a good thing. He was way too young. He’s very stubborn, and he just didn’t see it my way.”

That’s sweet. They talk about Cher’s memoir and how she’s been feeling too protective. “There are certain stories you don’t want to tell, but those are going to be the most interesting and helpful.”

 

New York Times

This article is by Melena Ryzik. Cher says of her career. “While I was busy being Cher, how did this happen? No one’s given me any info.”

They talk about the homeless, elephants and Cherlato. Of her Christmas album, Cher says, “It needs to be lighthearted because, you know, who knows what next Christmas will bring.”

Oh dear. I worry about this, myself.

Ryzik asks a very interesting question: “how did you first musical conversations with Alexander go?” [and I’d like to know same about Sonny, Gregg and Les.]

Cher says, “He talks about music a lot and we play music a lot. And he knew from knowing me what I would like. There are certain chord progressions and sounds on any record that your body responds to, your emotions respond to. He just had me pegged so right.”

She again credits Adrienne Angel, who she reminds us she found through Bernadette Peters who needed her for “Sunday in the Park with George.” “I just wanted it to sound like my voice. I didn’t want to have to lower any keys.”

Cher talks about older people signing well into their seventies, “It seems like a lot of us are having some sort of resurgence. I don’t know what it is. Revenge of the old people.”

Of “Believe” she says, “We were just trying to fix a problem.” Ryzik asks, “Do you mind that sound being associated with you?” and Cher says,  “Are you kidding? I love it….what comes to you, belongs to you. That’s my theory about life.”

“I live in Malibu. I can see the ocean, and that’s my favorite thing. I love my house. I’m grateful.”

 

Cher was on The Today Show, 28 November joking she would just love to see 70 again. There were also interesting stories on Entertainment Tonight and in Forbes which talks about how “DJ Play a Christmas Song” opened at #3 on the Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales chart, which was only her third track to do this but that most of her dance hits predate the online chart.

We’re Officially In The Season To Be Merry and Bright

So Christmas season is officially upon us. The Cher tree is up with a new, sturdier nativity.

It’s also time to link to my Massive Christmas Playlist(s). It was a pleasure, (a pleasure!), to add three of Cher’s Christmas songs to the list. Now Cher is officially ON my massive Christmas Playlist.  And her songs add some happy and fun to the blend.

You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or Tidal. Usually I plug the Tidal version of my playlists because Tidal pays artists more per stream and has HiFi. But there’s one song that’s suddenly missing from the Tidal list this year. (Tidal displays those songs grayed out.)

And so this troublemaker is making the Tidal list sub-par this year. Thus, I have to recommend listening to the Spotify mix this year instead.

Harumph. There’s always one.

Anyway, Cher said in one of her interviews, (excerpts post coming shortly), that she didn’t want to do a Christmas Special this year due to the writers and actors strikes (going on at the time of the interviews). Fair enough. I support that. But this just means we can start dreaming for next year!

Idea’s for next year’s possible Cher Christmas special:

  1. Cher dressing up as Mrs. Claus. That would be fun and adorable. A little feminist spin on the North Pole maybe.
  2. Cher showing us her favorite Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Cher show clips with maybe some behind-the-scenes dish.
  3.  New Christmas skits and other Christmas-song-singing musical guests. And because everyone has done at least one Christmas song or an album or two, that’s like possibly everybody.

(See? It writes itself!)

Finally, I know we’ve all been listening to Cher’s new Christmas album non-stop over the last few weeks, but there are actually other 2023 Christmas album releases this year and although I surely won’t be able to listen to them all before the end of the year, there are a few I have listened to and I would like to mention the new Gregory Porter Christmas album, Christmas Wish, which is very good.

Every song is great, but there are some very timely songs included considering this troubled year, like “Everything’s Not Lost, and “Someday at Christmas.”

His song “Christmas Wish” is probably the best song with that overly-sentimental title.  After listening to it, you may want to kiss your mama if she was one of those who could turn Christmas into a magic time (as my mother could).  Porter does a very good duet-version of Ella Fitzgerald’s  great song, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” (I also love Patti LaBelle’s sparkly version.)  Not many artists every take on the Peanut’s Christmas theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” except jazz artists like Porter.  So that’s nice. Porter does a good version of Nat King Cole’s “A Cradle in Bethlehem” and I love the quietly-exciting end to his version of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Overall, a poignant-feeling Christmas album.

So enjoy a Christmas cookie and some nice new Xmas jams…and my new Cher-boyfriend nativity.

Cher Christmas Reviews & Upcoming Appearances

It’s way past time to catch up on how Cher’s new album has been doing.

Remixes

Before we start, the digital remixes for “DJ Play a Christmas Song” were just released. Check your local streaming service. Some remixes I like even better than the “canonical” song, and I think I can only say that about two prior remixes. Although I acknowledge the fun aspect of remixes, (which is a very unfun way of saying it), remixes kind of confuse me in a scholarship sense: what’s the canonical version if remixes fare better than the album versions in sales or on the charts?

And anything that stars with a pounding beat for three minutes will send me to bed with a headache. But happily, this is not the case with these remixes.

Good Reviews

So let’s start with the fans. Ones I’ve heard from have been playing the album nonstop. Starting with Google reviews, I couldn’t find anything less than a five-star. The Amazon reviews are spread out between the two editions Amazon is selling.

Amazon 1 or 2 stars complain that their CD cases were cracked. I bought some extra copies for gifts and the majority of mine from Amazon US were cracked as well. None of my Amazon UK cases were cracked. But some fans were complaining that their CDs were cracked too! Boo Amazon US.

One four-star review said the album lacks the sparkle of a typical Cher album and they wanted more dance songs. Another four-star review wanted the songs to be more traditional. This speaks to the variety of Cher fans and how many subgroups want different things.

Some other four-star examples:

“So it’s arrived ,after year’s of rumours Cher’s Christmas album has finally landed. Overall its a good affair with stompers Dj play a christmas song and Angels in the snow ,Drop top sleigh ride withTyga could have been awful but is a winner, couple of ballads which fit in well.Home feat Michael Buble is almost the same version he recorded with Blake Shelton ,should have done Baby it’s cold out side instead or maybe that’s to woke or snowflakey for these days. Dissapointing mastering or production ,not sure which it is but the sound is very basie and not clear at all which for me spoils the whole album. That said Put the dec’s up have a drink and put this Cher-mazing album on ! ,”

Or this funny four-star:

Good CD except for 2 tracks which are awful

There are more cracked CD complaints.

Some of the five-star reviews:

“refreshingly different, in top form, Cher puts her stamp on Xmas, “Favorite Christmas CD of All Time”

Two fans disagreed over one song:

“I love “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” with Tyga! It’s has a great upbeat and is just plain fun.”

Another fan disagrees:

“Track #7 “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” with Tyga is the stand out bad track simply the rap ruins the song. The song starts great and fits perfectly, then Tyga puts the spoil on the song with rap. Wish there was a [Tyga] rap free version of the song.”

And this hilarious five-star review:

“JUNK the album is a piece of junk..cher should leave christmas ALONE

Or this review speaking to the variety:

“This is the best album Cher has ever recorded! The perfect mix of 60’s nostalgia, dance, rock and ballads.”

Other headlines used words like fabulous, quality, wonderful, loved it!

The overall Amazon rating is 86% at five-star (at this time). But these are most likely big fans. Dancing Queen also has a five-star rating at 85% (and I don’t remember such enthusiasm for that album) so this could just mean Cher fans like Cher stuff and they’re motivated to give Amazon reviews. Not that there’s  anything wrong with that and I use those reviews all the time when picking out books for authors I’m less familiar with.

But next I put it to Mr. Cher Scholar. Mr. Cher Scholar is not a Cher fan, per se. He’s also very much entirely not a Christmas song fan. So this album posed particular problems for him potentially. But he lives with a Christmas song / Cher fan who made him listen to the album four times on a recent road trip (I gave him 48-hour breaks in between). But his opinion was already contaminated by my complaints about the album’s one bad online review so he defended the album as “fun.”

But let’s be honest. Mr. Cher Scholar is Mr. Cher Scholar for a reason. He’s no dummy. So we need to go searching for other reviews. But where do you even go to find album reviews these days?

The Harvard Crimson gave the most detailed review and called it a “strong showing from an industry legend.”

“While holiday albums are a dime a dozen, Cher gives her own take on the saturated genre by combining mid-twentieth century doo-wop and early 2000s dance-pop with beloved…classics.”

“Christmas is at its best when Cher leans into one of two genres: big band ballads of the 50s and 60s and dance-pop tracks reminiscent of her 1988 hit ‘Believe.’”

The reviewer likes the high notes and vocal runs of Darlene Love and Cher and thinks “Angels in the Snow is a strong track” (although the reviewer considers the song a love song which I don’t because of the strong backup by Cyndi Lauper).

“One experimental, yet highly successful track that deviates from these genres is ‘Drop Top Sleigh Ride’ with Tyga. Proceeds with a bass and 808-heavy instrumental. Tyga’s highly suggestive verse. “These rap elements would be astonishing on any Christmas album, let alone one by Cher. Still, the track is surprisingly festive and cohesive, as the jingle bells and Cher’s silken vocals soften its more unconventional parts.”

The rap song comes up again and again as a touchstone in reviews. We’ll talk about this song more at the end.

The reviewer didn’t like the  duet with Bublé, but for no other reason than it’s too slow. Slow and sad Christmas songs have long been my favorite type of Christmas song and last week The Guardian agreed with me.

The reviewer talks about the “uplifting anthems” on the album but then doesn’t like the most anthem-y ones:

“Some songs display too much holiday: ‘This Will Be Our Year’ and ‘Christmas Aint Christmas Without You’ (mistakenly listed as “Christmas Won’t Be Christmas Without You) for those songs’ ”pine-scented mediocrity.”

It’s interesting our bad review below will single out “This Will Be Our Year” as  the only “charming” track on the album.

Herald&Review says, “There isn’t much Cher hasn’t done in her career. A Christmas album is new territory, though…The secret, of course, was to lean into the incredible eclecticism of her career, all while avoiding the sleepy, saccharine pitfalls of a ‘Silent Night’-heavy holiday release.”

They go on to say, “Alexander Edwards, Cher’s romantic partner and a credited producer on the project, is best friends with Tyga, who helped make the most unexpected and delightful collaboration happen.”

Yes: “most unexpected and delightful” – keep that in mind for later on.

This review also had some interview elements.

“She was asked to do a special, she says. ‘They said, ‘Well, we can do it in England.’ I said, ‘We can do it on the moon, but I’m not doing it,'” she says, not until an [acting strike] agreement is reached.’”

Yup, I support that. Maybe we can get a special next year once the strike is, hopefully, resolved. Because that would still be awesome.

Allmusic gave the album3 1/2 stars and said it was a “nice balance an upbeat contemporary energy with the storied Motown sound of the original recordings..”

Digital Journal’s review was almost too positive. They liked just about everything with no clear indication as to why. The most specific they ever got was to say that on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” Cher and Darlene Love “both showcase their powerhouse crystalline vocals, to the point where it is hard to differentiate where Cher picked up and where Darlene Love left off.” They also say “Angels in the Snow “would be a good sing-a-long and they end the review with “Mariah Carey ought to watch out… With this new collection, it is evident that there is a new ‘Christmas Queen’ in town.”

Well, not quite.

Retro Pop was the only review, fan or online to talk about the “riotous rendition of “Put A Little Holiday In Your Heart” and called “’DJ Play A Christmas Song’ a “genius opener that sets the scene for an album where Cher throws out the Christmas album rulebook and places the focus on having a good time.”

They go on to say, “the Motown-inspired ‘Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without You’ and hip-hop leaning ‘Drop Top Sleigh Ride’ (feat Tyga) add to her musical toy box.”

However, “there’s the occasional misstep; a reworked ‘Home’ with Michael Bublé is less a winter warmer and more an ill-judged vehicle to shoehorn him into the set – and clocking in as the longest track on the album between two feelgood originals, something of a vibe-killer – while ‘Santa Baby’ is a little out of place on an album that largely avoids the obvious holiday staples.”

That’s kinda true on both counts.

But, the review says, “come closing number, a cover of The Zombies’ ‘This Will Be Our Year,’ however, those shortcomings are forgiven and the overall effect is one of joy and warmth that has you reaching for a snowball and soaking up the holiday cheer….Overwhelmingly festive and quintessentially Cher – there’s a new Queen Of Christmas in town!”

Okay, let’s drop the Queen of Christmas thing. This is one album, people.

Bad Reviews

I have to say if you want to be a Cher fan who reads positive reviews about her all the time, you’ll have to be a fan of her movie career because she gets about 100% positive accolades for her acting performances, even in movies where she’s clearly playing a version of herself. Film people love her.

Music people, not so much. The music reviews historically have been very disdainful reviews. Not just bad reviews, but vitriolic. Like pre-trolling, offensive ad hominem reviews. They’re usually personal attacks and this goes back to the beginning of her career. But something changed in the last 10 or so years where these trashy reviews suddenly stopped, like overnight.

But sometimes you still  see one and you have to think about what it is about Cher herself they do not like. And you can tell it gets personal because attacks on what she represents will slip in there. Oftentimes, it’s political. They don’t like her politics.  So whenever I read a bad review, I try to separate legitimate points, (because even Cher herself will criticize her vocal performances as being far from perfect), from reviews with subterranean agendas.

On an album like this, reviewers could focus on her vocal changes or the sentimental Christmas genre they just don’t like, on production matters.

Slant Magazine put out not one bad review but two pieces trashing not only the album but the song “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” particularly and we’ll end this conversation talking about that song.

The author of both articles is a self-described fashionista and cool-finder. Which, of itself, does not make her a bad critic. But cool-finders and fashionistas tend not to like Cher because her fashion is of-its-own-path and the only people who find her cool are other cool people, like Nile Rodgers, for example. There’s surface cool and foundational cool and the ones who gravitate to the prior don’t like the later.

But let’s look at her points individually: “A Holiday Album We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Need

The reviewer talks about the “long-dated dance-pop of [Taylor and Cher’s] late-’90 smash ‘Believe’” and how “the sleigh goes off the rails” with the “paint-by-the-numbers” DJ single, ” its “gratuitous Auto-Tune” (she likes the word gratuitous) “and half-step key change.” She complains there are too many songwriters, a common lament for Cher’s dance music songs and says “Santa Baby” is “vampy-to-the-point-of-campy” and that’s kinda true but fully in the pocket of a Cher thing if you knew her history at all. In fact, to invoke the words “vamp” and “camp” in a review of Cher without any acknowledgement of irony says a lot about the age of the reviewer and their cultural literacy.

She says, “but that most “cringe-inducing” is the “trap-adjacent ”Drop Top Sleigh Ride.’” She calls the song “a crime against the holiday spirit” and dislikes the “embarrassing wordplay.”

So here’s my question: if she found the toned-down sexual elements of the Cher song uncomfortable, what does she think about the entire genre? Because she is the only reviewer to repeatedly label the song “trap-adjacent” vs rap.  I looked up bios and Wikipedia pages for both Tyga and Alexander Edwards and a page on the top trap artists and they were not listed as trap artists.

According to Wikipedia, “Trap is a subgenre of hip hop music that originated in the Southern United States in the 1990s. The genre gets its name from the Atlanta slang term “trap house”, a house used exclusively to sell drugs.”

Both Tyga and Edwards are from California, not Atlanta. I’m not sure how these are trap artists.

In any case, the reviewer even hates the album title (but what Christmas album ever had a good title?)

She only liked “This Year Will Be Our Year” and went on to highlight its hipster credibility.

In another article, “The 15 Worst Christmas Songs of All Time” the same reviewer starts with even more snark beginning with “apologies in advance” (a total hipster adage). The list included, judging by the Facebook comments defending them, some fan favorites. All the comments I could find about the Cher’s song on their Facebook post were defending the song. Some examples:

The reviewer alo attacks Dan Fogelberg’s “Old Lang Syne” for its “gratuitous details” but aren’t the details of the scene in that song the whole effect? She hates that effect! She attacks the usual novelty songs for being novelty songs.

The Rap Song

So….anyway. There’s something significant about a white woman (who gives a lot of good reviews to Taylor Swift) placing a laser focus on the one rap song over multiple reviews. Which is not to say a white, female, pro-Swiftie can’t make sentient points about rap, but this review seems to be sticking out like a sore thumb. It feels like a dog whistle. Especially when so many other fans and online reviews single out the song as a good showing.

As I was driving to Cleveland a few weeks ago I was tooling some response jokes  to this review, like this one:

“This reviewer needs to pull that piece of coal Santa gave her last year out of her ass.”

Or “Isn’t if funny that on this album Cher asked us to ‘put a little Christmas in our heart’ but the reviewer couldn’t find it.”

Anyway, those were my jokes. Once I got back I realized this bad review was a very significant review. Because after trying to figure out what so offended this reviewer about the song,  I have come to believe this is the most important song on the album. And a crucial song at this juncture of Cher’s recording career.

I believe there is a direct through line from Sonny’s love of gospel and R&B to this very song. And there’s a direct connection between this song and “Believe.”

Rap music has always incorporated technology in subversive ways. The white rock response to this just illustrates that subversiveness, like this other ironic Cher intersection involving Gregg Allman. “When asked what he thought about rap music, Gregg Allman said rap was “short for crap.”

So it’s politically significant that Cher included a song from her boyfriend, who happens to be a rap producer who then called on his best friend, Tyga, to sing on the Cher song.

And it’s also significant that Cher recorded “Believe” which is known as the Cher-effect, a technology that she stubbornly continues to use, a technology establishment rockers dislike but that the rap community has wholeheartedly embraced,  a fact proven not only in the rap songs themselves that went on to use the technology but with the famous story of Jay-Z approaching Cher at the Met Gala one year to tell her “thank you” for spearheading its use. (In one story I read it was the former Mr. Kim Kardashian who said thank you). In any case, rappers understood auto tune’s potential as part of their ongoing use of technology. And since then, Cher has been seen as much more popular in the rap community.

Therefore, the song makes perfect sense on this album and can be read as Cher’s merging musically and officially into the community she is already a part of.

The first essay in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (I’m only two essays in) is called “Plugged In: Technology and Popular Music” by Paul Théberge and it covers a lot of this ground:

“Any discussion of the role of technology in popular music should begin with the simple premise: without electronic technology, poplar music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable.”

He talks about pop technology from instruments to recording, performing and playback. Technology is a baseline and has a long history of being a “catalyst for musical change” as does using technologies in ways for which the technologies were not intended, much of music’s technology having been historically developed for other industries like for example the microphone being developed by the telephone industry.

There have been “conflicts in musical aesthetics and values have accompanied virtually every development in music” and that “different uses of technology reflect different…cultural priorities.”

Théberge talks about microphones and amplifiers that fueled the new crooner of the 1940s and how those were once controversial technologies which have now been naturalized. He says it is a lie that pop and rock music can ever really be ‘unplugged’ and how this is more of an ideology than a possibility.

The impact of the microphone alone “was both subtle and profound: for example, the string bass could be heard clearly, for the first time,  in jazz recordings and the instrument quickly replaced the tuba…” Crooning was instantly “regarded by early critics as effeminate and their singing style and both technically and, by extension, emotionally ‘dishonest.”

The microphone.

Théberge  talks about how crooners would develop a singing technique better suited to the microphone and how Bing Crosby’s “low register was particularly enhanced by the microphone though the physical phenomenon known as the ‘proximity effect.’”

Singers sing, Théberge says, “first and foremost to the microphone and every microphone has it’s own characteristics and colours the sound in subtle, yet unmistakable ways.”

This is a fact fans have noticed in the Michael Buble duet where the sounds of their respective microphones possibly doesn’t meld well in the final result.

Théberge says our experience of the ‘grain’ or ‘warmth’ or ‘presence’  of a singers voice is always mediated by the microphone.

Then, Théberge shows, we begot magnetic recording and putting mics on other instruments. Then engineers “gradually took over much of the responsibility for achieving musical balances” and then multi-track studios and then guitar pickups and then rock amplification and feedback and distortion and then computers and computer software.

“The loudness or rock or the booming bass of hip hop are sounds that can only be produced and experienced through technological means.”

Théberge talks about early technology effects that started out as novelty effects but have since become normalized: the echo effect in Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” late 1960s “flanging” on many psychedelic rock recordings, (created by manipulating the speed of tape recorders), and the multitrack tape recorder “which makes of song recording a compositional process and is thus central to the creation of popular music at the most fundamental level.”

Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole used multitrack recording to isolate their vocals from their orchestras. Overdubbing was used by Les Paul and Marty Ford and “a single vocalist performing multiple harmony parts [was] a technique pushed to its limits by artists such as Joni Mitchell…through overdubbing.” Phil Spector and Stevie Wonder also using overdubbing for various purposes.

And then mixing “ a complex and specialized tasks” used by Giorgio Moroder and other disco producers continuing on to dance remixes and DJ mashups and rap songs.

And then MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) which led to synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, home computers, software simulation. “The technical reproduction is not without its social consequences. The technologies of rock and pop music production have long been a male-dominated terrain, and this has been as true for the most basic of rock technologies, the electric guitar, as it Is for the wider range of electronic technologies associated with stage and studio.”

“Musical instruments are often the centre of controversy in pop and rock because their use is so intimately tied with musicians’ notions of personal expression….even Bob Dylan’s adoption of the electric guitar…was looked up with derision.”

Théberge then addresses rap and the Roland TR-808 drum machine (see above in The Harvard Crimson review of “Drop Top Sleigh Ride”) that became “the instrument of choice among many  hip hop, house and music producers….for the ability to detune the bass drum, creating a sound akin to a low-frequency hum, and the necessity of building rhythm patterns in a precise grid-like framework, have been cited as influences on the musical style of these genres”

“…scratching and the art of the DJ, ” digital samplers, tape loops going back to the Moody Blues and King Crimson,

Electronic pop is criticized “by the rock press for being ‘cold’ and ‘inhuman.’ but that digital effects “appear in a surprising number of genres.”

He ends by saying, “technology must be understood as both an enabling and a constraining factor, that acts in complex and contradictory ways in music production, distribution and consumption….Technology acts to disrupt both music performance and recording practices but the business of music itself,…mediating the ever-shifting power relations.”

Théberge adds this article in is his notes: “An insightful case study of the uses of technology in the production of rap music can be found in “Soul sonic forces: technology , orality, and black cultural practice in rap music” by Tricia Rose” (1994)

It’s worth a full read but let’s just excerpt the salient parts of that piece. Tricia Rose talks about common criticisms of rap: it’s too simple and repetitive, it’s not creative or musical, its just noise. She takes the structures of rap, (the volume, looped drum beats and bass frequencies), back to earlier black cultural traditions and explains rap’s social and emotional power for black communities. She also outlines the differences between Western classical music structures and African-derived structures.

Since we’re talking about technology here, I just want to say Rose makes a very detailed case for repetition and how new technologies enable that repetition in rap, “this advanced technology has not bee straight-forwardly adopted: it has been significantly revised in ways that are in keeping with long-standing black cultural priorities, particularly samplers….[which have raised] complex questions regarding fair use of musical property and the boundaries of ownership of musical phrases.”

That we already know. But Rose then explains how sampling is “critically linked to black poetic traditions and the oral forms that underwrite them….intertextuality, boasting, toasting, and signifying in rap’s lyrical style and organization. Rap’s oral articulations are heavily informed by technological processes….in the way orally based approaches to narrative are embedded in the use of the technology itself….these black techno-interventions [me: of which auto tune is now one] are often dismissed as nonmusical effects or rendered invisible.”

“The arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once deconstructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they recontextualize these elements creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial wastebins)….These revisions do not take place in a cultural and political vacuum, they are played out on a cultural and commercial terrain that embraces black cultural products and simultaneously denies their complexity and coherence. This denial is partly fueled by a mainstream cultural adherence to the traditional paradigms of Western classical music as the highest legitimate standard for musical creation, a standard that at this point should seem, at best, only marginally relevant in the contemporary popular music realm (a space all but overrun by Afrodiasporic sounds and multicultural hybrids of them).”

“Advances in technology have facilitated an increase in the scope of break beat deconstruction and reconstruction and have made complex uses of repetition more accessible.”

Rose talks abut the bass line, the loop, the rupture of the pattern and “the cut,” where she establishes a ground zero in the music of James Brown and goes on to say, “….music embodies assumptions regarding social power, hierarchy, pleasure and worldview.”

“Although rap music is shaped by and articulated through advanced reproduction equipment, it’s stylistic priorities are not merely by-products of such equipment.”

(An important sentence and the same is absolutely true for “Believe.”)

And here’s the thing:

“If rap can be so overwhelmingly mischaracterized, then what other musical and cultural practices have collapsed into the logic of industrial repetition, labeled examples of “cult” like obedience. [Theodor] Adorno’s massive misreading of the jazz break, beside betraying a severe case of black cultural illiteracy, is another obvious example of the pitfalls or reading musical structures in the popular realm as by-products of industrial forces.”

“Retaining black cultural priorities [and feminist ones, I would argue] is an active an often resistive process that has involved manipulating established recording policies, mixing techniques, lyrical construction and the definition of music itself.”

Rose also states that “Rap lyrics are a critical part of a rapper’s identity, strongly suggesting the importance of authorship and individuality in rap music. Yet, sampling as it is used by rap artists indicates the importance of collective identities and group histories.”

And again when we criticize a cadre of writers on a Cher song, or a producer’s advanced involvement in a Cher song, we’re fighting this same idea of a collective cultural project.

“Rap musicians’ technological in(ter)ventions are not ends in and of themselves, they are means to cultural ends.”

If Cher doing Rap offends you, that’s on you. She has a direct connection to rap although she heretofore never crooned a syllable of it. The majority of the reviews and comments state that it hasn’t offended many listeners. I have no doubt there are sinister areas of the internet that are trashing Cher for her involvement with rap and for her attachment to Alexander Edwards and black culture. But the song is not offending the rap artists I’m pretty sure, which is an interesting phenomenon itself in an era of calling out cultural appropriation.

What is Cher doing differently, (other than dating a rap producer)? What cultural work did “Believe” perform? Controversy always illustrates something.

Rap has been using technology in music in empowering and subversive ways. Cher, as a music outsider, has given rap another tool. And in return, rap artists have helped Cher record a rap song….for Christmas even. It’s pretty amazing.

There are some fine points being made here about how communities merge and how one song can culminate after 25 years of influence on a genre of music.

Appearances & Interviews

I’m not about to watch all the Hallmark Christmas movies this season but Cher songs have made there way into many of them: https://www.hallmarkchannel.com/christmas/cher-and-countdown-to-christmas

Chehttps://www.hallmarkchannel.com/christmas/cher-and-countdown-to-christmasr and Countdown to Christmas (All Season Long)

  • “DJ Play A Christmas Song” can be heard in “The Santa Summit” starring Hunter King and Benjamin Hollingsworth.
  • In “A Merry Scottish Christmas” starring Lacey Chabert and Scott Wolf, listen to the original song “Home” performed by Cher and Michael Bublé!
  • In “Christmas on Cherry Lane” you can catch the classic Christmas song, “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” performed by Cher and Darlene Love.
  • In “Holiday Road” listen for Cher’s performance of the joyful song “Run Rudolph Run.”
  • Finally, don’t miss the unforgettable song “Angels in the Snow” by Cher in the original Christmas movie “Friends & Family Christmas.”

22 November – I Heart Radio Special
https://www.iheart.com/live/holiday-season-radio-9608/?autoplay=true&pr=false&fbclid=IwAR0AK5Bxcrg28Tcqc2XcbHqhAjVILlRYI6c1bMD1A2eGnaw_1VhxcUE6L_E

https://wnci.iheart.com/calendar/content/2023-11-22-iheartradio-holiday-special-cher-elton-john-meghan-trainor-more/

23 November – Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade starting on NBC at 8:30 am (all U.S. time zones)

https://www.macys.com/s/parade/lineup/?lineupaccordion=Performers&lid=parade_primarycta-lineupperformers

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon NBC 11:35e/10:35c
https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/how-to-watch-cher-on-the-tonight-show-starring-jimmy-fallon

29 November – Christmas at Rockefeller Center with Darlene Love

https://people.com/christmas-in-rockefeller-center-performers-cher-keke-palmer-barry-manilow-8401862

Barry Manilow is another listed guest. I love the rare times those two coincide in a cultural product.


1 December – at Odeon de Luxe, Cher in Conversation

https://www.nme.com/news/music/cher-announces-live-london-in-person-interview-event-3537716

This event is also offering a Cher Christmas magazine in combo with the LP or cassette tape but order fast (you have until Nov 23)

https://shop.thisisdig.com/gb/dig/artists/cher/?ref=direct

1 December – Cher on Graham Norton Show

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/reality-tv/a45824179/graham-norton-show-julia-roberts-tom-hanks/

 

 

Keep up with the news on further Christmas-related appearances and chart info: https://twitter.com/TCherUniverse

 

#34 Over Seven Decades!

As I was updating the Cher Scholar record page I decided to update the album stats page and as I was doing that I thought, “man, it’s good to re-review this album spread! 1965 to 2023!” It’s times like this I get very smug about my picker and my savvy little kid self.

I remember where I was when I heard each Cher album, too, from first listening to two Sonny & Cher albums my parents had in our small living room in Albuquerque. The bulk of Cher’s albums I bought used or discounted or found in libraries and listened to them in the front room of our St. Louis house, (albums like Superpak I and II, Cherished, Stars, I Paralyze). By the time of the Geffen albums, I had my brother Andrew’s old tape-deck/turntable stereo in my bedroom. I was in Yonkers, New York, when It’s a Man’s World and Believe were released. Living Proof was the one album I first heard in the upstairs bedroom of my parents house in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Closer to the Truth was heard first in a home office back in Albuquerque. And the ABBA album was in the  office I had in the marketing department at CNM. This album was first attended to in my current home office, interrupted too many times by work in preparation for next week’s ICANN meeting in Hamburg Germany. Pooh.

Not only is this Cher’s first Christmas album, it’s Cher’s first album with multiple covers upon release. Heart of Stone and Love Hurts both had later-day covers. Some of the 60s and 70s albums had covers with slight differences, like the 1971 Cher. But nothing like this. Casual Cher on a snowball surrounded by Christmas tree balls is the canonical cover. The Amazon edition has Cher in a silver gown and standing on an iceberg (my favorite). In the Cher.com version, Cher is kicking ice at the camera. Different fans seem to like different covers. There is also a Target cover with CHER in red (although my copies are in pink). The Amazon version has the most extensive booklet, with all covers included and an extra photo and a “Merry Christmas” message from Cher in the back.

Previous accountings had a few mistakes but the track list still has something for everyone: 3 dance songs, 3 pop songs, 2 R&B songs, 1 1950s-Rock-n-Roll song, 1 rap, 1 big band number and 2 country songs. Turns out there are 9 covers and 4 original songs.

When I evaluate a new Christmas song I think about two things: one, is this the best version of a song many people have already covered, and two, if it’s a new song, is it a good new addition to the great Christmas song canon? So here we go.

“DJ Play a Christmas Song” is a fun dance song and all the fans seem to love it. It’s about Christmas at the dance club with your other family, your chosen family (if you know, you know). “It’s love in here,” an escape from the tough outside world. We slip in and out of the Cher Effect, sleigh bells and Christmasy keyboards.

This introduces dancing as part of Christmas joy but unlike being nestled in our beds, this is dancing all night long (going out versus staying in, going out versus heading to grandma’s house). The song begins and ends with the sleigh bells. There are red and green strobe lights, song requests like requests from Santa. This is a pulsing heartbeat of sassy love.

This song really grew on me. Just hearing Cher sing the word Christmas feels festive. If you ever had bad, drama-riddled Christmases in your past for whatever reason, this song is your antidote. A definite add to the Massive Christmas Playlists (Spotify or Tidal).

“What Christmas Means To Me” is nice with Stevie Wonder but it’s the harmonica’s show. It feels like Cher’s voice has been Christmasified. She does a very sexy turn with “all these things and more.” They do a nice job recapturing the Motown sound in this song about definitions of Christmas (candles, cards, choirs and mistletoe). What’s amazing is how Stevie Wonder sounds like a young man on this track. He sounds younger than even in the 80s! His laugh at the end is so great. I also like CeeLo Green’s cover of this song.

“Run Rudolph Run” Cher slayed it (sleighed it, ha!) here start to finish. This song is my unexpected favorite. The whole thing sounds deliciously thick. That guitar! Cher’s love of guitars. Cher takes the guitar in the lyric here. Cher really pulls out the vowels. I also like the Jerry-Lee-Lewis piano and the echo on “round.” Most perfect. Definite add to the Massive Mix.

“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” This one with Darlene Love is different enough from the original although they capture the Phil Spector sound, the wall of noise drowning out the vocals.  Those ubiquitous sleigh bells, the sax. I wish the piano wasn’t so faint. Darlene Love and Cher sound so much alike now. When they sing “all the fun we had last year,” it’s totally believable.

This album passes The Bechdel Test, already, by the way and we’re not that far in. There’s a sense of fun that comes packaged with Darlene Love. I love the build of “please” at the end. This is the only song on the record with a fade at the end.

“Angels in the Snow” Cyndi Lauper does more than backup on this one. In fact, I like this because of Cyndi because it reads like two little girls putting on a little Christmas show, adorably childlike. “Celebrate the wild child in you and me” is right there in the lyric. Speaking of which, I had to look up the lyrics on this song just for “city streets aglow.” It’s a song about besties, “we’ll always be together/where ever we are/where ever we go…” Another reference to mistletoe. This album is obsessed with it, I contend.

“Home”  We start with church bells to help turn this secular song into a Christmas one.  Cher sings “another Christmas will come and go away….” but in the original version, it’s a summer, a summer tour ostensibly. Michael Bublé’s vocals are a little understated, If I remember correctly, he’s a Cher fan. His voice is so soft and Cher’s is so big but she tries to bring it way down and he tries to sing big. Both great voices. I like the way they sing around each other at end, better than when they sing lines together. Such a sweet song. A good, somber half-way point.

“Drop Top Sleigh Ride” Because I lived there for eight years and spent a few holidays there, I do like Los Angeles-specific Christmas songs like this. Sure there’s no snow but it can get festive anyhow. And harkening back to the first song on this album, many people end up in LA in search of many things, not the least of which is a second family. The party family.

For a rap (or half-rap) this song is kind of sedate but nonetheless catchy. But it has all the bling and spice markers of rap, like “shake that thing like a snow globe” and “a candy cane high” (rated G there). It’s another party song, “there’s a crowd in every house” and “there won’t be no silent night” (double negative). The bass bounce and “shake it up like a snow globe” and “sit on my lap” and “girl, keep dancing” all spell out a particularly bootsylicious Christmas party.

Another mistletoe mention. Listen if there’s something magic about mistletoe, I’ll take it. Pack that word up in there!

“Baby Please Come Home for Christmas” Those big bells start us off just like the Eagles version. I’ve always thought this one was too much of a Christmas sleeper. Not a favorite. And this is so similar to the Eagles version, down to the guitar solo. I prefer the very similar “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” But I bet this is one Cher really wanted to do and she makes it a bit Elvisish, which sounds properly close to the word Elvish, which equals a Christmas add.

“I Like Christmas” She does the same trick with this song, which is not a new song. The Casey James version was written by Nashville exec Bryan Fisher, his wife and son. I like this one for the moxy and mischief Cher adds to it as…well, Cher.  Another definition list of Christmas: friends, love, mall Santas and tacky lights. Cher sings this one well, gives it volume and a touch of rasp. I love the end where she laughs and comments.

And guess what we have more of? “I like a big red bow and mistletoe with you underneath ’cause I know it means you’ll be kissing me.” Amen to that. I’m getting to like this whole mistletoe thing.

“Christmas Ain’t Christmas” This new song from Mark Taylor, Patrick Mascall, Alex Francis and  Paul Barry is another favorite of mine. It’s anthemic and fun. “I’ve been a good girl. Well, at least I tried.” The cascading bells. Love it! It’s a love song and another homage to the Phil Spector sound, the thickness, the sax. This is definitely a Massive Mix add.

More mistletoe. Sigh.

“Santa Baby’ is indeed a  coquettish cover of a coquettish song. What else could it be? My favorite appeal-to-Santa song is Pearl Bailey’s “Box of Money” because it just comes right out with it without any pretext of a sexual favor in return. There are things I like about Cher’s cover, however. It unintentionally (or intentionally, who knows?) plays against Cher’s history of conspicuous consumption and her famous quote about not needing to marry a rich man because she already is one. They do a good job dating this song back to 1953 (hey, that’s why she wants a 1954 convertible!)

I also like her sort of ironic giggles. You can tell she’s having fun. There’s nothing really new here, except Cher’s gloss and the musical time-travel.

“Put a Little Holiday in Your Heart”  Did I mention how much I love these two singing together? This is good feels the minute Cyndi Lauper comes in. This is more adult than the other song and balances it out. The song offers help to your sprint and meanwhile is a nice holiday, boot scooter. I like Cyndi Lauper doing country songs. She’s also one of the few voices that can’t be overpowered by Cher. I like how the song is about being holiday-hearted and how that can put “a little shuffle in your step” (so you can both be happier and line dance).  Cher and Lauper both have immediate family members who are gay or trans, so this is not just a bit of fun but possibly a personal statement about open-heartedness. I could listen to a whole album of these two together.

“This Will Be Our Year” Another secular song that has been Christmas-ified. I love that it’s here in the finale. What a nice ending and yet something forward-looking.

 

Big themes of this album are mistletoe kissing, big parties with friends, and lovers being separated during the season.  My two top favorites are “Run Rudolph Run” and “Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without You” but there is a sub-tier of favorites too, like all the duets and “I Like Christmas.” This is one of those rare Christmas albums I have, (and I have quite a few), that I would enjoy playing start to finish at a Christmas dinner maybe or on a road trip and feel pretty confident that everyone would enjoy the variety. I have the later coming up so we’ll see!

Deep Dive Into Good Times

So I’m not technically finished with the 1970s TV shows yet. I have a little bit of cleanup to do with those, thanks to some audio files Cher scholar Jay sent me a while back (and some full episodes to revisit and refresh).

And then there are the TV specials I’ve just started to review. I’m up to Cher’s show in Monte Carlo in the very early 1980s now (watched it last night), a show which marks an important new chapter in Cher shows. I’ll have that up soon.

And in the middle of all this, I asked Robrt Pela if he would sit for a conversation about the Sonny & Cher 1967 movie Good Times since its director William Friedkin has just recently passed.

And so that led to a deep dive into the movie which produced not only the conversation with Robrt but a scene-by-scene guide to the movie, probably a bit too much explication but there’s a lot going on in that movie so…

…so….we’re doing movies now.

But anyway, the dive into the movie revealed a lot of Easter Eggs, as Robrt calls them, and lots of meta-moments and commentary on show business, all under the sharp direction of Friedkin and colorful, mid-60s stylings of teen-Batman-culture.

I remembered the movie as a kind of sentimental, silly romp from childhood. But I found much more in there as subtext when I went back in for a closer look.

Cher Scholar and Robrt Pela Discuss Good Times

Cher Scholar’s Guide to Good Times

 

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