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Category: Cher Product (Page 1 of 8)

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.)

 

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.

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

 

Cher is Cookin’

Christmas is Coming Early This Year!

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Cher set a release date of October 20 for her Christmas album and unveiled a series of covers. And those covers seem to just keep coming. I suppose everyone has to draw their own line on how many different covers they need of Cher’s Christmas album.

On October 28 I’m starting a road trip to get to a family reunion in Cleveland.  I should have my copies by then because guess what’s going in every family swag bag! Whoo-hoo! (They’re all also getting pistachio wine from Las Cruses.)

Anyway, Cher has been keeping quiet on the track listing of Christmas songs and regarding names of any duet partners, but in all the kerfuffle of the pre-order announcements, Amazon’s special-cover (my clear favorite of the three, by the way) was leaked with the little sticker on it. So now we know: Stevie Wonder, Darlene Love, Michael Bublé, Tyga and Cyndi Lauper.

I actually keep those little stickers from my Cher albums and CDs. I once drove a friend to Las Vegas from LA and this person opened my CD case for Heart of Stone, the sticker fell out,  we lost it and I’m still upset about it.

Last week on social media, we saw pictures and clips of Cher’s house all decked out with Christmas trees and poinsettias and Cher was sitting with Darlene Love.

This duet is pretty awesome for a few reasons. For one, Cher and Darlene Love are longtime friends. When Darlene Love was in financial trouble, Cher hired her for one of her concert tours.

Also, they both sang  on the famous Phil Spector Christmas album back in 1963  (Darlene Love soloing and Cher as part of the backup crew) so they have Christmas history together.

And finally because Darlene Love has done some of my favorite Christmas songs, her Home Alone song and the fun one she did with Ronnie Spector.

Apparently the new clip is for an upcoming episode of The View but it seems too early to be shooting appearances for future talk shows. But maybe Cher will start promoting the album in October. Would it be hard to whip up a Christmas TV special like Mariah Carey does?  Easy, right?

Darlene Love and Cher through the years:

We know the song “Silent Night” won’t be on the album. Cher has said that about a million times. She also likely won’t redo anything she’s already done (my 2021 breakdown of Cher Christmas moments).

To find all the formats and covers: https://cher.lnk.to/Christmas 

Recent Interviews & News

A really good recent interview was in the Hollywood Reporter.  They call her “the world’s most recognizable mononym.”

On Music and Movies:

The most common quote she gets from strangers is still, “Snap out of it.” She still gets that “over and over!”

Last week, people were reporting Cher’s name has shown up under the IMDb.com entry for a film called Hail Mary, a football movie staring Jennifer Aniston. Her character name is Roxy Fields. I’m getting a football franchise owner vibe on that.

We found out Cher just sold her music catalog to Irving Azoff.  “Well, everybody’s doing it. (Laughs.) I get to keep everything from Believe on, so I’m fine with it.”

In captions on the article we find out October marks the 25th anniversary of “Believe” and April the 35th anniversary of Moonstruck. 

About auto-tune, Cher says she had a hard time with the song and  producer Mark Taylor kept asking her to sing the verses better until she finally said, “If you want it better, get somebody else” and stormed out. This is artistically preferrable to walking out over a broken manicured nail as would have happed in 1972.

She says, “the record company didn’t want to do it. They said, ‘You can’t tell who it is.’ I went, ‘Yes, I know, that’s the beauty of the whole thing!”

Let’s just sit with that for a minute. Imagine having a voice so identifiable that you feel disappearing from it to be beautiful. Just think about that for a minute.

On Elephants, Ukraine:

Cher is still working to save Billy, the LA Zoo elephant (and the elephant that started her captive animal advocacy). It’s so shocking that the zoo has been confronted with so many recommendations and that 40 other U.S. zoos are phasing out elephants but they refuse to budge. Cher says it took five years of legal work to save Kaavan from Islamabad. And Billy is still showing psychological distress so she’s not giving up on him. She’s asking people in Los Angeles to “bombard the [LA] city council” because “the citizens of LA essentially own the zoo but don’t have the authority to influence the decision making.”

She talks about saving  six lions, a  panther and a tiger from Ukraine right before the war broke out. “We left the bear, so we had to sneak back in with a big pickup truck and get him out during the war.”

On the war itself, she says, “We’re helping them fight the war so that Russia doesn’t go in and take all the NATO countries. I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand or realize that, but [the Ukrainians] are doing us a service.”

She also talks about her first dog, Pansy, and her beloved cat Mr. Big who she rescued while on tour at a two-day stop in Detroit.

On Twitter:

She laments the changes on Twitter, the disabled Tweetbot that was helping her dyslexia. “I went to Threads, so I’m on both now. I used to love going on Twitter.”

Me too, Cher. Me too. I’m using Facebook now but there are many more ramifications. I even have much better feedback on Facebook but that’s not the point. I miss talking to strangers.

On Cherlato:

During the Hollywood Reporter interview the Cherlato truck was at the Taylor Swift concert. Cher says they have many flavors but the truck can only support about five at a time. Her favorite is chocolate. “I’m pedestrian,” she says. “When I saw the [edible] gold cones, I almost lost it. I wanted to wear them as earrings.”

On Her Life Stories:

The interviewer, Mikey O’Connell, asks her if she’s still amazed that a news story transpires whenever she leaves her house (my paraphrase). Cher talks about bad periods in her career, periods that would make anyone else give up. “I didn’t quit,” she says.

When asked about performers she likes, she refuses to use her position to single out anyone “because there are so many great people right now. When you single out one of them, it just diminishes everyone else that’s working.”

That’s a good answer.

She’s starting over with her bio-pic. That doesn’t sound good. I hope she’s not been firing a succession of directors. But in any case, she says “we’re going to have to wait [for after the strikes]. I’m not going to go against my people.”

She keeps saying “my people.” I don’t think she means that in the royal sense, but like in “my squad.”

Her autobiography is still not done. The big problem with these projects, she says, is how long her life has been and how hard it is to squish it down into a story.  That is a challenge.

Her House:

She finally explained why she’s been trying to sell her beautiful Malibu house. “You can’t be flexible in this house — as much as I love it.” I think this means it stifles her decorating creativity.

Someone did a little article solely about Cher’s Malibu entryway: https://www.homesandgardens.com/celebrity-style/cher-entryway


There was also a Good Morning Britain interview where we find out that  Mama Mia  doesn’t even have a script yet. And Cher is not committed to it. On this interview she claims she’s never had duets on her albums. That might sound odd when she had a Peter Cetera duet on Heart of Stone and all of those with Gregg Allman and Sonny duets. I think she means she hasn’t made it a habit on every album or hasn’t done The Duets Album, like Tony Bennett.

Cher’s Tuna Pasta Salad

In other Cher cooking news, way back my sister-in-law Susan sent me an article online about Rock-and-Roll recipes that included Cher’s tuna pasta salad and wanted to know if it was any good. So I dug out my Cooking with Cher cookbook and found the same recipe there and made it.

So this was back when the fad was to make everything fat free. People aren’t doing this anymore.  Michael Pollan has said in his book In Defense of Food that the fat-free craze just made us fatter. And we need some fats as it turns out.

The recipe tasted….well fat free.

I still hope we’ll get a Sonny cookbook someday and a maybe new more-fat-ful Cher cookbook.

Cher….and Other Fantasies

I’ve finished reviewing the final TV Special from the 1970s. It took a long time, was often hard to describe and this one had a lot of context:

https://www.cherscholar.com/cherand-other-fantasies/

Little Richard, Cherlato and Cher Specials

Little  Richard:  I Am  Everything

A few weeks ago I watched the documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything. It explored how underappreciated Little Richard was during his lifetime and the queer influence inherent in the origin of rock-and-roll music.

The documentary relates to Cher for two reasons. One, Sonny worked closely with Little Richard back when he was employed with Specialty Records. There’s a documentary out there where Sonny tells some  wacky anecdotes about being one of Little Richard’s handlers. I’ll try to track it down. It might even be an old Phil Spector documentary.

Anyway, at one point during the Little Richard documentary Mick Jagger is talking about how beholden everyone is to Little Richard and then Nile Rogers tells how Little Richard paved the way for everything that followed. And at that point there is what I would call “a collage of flamboyance” at marker 1:35:52 pulling the thread from Little Richard through to contemporary artists. Someone says, “it’s almost as if everyone is defined by Little Richard.”

As I was watching the collage unfold I thought Cher will not be included in this, flamboyant though she is. I just took it on faith she would not be included.

But she was.

Here’s the partial list in the collage. It’s pretty impressive:

  • Elvis
  • James Brown
  • The Beatles
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Prince
  • Elton John
  • David Bowie
  • The Eurythmics
  • Freddie Mercury
  • Boy George
  • Mick Jagger
  • Jimmy Page
  • Robert Plant
  • Rick James
  • Cher
  • Madonna
  • Rod Stewart
  • Lady Gaga
  • Plenty more new people after this I didn’t know.

I did a screen capture of Cher’s appearance (above). It’s a big deal. There were plenty of other deserving flamboyant artists who didn’t make it.

Cherlato

Cher’s new gelato truck finally started rambling around Los Angles a few weeks ago. I asked my peoples in LA to try it out for me because I can’t very well make a visit just for gelato. as reasonable as this seems to me. My friend Coolia caught the truck near Canter’s Deli  while she was on her way to another event.

At first when I mentioned the gelato truck to Coolia, she said, “I don’t buy that Cher even eats ice cream!” So I googled ‘Cher eating ice cream’ and sent her the resulting collage, which looked something like this:

Coolia said, “I stand corrected.” She then fit it a Cherlato truck visit in between a family tragedy and a trip to Japan so I’m very thankful to her for taking the time to not only track it down but let it interfere with her diet.

Julie said the gelato was good but not mind blowing. The staff was really nice, she said, and they told her business was good. By closing time they had run out of three of their flavors (and it’s not like they have that many!) Coolia had the Chocolate XO Cher flavor (allegedly Cher’s favorite) and her boyfriend Dave had the Breakfast at Cher’s Coffee and Donuts. They didn’t upgrade to the $18 gold cone understandably.

The staff gave them tasting spoons and Coolia said the Stracialetta Giapo’s Way flavor was also good.

Here are Coolia’s pics:

You can check Cherlato’s landing schedule on their Twitter/X page: https://twitter.com/cherlato_gelato.

Cher on TV

I’ve been updating the main Cher TV page on cherscholar.com, adding links to her music videos. Strangely, not all of her videos have been published on her own YouTube channel.

I’ve also started to add the dates and songs for all the televised guest performances.

And I’ve started documenting the TV specials. I’ve completed two new ones so far, The Sonny & Cher Nitty Gritty Hour from 1971 and the 1978 Cher…Special.

A big theme of Cher…Special is hair. Cher-the-child laments the fact that she is not blonde. Intro 2 Anthro with Two Humans just did an episode about hair. So I’ve been thinking about it. I was blonde once inadvertently when I first arrived at Sarah Lawrence and I was highlighting my own hair. For those of us who were using that plastic head cap and needle instead of the foil, you were going to be blonde eventually.

I was never allowed to watch the movie Grease when it came out (one of only two things I was deprived of watching, that and the comedy Soap). So in high school I finally saw it and thought Cha Cha was the prettiest character in the movie. So I had red hair my senior year, constantly chasing the sultry Cha-Cha color and ending up occasionally with the more innocent-looking Molly Ringwald. I’ve had about 50-shades of brunette since then and the Susan Sontag streak. Right now my hairdresser Maxine, (who I just found out went to the same grade school I did only ten years earlier), is helping me evolve into a natural salt and pepper. Fingers crossed.

Hair color seems so fluid to get upset about. But I guess if you were Cher and your mother and your sister were California blondes in the 1950s and 60s, you might become an upset tween too. Honestly, I’ve never found hair color, eye color, height, shape, size, the car you drive or the shampoo you use a relevant factor in any successful friendship or relationship, but I understand other people have their fetishes. Sonny apparently did although he married two raven-haired beauties.

To elaborate on a comment Mr. Cher Scholar made in his Anthro episode about Cher, after a decade of Barbara Edens, seeing Cher on TV as a raven glamazon was a big deal. And due to Cher’s somewhat fluid-looking ethnicity, many kinds of women were impacted by this. It was beyond a personal statement; she was pulling us all through. She was all non-blonde women around the world on TV.  Someone once told me they loved her in Iran. But still, she never lost her own blonde fetish. And she’s dipped into blondeness occasionally through the decades. I could probably do a whole essay on Cher exploring blondness.

Programs for The Cher Show

I keep hearing rumors that the US traveling-version of the Broadway musical The Cher Show is set to launch. Fall 2023 is the latest story. But the show’s own site still lists the old start date of Fall 2021!

The Broadway version of the show opened on December 3, 2018 with Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Miraela Diamond as the three Chers, and when I went to see it in January of 2019, the programs weren’t available  yet. Which seemed incredible since any fan would want a program to a Broadway show, at minimum.

And then I forgot about it. So it was a long time, (maybe even after the show closed), that I ordered my copy from the online store.

When the traveling UK show started up in 2022, their program was ready right away and I mailed away for a few of their show’s artifacts.

These programs are very different. The shows were different. Different cast, sets and costumes. And I think their programs reflect those differences.

The Broadway program has a beautiful design, the three stylized Cher drawings, very colorful incarnations. There’s a emoji-strewn message from Cher inside. The program is maybe a little too much like a Cher concert program; it has the mandatory two-page collage of her record album covers. Always impressive to see, but not entirely germane in this book. There are shots of the cast, with quotes and song titles to situate them in the show. There’s a big centerpiece, fold-out of the Bob Mackie costumes. On the one hand, this almost puts too much emphasis on the clothes, (Mackie here calls the costumes “get-ups”), but in light of the dead, old critics view in the 1970s that Cher was “just a clothes hanger,” this doubling-down feels alright.

There are lists of Cher’s hits and awards, Bob Mackie sketches for the show, (little art pieces themselves). One-hundred costumes were created for the show, including a recreation of  the hole-fit which Mackie always calls Swiss Cheese. Mackie retells the story of meeting Cher and what a young “sprite” she was back then. How daring she has always been.


There are some great shots of the sets. But one of the best things about this programs is the list of accolades about Cher.

TV producer Flody Suarez talks about germinating the idea 17 years prior. (Didn’t the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour producers Chris Bearde and Allan Blye once try to  mount a Sonny & Cher musical back in the 1980s or 90s?)

Suarez went to New York and met people who knew people on Broadway who got the show hooked up with stage producer Jeffrey Seller and Rick Elice of another successful jukebox musical Jersey Boys. He says Rick Elice demanded great performers and nice people. With Cher involved, it was easier to get Bob Mackie involved.

And what about Cher? Suarez talks about her power, her vulnerability, tenacity, kindness and originality.

In Rick Elice’s notes, he talks about a visit from Cher in the summer of 2015 when his life was at its lowest ebb due to the death of his long-time partner, how Cher helped him through it. He talked about Cher as “a minister” who is “attentive to people.” Someone who is kind, thoughtful, fun, generous, surprising, full of variety.

The choreographer Christopher Gattelli talks about Cher as an inspiration, her confidence, strength and resilience. He sees her as a kick-ass singer and actress and a goddess warrior.

Music supervisor Daryl Waters talks about hearing “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves” as a young music nerd and dissecting it. He calls Cher caring, funny, poignant, irreverent.

(These are some good words.)

Director Jason Moore talks about trying to create an old variety show set and how they tried to pick the songs that would tell Cher’s life in less than six hours. He felt the theme of the show was about facing fears in order to grow and be stronger. Oh, and glitter. Glitter with intimacy and authenticity, how they tried to embody Cher’s essence without impersonation.

He sees Cher as “a beautifully complex woman, larger than life and a deeply authentic human being, spectacular, extravagant, intimate and emotional.”

Set designers Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis talk about wanting an over-the-top look of glamour (because we want to see Cher big and strong) but also  intimate sets (because we want to see her up-close and vulnerable). Cher has covered so many years and so many mediums, they said. She’s “fierce.” They wanted to use mirrors to highlight the multiple Chers, sometimes struggling through the fragmentation of the world. They needed flexibility with the lighting and they didn’t want to upstage the “get-ups.” They call the show a “kaleidoscopic ride through a psychological closet.”

Lighting designer Kevin Adams talks about bringing together a contrast between the dark-haired Cher and the big bright spectacle.

It often seemed the US show struggled to show Cher’s legitimacy (or a jukebox musical’s legitimacy for that matter). The UK show never seemed to face such a struggle, more willing did their press seem to just just let go and have some Cher-fun. This might be because the UK show traveled and the US show was ensconced in the Great White Way.

As I’m working on a Katharine Hepburn project at the moment, I can’t help but be reminded of the differences between her Broadway and London Shakespeare reviews similarly. You’d think if anyone would be overly serious about Shakespeare…except  the US critics couldn’t get over Hepburn’s New England accent doing Shakespeare and the London critics couldn’t care less. They loved seeing Hepburn do Shakespeare.

So it was much more pleasant to watch the UK show publicity unfold. And I love the Broadway Chers but casting people of color was brilliant. (The three UK Chers were Millie O’Connel, Danielle Steers and Debbie Kurup.)

Their program has ads in the front and back advertising jukebox musicals about The Osmonds, Tina Turner, an unfortunate musicalization of Pretty Woman, and the choreographer Oti Mabuse’s own show. This program goes more into the biography of Cher (because maybe they’re not as familiar with it?) which calls Cher a “rock and roll survivor…a prize fighter.” The bio goes into Sonny’s unfaithfulness and how he absconded with all their money . It states Cher’s freedom cost her over a million dollars.

There’s a page of movie highlights where Cher talks about being a bumper car (“I won’t stop.) This program also talks about Cher’s iconic impact on LGBTQ, her struggles with alienation, mistreatment and marginalization. They talk about her sass and style, how she tells it like it is, her survival. They point out her role as a lesbian in the movie Silkwood, her relationship to her son Chaz and how she supported drag queens back to her 1979 show that brought the art of drag into the mainstream, the influence of her style on people like Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus.

There’s a page of celebrities praising Cher: Gwen Stefani (who credits Cher for making us strong and true to ourselves), Beyonce, Sarah Paulson, Christina Aguilera and Rob Halford, whose comments are the best and most specific. He says she has the “most beautiful voice…beautiful, beautiful texture in her voice.”

The production notes in this version talk about the show’s color palette, how Rick Elice made a visit to Cher’s own closet to generate ideas about the story, (and being in the closet is such a wonderful metaphor here). Set designer Tom Rogers talk about wanting to avoid making the show “a soulless presentation of her songs.”

What’s great about this program is the 4 pages of behind-the-scenes rehearsals, it gives list of acts and numbers, longer credit pages (like a Playbill), all the actors and dancers, everyone’s Tweet handle, 5 pages of the creative bios and 1 page of production credits.

Although I love the design of the Broadway program, it’s very slim in information and beyond words, doesn’t take you behind the curtain. It feels bare bones compared to the thicker, more outgoing UK program.

I’m looking forward to what the traveling US show programs will look like. Fingers crossed that even happens.

Information about both shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cher_Show_(musical)

We’ve Moved!

You try to tell newbs and naysayers about Cher one day and then 24 years of your life go by! It’s not okay. (It’s totally okay and I would do it all again.)

Our flagship site, Cherscholar.com, started in 1999 in my Yonkers apartment off Odell Avenue and it all began as a static spoof site. And look at us now! The spoof has swallowed us all up and we are now in our second content management system. 

My friend Julie encouraged me in 2006  to start a blog to go along with Cherscholar. At first I had no idea how to strike a balance between a personal blog and Cher discussions. But after some practice on another fan forum, I figured it out and started this intrepid little blog back on September 28, 2006. Unfortunately, back then I did not imagine the blog would last 16+ years or that I would have to lift it up and move it somewhere else. I would say that is something I probably should have known, web content being my day-job and all; but in my defense, content management systems were new back then and the perishability of services just seemed so…far away and unlikely.

And the really bad news is that I didn’t purchase a separate domain name for the blog. I’m fixing that now by attaching the blog to the parental cherscholar.com domain, but….big sigh….16+ years of incoming blog posts links to cherscholar.typepad.com/i_found_some_blog are about to break. Considering the prospect of almost losing 16+ years of deep Cher ponderings, I guess that’s a fair price.

I found out last October that Typepad was no longer accepting new bloggers, which translates to a ramped-down customer service and troubleshooting situation (you can’t pay folks when income’s not coming in). Then, when a server move resulted in weeks of broken site images and downtime, I saw the writing on the wall. But I was loathe to leave Typepad. I have very few complaints about them if any. They were easy to use and secure and their customer service was always great. Although very limited in site bling, their out-of-the-box features were far more customer-friendly than on WordPress where you have to build pretty much everything from plugins. (Want to include borders around your images? Well, you need a plugin for that. Want to link to Twitter? You’ll need a plugin. Don’t ask. You will need a plugin.)  But to WordPress’ credit, there’s a lot more bulk editing you can do site wide, so that’s good.

I had worked with WordPress at the Institute for American Indian Arts and at Central New Mexico Community College so I knew the learning curve with it and although I knew WordPress was the safest bet for future migrations, I still felt very loyal to Typepad and very, very lazy to do anything about the situation.

The timeline of the move looked like this:

  1. November: feeling sorry for myself, wishful thinking that Typepad would get bought out in the next month by another blogging service.
  2. December: dragging my feet to do anything and continued wishful thinking, backing up all my sites over Christmas break.
  3. January: begrudgingly researching my options.
  4. February: prepping the new environments, moving the two Cher sites, struggling with plugins.

Some of my angst I’m sure was not wanting to spend my private life doing my day job. And I don’t even hate my day job; I just don’t want to do it all the time.

Anyway, the new URL for the Cher Scholar blog, I Found Some Blog is https://cherscholar.com/cherblog/. Please update your bookmarks and forgive all the new brokenness.

Cher Funko Pop dollOh and image pop-ups will no longer work. So very sorry. I haven’t found the plugin for that. 

Sigh. 

Old stuff will look messy for a while (and there’s an issue with old comments.)

But as part of our lookback, I’d like to remind everyone this was the first title of my first legitimate I Found Some Blog post, “I’d Be a Superfan of Albert Goldbarth But There’s No Doll.”

Can I get an amen on that? The Funkos Pops are coming!

The She-Shed Cher Shrine

TapestryOne thing I finished in April was the ‘shrine’ in the Cher She-Shed. Full disclosure, the story of the she-shed Cher shrine is a long and winding one. It began, one way or another, all the way back in 1998-9 when my friend Julie cajoled me onto the Internet and I discovered early Cher fan websites in the mid-1990s that mostly contained only copious amounts of pictures of Cher.

At the time I called those sites disparagingly 'Cher shrines.' After learning HTML for Ape Culture (Julie again), I secretly wanted to create my own Cher website but wanted to avoid a shrine. I came up with the jokey 'Cher Scholar' to pretend scholarly legitimacy. I’ve since come to learn you should be careful what you joke about. Jokes can overtake you. Sure enough, in 2010 I found a copy of the journal Camera Obscura with an academic essay on Lena Horne and I've been aspirationally scholarin’ since.

Around the same time I had moved to New Mexico which is composed of three large groups of people: Native American Indians, Hispanics (self-identified descendents from Spain vs Latin Americans) and Anglos. When I moved here I started  researching the major Anglo artists here, including the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies and the grand dame of Anglo art here Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe is important in New Mexico for two reasons. (I promise this will get back to Cher). First of all, she’s one of the very few female artists with a museum dedicated to her (thanks to heiress Anne Marion). She’s also a pretty good interpreter of New Mexico from the point of view of Anglo transplants. And there has been a proliferation of Santa Fe artists and writers that are descendants of her style (and lifestyle).

Back in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s my grandparents accumulated a bit of American Indian art from my grandfather's career in the Indian Service. I had a somewhat advanced knowledge of traditional Pueblo arts in New Mexico and Hopi, Arizona. Meeting students and teachers while working at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and visiting their associated Contemporary Museum (the area’s most interesting modern art actually), I caught up on non-traditional artists. But knew little to nothing about the Hispanic arts in the area

Back in 2015, I started working at a community college in Albuquerque and I took a class on New Mexico Art History. It was the whole world of Spanish-influenced New Mexican arts that had an impact on the Cher shrine as it came to be.

New Mexico was a very remote area in the empire of Spain for about three centuries. As a comparison, New Mexico has only been part of the United States for less than 200 years. Some very unique arts and culture developed here due to area's remoteness (from Spain and even Mexico), particularly objects related to the Spanish/New Mexican Catholic Church, as well as the practice of speaking Spanish here that was so secluded, it 'stagnated' (or separated from the natural language evolutions happening in Mexico and Spain) and became a different dialect of Spanish that is spoken to this day in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

IMG_20211120_182005Most of these arts were developed from lack of materials like gold, silver, wool and plaster. This includes fiber arts like colcha (lack of yarn), tinwork (lack of silver), straw filigree pieces made with wheat (lack of gold), and wooden altars they call retablos (lack of painting canvases) and bultos (or santeros), wooden saint statues (lack of plaster).

Anglo painters like Marsden Hartley even painted the retablos and bultos.

There are pre-historic and multi-cultural arts here that exist nowhere else on earth.

And here is where we come back to Cher. 

The idea to start a fake-shrine began when I acquired the praying-hands Cher blanket (at the Chersonian, we call it a “tapestry”) which was originally sold on her Believe tour. I thought immediately I could hang this up with a two-person pew beneath it. Fans could then pray "with" Cher if (hopefully not) "to" Cher. 

Then I found a little tourist retablo of Saint Cecelia in Santa Fe that looks totally like Cher in the 1970s. Catholic candles are very popular here (you can find them at every grocery store) and there are now Cher versions proliferating on Etsy. I snared one for the decades 1960s, 70s and 2000s. I then collected a few tin nichos (little nooks) in need of pictures so I downloaded some  Cher pics in prayer gestures and a very creepy Cher head transposed onto Jesus.

(click any pic to enlarge)

IMG_20220507_095851

At Spanish Market I ran into the booth of an artist who calls himself the “Picasso Santero,” Jose A. Lucero. His Jesus retablos had an uncanny resemblance not only to Cher in various colored wigs but they even uncannily indicated a Picasso-like post-plastic-surgery Cher. How great is that??

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The Cher store at Caesars Palace put out Cher mints that serve a handy Eucharist. And then I found the handy fan-made kneeling pillow (to replace the pew, which there was no room for).

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You may recognize the Vida scarf Cher designed a few years ago underneath everything.

One day I found a fan-made picture of the Divas Last Supper on Etsy. It arrived in the mail with a Britney Spears laminated card. I had no idea what this card was and asked Mr. Cher Scholar who informed me it was a Catholic prayer card. It took me literally a second to decide to design a Cher one with her lyrics for “Chastity Sun” serving as the prayer on the back. 

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All that was missing were the bultos, the wooding carvings of the saints. 

I couldn’t very well ask religious artists at Spanish Market to make me a custom Cher bulto, although I’ve stood in front of many a vendor table contemplating it. “This Jesus is so cool but…”

For Christmas last year my friend Julie got me a little wooden doll of Cher carved with her "Take Me Home" outfit. She found a Palo Alto artist named Holly on Etsy who does various wooden pop culture figures and she has a whole suite of Cher dolls in iconic outfits. I suddenly realized these was technically tiny bulto figures.

And so the New Mexican She-Shed Cher Shrine was done.

It’s been a big unnerving to watch some of my more religious family members tour the Cher she-shed but I did find the "Sonny & Cher read the Bible" advertisement; so I hope that mitigates the sacreligiousness for them somewhat. The religious visitors don’t seem too disturbed, honestly.

It’s the straight men who experience adverse effects repeatedly. I’ve taken large family groups into the shed and the girls (gay or straight) all express surprise and delight (which is always a shock to me considering how dorkey the whole enterprise is). But after the initial pass-through, I will invariably look around and all the straight men will have disappeared.

I look out the door and they’re out on the lawn literally fanning themselves. I’m not kidding. I think they’re having a religious moment.

 

More information about New Mexico's Spanish arts and culture:

Spanish-nm Spanish-nm Spanish-nm

Cher Decades Smell Testings

Spray2So last year Cher released a fun new product in her new perfume line, four different perfumes called Decades (based on the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s). I was very excited to see what this was all about. Unfortunately, I was too excited because the night I received my spray-bottle versions I opened and snorted them immediately without trying a blind test them myself. Which I immediately regretted. 

So now whoever comes into the house is subjected to a Cher perfume smell test. For the most part, the test smellers have failed miserably and there seems to be no rhyme or reason who does better or worse (age, schnoz, recall ability). Seems it's hard to guess a decade by its scent although it doesn't seem an illogical task; decades do have particular smells: incense we associate with the 60s, that Windsong perfume I religiously purchased every year for my mother's birthday in the 70s, Calvin Klein in the 80s and, of course, teen spirit in the 90s.

That scents are so hard to ID is not surprising to me, though. There was a Children's Museum in St. Louis called The Magic House that my friends and I used to visit long after we were children (it was that fun) and The Magic House had an exhibit of boxes on a table with steel lids. You'd open each lid one by one and there'd be a powerful smell you were supposed to identify. The smells would be so familiar but impossibly illusive…like banana. 

The Results:

Mr. Cher Scholar (3 years older than me) initially ID'd all the smells correctly and then second-guessed himself and changed two of his answers. He said distinct memories came up from his childhood for each smell. The 60s scent had a floral smell he associated with that decade, the 70s scent reminded him of his mother's Jean Nate; and the 80s smelled like a date.

RollerballI gave the rollerballs out as a gift for Christmas. Dave (same age as me) guessed them all correctly. He couldn't articulate why. My friend Julie (younger but 80s era) got them all wrong. After knowing the correct smells, she did associate her mom's perfume to the 80s scent.

I threw two small Christmas parties this year (due to Covid). The first party was for my local cousins (both 60s kids). The party was a bit of disaster as the family was fully lactose intolerant and the menu was unintentionally dairy-laced. My cousins Mark and David both failed miserably. I blame the dairy.

The second party was for local friends all of whom were 90s kids. (I made sure to gather dietary requirements this time.) My friend Mary ID'd the patchouli in the 60s bottle right away. But got the others wrong and then proceeded to fold her answer sheet into an origami swan. Her husband Peter got the 60s/70s right but not the 80s/90s. He said he could tell they went from strong to subtle decade by decade. Melo got them all right but she cheated and guessed by the color wheel. Kalisha got the 70s/90s right but not the 80s/60s.

Rollerball2Last week, I just took a trip to Cleveland to try the rollerballs out on family members. My sister-in-law (five years older) got one right (80s), my brother (5 years older) got them all wrong, but did keep the 60s/70s together (which he said were more pungent) and the 80s/90s which he said smelled more contemporary, sweet, warm and leathery. My mother (1940s generation) made all the same guesses my brother did. My Dad (same generation) got only the 70s scent right.

You can get the rollerballs separately or in a set. 

Soon, according to Cher's Instagram, we will be able to buy the fancy bottles in all the decades too. Decades-bottle 

Cher Takes Over Smells, Slippers, Cosmetics and More

WisdomHappy 2022, Cher fans. Taking a moment to catch-up on all the great Cher stuff happening right now.

WisdomofsoundA few months ago Cher contributed to the 2021 Wisdom of Sound with her Miley Cyrus song "I Hope You Find It." This was a benefit concert for the Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery and Nagi Nunnery in Nepal. Cher made an appearance, Richard Gere hosted and the live-stream included Laurie Anderson (also love; where else could Anderson and Cher appear together??), Jon Batiste, Norah Jones, Angelique Kidjo, Steve Miller Band, Gregory Porter, and Maggie Rogers.

Last year Cher also released an offshoot of her Eau du Couture line, scents from the decades (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s) for sale at Walmart in a larger bottle and small roller-ball bottles. I've been asking my friends to do blind smell tests to identify the decades. How bizarre this seems to locate a certain scent for an entire decade. I'm curious to know if there is consensus on this wild experiment. More on that later (I'll be testing family members in Cleveland soon). So far the younger kids are doing better at guessing the decades although they weren't around for some of them. 

F187cd8b-6cb9-40d1-b7ed-6ce86f4d5ada.5c9b1b75e3c084d13ed6874e3bf0d9ec F187cd8b-6cb9-40d1-b7ed-6ce86f4d5ada.5c9b1b75e3c084d13ed6874e3bf0d9ec

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cher has also done big things for Ugg in just one week. Here's their Cher page:

Ugg

Here's the tweet on the power of Cher:

Ugsspike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More ugg pics:

Ugg2 Ugg2 Ugg2

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ugg ad in Cher's Malibu house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei5cc_isx60

But that's not all. MAC Cosmetics this week has also unveiled a big campaign with Cher and the rapper Saweetie:

Macad1 Macad1 Macad1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The MAC ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_gsH9yLNuw

https://www.tiktok.com/@cher/video/7049723316873088262

And that's not all! Late last year Scent Beauty released a body lotion for Eau du Couture and Cher went on HSN to promote it. Frustratingly, you could only get the lotion in combination as part of a set. But then they offered it as a one-off if you purchased other Scent Beauty products, so I bought my friend a few of the new Dolly Parton perfumes for Christmas and snared my body lotion that way. Now it seems you can just buy the lotion separately. It was like a Christmas shakedown.

Hsndec21 Hsndec21

 

 

 

 

 

Cher on HSN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbFVoSzjGjU

 

OwnwordsI was reviewing my date calendar from last year (it's full of quotes to inspire) and found I missed this Cher quote from April 2021: “If you really want something you can figure out how to make it happen.”

I have no memory of this quote by Cher, at least in the famous quote pages and books…yes there’s a book of Cher quotes.

 

 

Mrms-2And best news of all, after over a year of hiatus I'm finally back on track with the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour episodes with what I think is a very good lost episode, #56 from December 12, 1973. There are only 11 more episodes for this first variety show series. Then we move on to Cher solo shows.

https://www.cherscholar.com/the-sonny-cher-comedy-hour-episode-56.html

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