Due to recent events starting a few years ago, I started moving from X to Facebook. Then I completely cancelled my X (its owner has been trolling my family members; I really couldn’t stay) and moved to Facebook, knowing that wasn’t a very good alternative. But at least Bluesky (a more healthy place for former Tweeters) was a viable space for short form posts. Facebook really has no similar space out there in the world and many people rely on it for their businesses.
I, however, don’t. So I didn’t have a good excuse to stay there. Especially after hearing details from the the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and the international malfeasance Facebook is causing worldwide. So I have now given up Amazon, X/Twitter and am far down the path of extricating myself from Google and Facebook. It’s not like we didn’t once live our lives without them.
Change is hard but it can also be fun. More on that below.
This is all to say I won’t be posting notices about Cher Scholar Blog on Facebook anymore. I’ll be doing that on Bluesky and Substack. I’ll also be publishing Substack-only articles, longer-form pieces that don’t fit either on Cher Scholar or Big Bang Poetry. Previously, I’ve had no space for that kind of thing.
I’m very happy with Bluesky and so far Substack feels almost like a clearing of the mind when you consider its interface compared to the noise of Facebook. It feels refreshing. The first thing I did there was to type in “Cher” to findcontent. That’s always how I learn a new research or technology tool. I type “Cher” into it.
I found some very good things. And some sassy, good writing, like the early pre-2000s Internet.
Unlike Bluesky, Cher fans were on Substack years before I got there. (I’m still waiting to find my Cher people on Bluesky.) A few pieces are about fans discovering Cher media for the first time.
Like her music. Trevor Gardemal has started working through Cher albums this year: https://substack.com/home/post/p-155592386
Mostly he doesn’t like the 1960s stuff. He calls Look at Us “among the longest 36 minutes of my life” and after that he would try no more S&C records, But the 1960s solo records also sound “monotonous” to him and he didn’t know the covers on those albums He does like the “musical spaghetti” of “Bang Bang” and he says, “Cher always kills a story-based song.” The first album he likes much is With Love, Cher because it’s where Cher is “really starting to sound like herself.” He also likes “You’d Better Sit Down Kids” which is “fun, sad and a little kooky.” He likes the artwork of Backstage and a few of the songs there. But the Jackson Highway album, he feels, is where “Cher is free from Sonny’s production…everything [he did] felt so flat prior to this.” He really likes “the twang” on that album.
Oh and Cher Scholar gets a shout-out there so that’s nice.
Like her movies: novelist Kerry Winfrey had a Cher Summer of Movies in 2024. She describes her experiences watching the movies (and other Cher things) with her husband and son. I particularly like the irreverent way she writes movie reviews, which is very funny and knowledgeable both. And she’s a novelist so the writing is good.
Silkwood: https://substack.com/home/post/p-145674456
Winfrey marks the beginning of Cher’s career here. But Cher would say it was the preceding film version of the Broadway play Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean. I would put the beginning at Good Times and Chastity a few decades earlier. Why leave them out?
Winfrey talks about how hard Silkwood is to find (life-hack: she gets them from the library). Her “gentle roasting” style is very addictive. She describes it as “when you love something with your whole heart and are also making fun of it just a little bit.” But the Cher love comes through loud and clear, which makes these reviews a very good example of audience reactions to Cher in these movies, especially a woman’s reaction.
“This movie was harrowing and emotional…and still quite fun in parts,” she says and then she talks about the great cast and Cher’s role as “a butch lesbian,” (a soft butch I would say). “This is a pride month watch for two reasons: Cher in general and Cher as a lesbian.”
This paragraph is typical of Winfrey’s style:
“Kurt Russell is, as always great. Have you ever seen Kurt Russell in a role and thought, “no thanks,” because I certainly haven’t. I’m always happy to see him. He wears very low=slung jeans and, at one point, pours a beer over his head….He’s a flawed character and he’s a character that knows the importance of reduce/reuse/recycle.”
That’s adorable film reviewing right there. She also sees things in the movies that I’ve missed. Like Meryl Streep’s mullet.
“Like, what a cast! The tree of them together [Streep, Russel, Cher] light up the screen! There’s just so much hair!”
She talks about Craig T. Nelson’s work as a heavy in movies and I didn’t even realize E. Katherine Kerr is the same person who is in Suspect. Playing different social class of character, too. How amazing. Winfrey catches the cross over of John Mahoney in Suspect and Moonstruck. But if she watches Come Back to the Five and Dime, she will see the cross-over of Sudie Bond there and in Silkwood.
Her reviews are also full of empowering Cher asides, which I will catalog here.
“At one point Cher starts dating a makeup artist but it turns out she’s a makeup artist at a funeral parlor and she’s making Cher look like a corpse. Hollis was like, “What was that whole plot in there?’ and listen, he’s my husband and I love him, but sometimes I don’t know what he’s thinking. Why wouldn’t that little detail be in there? Why wouldn’t I want to see Cher date a funeral home makeup artist?”
I love reviews like this.
She quotes Roger Ebert’s review at the time expecting the film to be a predictable, angry political expose but that it was really an unpredictable character-driven story where the villains are mysteriously drawn and not cartoonish.
Then there’s an aside about Winfrey working out to Cher music. “Have you ever power-walked to ‘Song for the Lonely?’ Because I have and it was beautiful.”
Winfrey’s son was shocked at seeing Cher’s entire butt in the “Turn Back Time” video. and she says, “it’s never too early to start talking about Cher.” Her son also asked,
“why did that sailor grab Cher’s leg?” and I responded, “I guess he just loves Cher.” But then I remembered that we need to teach our children about the importance of consent, so I added, “but you shouldn’t grab someone’s leg, even if it’s Cher…especially if it’s Cher.”
I could read this stuff all day.
Mask: https://substack.com/home/post/p-146339849
She begins this review talking about how all the moms who are hot for Sam Elliott. She says she didn’t watch Mask in high school “because I would have, as they say, made it my entire personality.” This tracks with my behavior after seeing the movie, how I went out to find white sleeveless t-shirts and shoelace necklaces.
She focuses on the mom aspects of the movie which I only half-considered on previous viewings, how the kids are mean to Rocky but “he has something all those other jerky kids don’t have: a biker gang as a family.” She compares these bikers to the romance novel trope where a group of “traditionally very masculine guys is actually made of up romantic softies.” She also highlights Rocky’s transitioning from a little boy who collects baseball cards to a teenager who likes girls and how touching and precious she finds this. Very interesting point there.
You can tell from the review that she’s watching the director’s cut because the scene with Cher singing at the camp site is back in and Bruce Springsteen songs are on the soundtrack (which was Rocky’s favorite artist). Of Rusty, she says, “She is such a tough, take-no-shit, badass mom at times (I mean, she’s Cher, of course she is) but does she have a job?
I’ve thought about that too. How do they pay the rent? Cher is always “making morning smoothies while listening to what sounds like my Spotify yacht rock playlist.” And also, Rusty also cannot drive a car….whenever there’s a a lawn or a curb, she’s gonna drive over it. She can’t even park in her own driveway–diagonally on the front lawn it is!…No curb can contain her.”
And Winfrey claims “You’ve never seen a more attractive biker couple.” And then she makes fun of one of Gar’s t-shirts in the movie, the one that says “Mustache Rides” (which was lost on me in 1986. Winfrey says, “literally anyone else in this shirt would look like a drunk frat boy.”
Other good sentences:
“In my experience, knowing a lot about the Trojan War was never a ticket to popularity in high school.”
Upset when Rusty ignores Rocky’s new poem, Winfrey says, “I know she doesn’t’ have time to read parent books….but come on.!”
She does respect Rocky figuring out how to ride all day on the bus across Los Angeles to get to see Laura Dern again: “Things were so much harder in the time before cell phones and Google.”
She says some say the movie is too long. I didn’t realize this. I hadn’t heard. But that “art doesn’t have to be efficient” and she makes a case for Nothing Happens cinema.
Winfrey is surprised this role did not earn Cher an Oscar win, not to mention just a nomination. She feels this is a better role than Moonstruck. I’ve been saying that for years. It’s more of an emotional tour-de-force. Winfey notes that Rocky’s puppy grows bigger in the background while the story plays out, which is a nice touch.
This was also a hard movie to find, Winfrey says. The library again.
“I know we have a lot going on right now as a country, but at some point we need to look at why so many Cher films are almost impossible to watch. Something’s not right here. I think Cher is being silenced, you guys.”
And she leaves us with this bombshell at the end, artist Jens Lekman having songs about this movie. Who knew this factoid?
From Wikipedia:
Gradually, he adopted the pseudonym Rocky Dennis, a name he borrowed from the protagonist in the movie Mask. Under this name, he began releasing limited edition CD-R discs, the first of which was 2001’s The Budgie. In the early 2000s, he sent a collection of the songs to the American record label Secretly Canadian, who contracted him.
From 2000 to 2003, Lekman recorded and released much of his material privately on CD-R. Because one of his songs during this time was titled “Rocky Dennis’ Farewell Song to the Blind Girl”, inspired by the movie Mask. Lekman was mistakenly referred to as “Rocky Dennis”. Lekman says that it was a “mistake”: “someone thought that was my real name cause I had a song about him, and then radio picked up on it, and I never had a chance to change it,” He put the confusion to rest with his Rocky Dennis in Heaven EP (2004).
We will have to check that out.
Suspect: https://substack.com/home/post/p-144841303
“I wish Cher was my lawyer” Winfrey says and I had to think about that for a minute. Would this be good or bad?
“Yesterday, May 20th, was Cher’s birthday. A national holiday, if you ask me!”
She compares Suspect to the courtroom drama And Justice for All but :instead of Al Pacino being hot, we got Cher being hot.”
Winfrey notices a lot of the outfits Cher rocks in this review: “absolutely rocking a beret,” and she “looks amazing in all her oversized sweaters” (she totally does), and “Cher looks amazing in glasses” and how great she looks between the library stacks talking to Dennis Quaid, “and at the end “where she’s sitting at her desk and looking like the baddest bitch in town.”
Cher as a character: “beleaguered and tough.
D.C. as a character: “the D.C. of Suspect is a nightmare. We’re, like, five minutes in and we’ve already had a suicide, a murder, and a carjacking.”
So true.
She makes over Cher’s bad chalkboard handwriting and about Liam Neeson, “this hostile murder suspect [who] is just betting hotter and hotter” with every progressive clean-up scene. And Winfrey tracks all the ethics violations, including Dennis Quaid having to sleep with E. Katherine Kerr: “That’s honestly so much work. Good for him.”
Instead of jury-tampering there’s Cher-tampering and about Quaid, “no sequester can hold him.
“I screamed when he grabbed her and scared my son…I had to be like, “I’m sorry, someone was hurting Cher in a movie, but everything’s okay, go back to bed!”
About Cher’s solving the mystery at the end: “I don’t really know, but I believe she can do just about anything so I’m willing to overlook any gaps in logic.” Winfrey affirms Cher was believable as a lawyer and I do too.
She reminds us Cher “was in Suspect, The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck all in the same year. “We used to be a proper country.”
She caught this movie for free streaming on Tubi.
Moonstruck: https://substack.com/home/post/p-147964693
This is the last movie I could find that Winfrey reviewed.
“I’m not sure this is her best performance (she’s been great in everything, and different in everything…we love a queen with range), it’s certainly her biggest performance. I’d say her star-making performance, if Cher wasn’t already a star….the quintessentail Cher role…she’s luminous, lighting up the screen with that husky voice and je nais said Cher.” No one else could play this role.”
Winfrey talks about how Cher can play an Italian character (and notes the other non-Italian actor, Olympia Dukakis) and that Cher “can play any identity. She basically wrote a song about it.”
What is this song she speaks of?
She talks about love in New York City movies in the 1980s and mentions Crossing Delancy. I was once at my local tearoom on a book club night and I sat with two New Yorkers now living in Albuquerque. I asked them what movie they thought most reminded them of New York City and they answered Crossing Delancy. We talked about me living there in the late 1990s and I said the movie that most reminded me of my co-workers and my landlord was Moonstruck (especially the plastic runners and the plastic on the couch and the way they were less broadly Italian than I had been led to believe Italians were from the movies.)
I didn’t notice this before but Johnny asking Loretta to invite Ronny to the wedding was kind of pushy. “This is so much emotional labor to foist on Cher and she’s not even your wife yet!”
Winfrey goes into great detail about the “meet cute” (which is a ROM-COM term I had to look up) at the bakery. Chrissy and all the cast reacting to Ronny in great detail. She says this is one of the “greatest lines in the history of cinema”: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”
Winfrey says she taught her son to memorize those lines because “I do think it’s important for children to learn at least one Nicolas Cage monologue while they’re young, and if they don’t hear about Moonstruck at home, they’ll hear about it on the streets.”
When Loretta makes Ronny a steak, “we should all be so lucky as to have Cher makes us a steak.”
Winfrey then talks about the knocking over of the table in this scene: “Today’s romances could never. Point me to one single romantic comedy made in the last ten (fifteen?) years that has even on-tenth of the raw sexual chemistry that Cher and Nicolas Cage share in this scene”…and then she talks about male desperation in movies.
She then compares Ronny’s hotness (“He’s already knocked over multiple things”) to Johnny’s boringness (“I seriously doubt he’s toppled a table even once.”)
Winfrey then talks about characters who have to make tough ethical choices (Olympia Dukakis’s character) and Cher’s makeover.
“It’s pure elation whenever we get the chance to see Cher get glam again. It’s her natural state….she loses the gray hair and puts on some blood red lipstick, buys a new dress, and BAM! She’s Cher!…and she looks like a million bucks. And do you know what Ronny says when he sees her dress? He says “thank you.” This is the correct response.”
Back at Ronny’s place, Cage delivers what Winfrey says,
“I swear to you, the best monologue I’ve ever heard…this one is a romance novel….He has his little bowtie on. It’s snowing. Cher’s crying. Show me a better scene in cinema, I dare you.”
She then recites the whole monologue. Which is great indeed.
“Cher walks home in the morning looking the absolute hottest she’s ever looked, kicking a can down the street with the city…Name a better romance. You can’t. This one has it all: New York, Nicolas Cage, Italian food [that egg dish alone], opera, Dean Martin singing ‘That’s Amore,” a lot of dogs, and Cher..”
I quoted Kerry Winfrey a lot here just to show how she is very adept at showing us why Cher is so likable in the movies. So check out her other stuff on Substack and her novels at Goodreads.
Cher vs. Dolly (https://substack.com/home/post/p-136055950)
Troy Ford wrote this 2023 (and since I’m having a Dolly-easter party this weekend, this is very timely).
Ford does random smackdowns of artists (Liza v. Aretha) with topics like Plastic Surgery of which he says you can look weird or old. but that “weird is people too.”
I like that he writes his way into his thoughts. As he begins she says, “Monocles in.”
He says there are only two movies of consequence for each of them, (Winfrey would beg to differ, as would I), Moonstruck, Witches of Eastwick, 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. He says he didn’t make it through Silkwood and Mask. And of Mermaids and Mama Mia 2 he says, “Meh” which actually does map to my feelings. He says considering Burlesque would sink “the SS Mrs. Bono” and I wonder if he knows Christina Aguilera is about to be made that into live show. He happens to love Moonstruck.
He also reminds how great the 9 to 5 cast was. He scores Dolly and Cher evenly here. “It’s tight. Let’s move on.”
Of The Witches of Eastwick, he loves the polyamory aspect in a movie “before everyone was doing it, Jack Nicholson, in a role no other actor could have played” and he loves the Veronica Cartwright cherry scene. (I saw the movie with my high school friends and this was one of our favorite scenes as well.)
Ford also reminds us about Dolly’s two Golden Globe nominations.
Musically, Ford says Dolly and Cher are like peaches and pomegranates.
“Cher’s musical repertoire spans folk rock, disco, pop-rock, dance-pop; she put Auto-Tune on the map; and has died and risen from the ashes so many times, she might be our closest living embodiment to a phoenix ever….she has sold 140 millioin records (including 40 million with Sonny) and has had #1 singles in six consecutive decades.”
But he says he didn’t “become a believer until ‘Believe.'”
“Dolly is country music,” he says. “When she bleeds, Southern Comfort gushes out.” He notes Dolly’s monster songwriting credentials: about 3,000 written and 450 reordered. Dolly also has 11 Grammys to Cher’s one. But he equates Cher’s breadth to Dolly’s depth. Another tie.
Next is Philanthropy: Dolly’s Imagination Library (200 million books donated), The Dollywood Foundation. He says they both donated 1 million to Covid research. Dolly got publicly vaccinated and for doing so, “she’s a hero,” for setting an “example among demographics who [maybe wouldn’t].” Cher has contributed to AIDS research, poverty initiatives, solders and veterans, LGBTQ+,
“and then there’s the elephant….excuse me for just a moment, I have an onion to chop.”
The last contest is for “America’s Grandma” which was inspired by Betty White.
Betty White really did feel like America’s Grandma. Dolly is more like a fabulous Aunt. Cher is not even a family member, in my mind.
Ford says, “Dolly would be delighted; Cher might be annoyed.”
Yes and No. She would like her own grandchildren. She doesn’t need to be yours.
He reminds us they are in the same age. “Our two divas are class itself,” he says and note that on Cher…Special (1978), they “clearly like each other.”
He ends with, “Dolly is still America’s Grandma, but Cher will probably outlive us all and reinvent herself anew as singer babe mother gypsy tramp thief TV star mother KISS-groupie lesbian mermaid service member tarantula infomercial queen witch Italian-American Jewess nightclub owner singing grandmother Empress of the Universe.”
Amen.
There’s also an article in Portuguese by Victoria Haydee who does Albums of the Month. (https://substack.com/home/post/p-145360935)
She reviews Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Marianne Faithful’s Broken English (it has a blue cover) and Madonna’s True Blue. She then, for some reason, moves over to Cher’s Heart of Stone. She talks about Cher’s look, her “striking countenance and deep eyes,” “unforgettable clothes, her eras and styles, “the folk style, soon she would become a mysterious gypsy, a powerful witch with her black cat, matured into a daring rocker in the 80s and the futuristic version at the turn of the millennium.”
There are two Believe articles:
Matt Fish commemorated the 25th anniversary (2023) for a series on Numbers Ones (2023)
https://substack.com/home/post/p-136856438
“Like it or not, Cher’s Believe irrevocably changed the face of modern pop music.” He notes it topped the charts in over 20 countries and moved “upwards of 10 million units independently” and “is best know as the first certifiable smash shaped around autotune.”
He tells how the producers lied initially, said the song used the vocoder, “a technology pioneered by Kraftwerk in the 1970s. But that Autotune is in the average producer’s toolbox now. He calls out Daft Punk, Dua Lipa, Kanye West, and T-Pain for their work in Autotune.
“Music snobs can decry its ubiquity and gripe about how it’s “not real” singing, but the fact remains that much of the 21st century’s catchiest songs wouldn’t exist without Cher.”
He says, “there’s more to this record than “Believe” and goes on to talk about that.
“In an era where too much pop music takes itself too seriously, Believe is a fun, nostalgic antidote” and you can “sing along to that iconic warble.”
#1 Believe (https://substack.com/home/post/p-135794943)
Another treatise on the song is found in Italian by Canzonette.
“There are songs that change the course of music history, and it almost always starts from an accident.”
“Cher’s career at the end of the century was (given for) over,” he says and he goes through her highs and “then oblivion again.” He talks about Brian Higgins’ years of (re)writing the song for demos and how Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling get involved, Then goes into the invention of the technology by Andy Hildbrand who was an electronic engineer and who developed algorithms for sonar to locate oil deposits and the seismic acoustics that led to Antares Technology, or the early version of the plugin “which would change the history of world music and which will cause huge fights between the old and the new generation.” (Canzonette positions the problem generationally. He might be right.)
He delves into it (and this is a Google auto-translation):
“Is using autotune right? Is it an effect or is it like doping in sport? What is the use of splitting singing lessons [if] there is a machine what intones you? (Now to be honest, I don’t believe the false myth that Autontune can fix anyone: you need a half idea, even a vague one, a rudiment of intonation so that the algorithm works as it does best. Of course, the more out of tune and the more you hear the correction, which then becomes a habit, a stylistic element, an identifier, an almost perennial color of the modern drifts of rap and pop–but this does not change the reality of the facts: it cannot fix all.)
There have been countless debates on the matter, a single truth or a solution that would please everyone has never surfaced because it is impossible, even just for an ideological reason, for two distant generations to find themselves…on common ground on something as fragile as technological progress. This is how systematically every x weeks we witness the format Singer From Another Era Who Says His Own Against Those Who Use Autontune, rightly or wrongly, independently.
Note 1: in all fairness, these fingers have the duty to underline how even in the 60s the guitar amplifier and distortion pedals were seen as the devil.
…
Setting zero sounds very robotic…in the following years the Autotune manual will call the Setting zero ‘Cher effect.’
He says Cher suggested trying a Roachford vocoder effect. Mark Taylor decided to try the new plugin…
“that thing that instantly makes Cher’s voice intonatissima in an algorithmic, cold robotic way. It looks like the vocoder, but a vocoder it is not….. we could talk about…how, even today, the piece sounds fresh and innovative, despite the sound of Autotine is now absolutely everywhere, from trap to new records crooner like Bublé.
“…there are passages, fore example the initial one ,”I can’t break through,” in the first verse in which Cher’s voice breaks, she becomes roboticfor the first time in the history of music in an audible and desired way and at the same time is extremely emotional…”
He notes when Kayne West “abandons the alpha male character” to use it, suggesting the use of Autotune is gendered and feminine. Which judging the amount of male rappers who use it…
“If you want to know other and further modern evolutions of the Autotune: turn on the radio.”
Feisty!
Cher, The Original It Girl by Vee (https://substack.com/home/post/p-153684192)
This is a style and fashion article from an Armenian perspective. Vee calls the 1970s Cher’s “defining decade” and she recalls her first Cher impression, “watching my mom get ready in Armenia” while listening to “Believe” and “Heart of Stone.” She says Cher is one of Armenia’s few international stars. She traces her quirky, counterculture style of the 60s,to the TV star and fashion icon of the 70s.
“(Sonny was also there.)”
Here is her gallery of Cher 70s fashion kills:
She then mentions that the solo spots of Cher’s variety shows became increasingly, elaborately staged. Here is her gallery of looks from the TV shows:
She remarks about how Cher thrived in “predominantly white entertainment industry” and mentions the work of Bob Mackie and she makes what is probably the most astute summary of Cher’s impact of the fashion culture:
“She became a walking revolution in fashion, redefining what it meant to be glamourous, edgy and unapologetically individualistic…an aesthetic that fused Old Hollywood grandeur with a daring, futuristic edge. Her style wasn’t about looking good–it was a statement of self-expression, definance and liberation.
Cher rejected the understated norms of the the time in favor of extravagance and risk. Her looks weren’t just clothes–they were moments of performance art, each outfit telling it’s own story….with her sharp cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and long black hair, she embraced her erotic features which stemmed from her Armenian heritage…a powerful act of self-empowerment.
Her wardrobe inspired generations of artists and designers. From the daring cut-outs seen on modern runways to the maximalist red-carpet looks seen on our favorite stars.
Her story encourages to embrace change, own your unique identity…she proved that beauty, success and identity are not one-size-fits all…true icons don’t just reflect the culture, they shape it.”
Wow. That was great!
As I said on a recent Substack article, the days of us all being on the same social platform are probably doing away for all of us, Cher, herself, isn’t very active on X/Twitter anymore, where she used to be one of everyone’s favorite Tweeters. Or as much on Facebook either (she even removed her account there for a time) and now she’s more on TikTok or Instagram maybe, but those platforms have their own issues. Cher has never been very good at posting her news from her own sites anyway. Fan clubs and sites tend to get their news elsewhere. Who knows how long those fans will stay on their platforms. The winds of change are afoot.
Speaking of Little Bites, here is a post to catch up on bits and bites of the Cher news we’re behind on.
There are few good things I have to say about this shitty, heartbreaking year. But one of them is the time I’ve spent watching an amazing show called Ted Lasso. My family has been prodding me to watch this show for a while now but I didn’t have AppleTV. The show has a strong foundation of kindness and perseverance and goes against the grain of decades of Machiavellian TV plots. We have been so bombarded with fictional and reality characters showing us all the ways we can be assholes, it’s refreshing to see something that shows us all the ways to not be assholes…and still maintain dramatic interest, as if assholery is the only thing that could.
