a division of the Chersonian Institute

Category: Music (Page 2 of 34)

Cher Space and Time

While I was working nightshift last week, to stay awake I made a list of scenes, movements and styles Cher has been involved with over the decades. This is kind of a piggy-back to the music legitimacy article I did last week and thinking about prior categories I might have missed. But also thinking beyond music. Here it is:

– Part of the mid-1960s Southern California Pop scene with the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Turtles and the Association

– A member of Phil Spector’s Gold Star Studios circle

– Records made with The Wrecking Crew

– One of the first records made at Muscle Shoals Recording Studio

– A top participant in the Golden Age of Variety Television

– Worked with comedy-television icon, producer George Schlatter and his slate of shows

– First Met Gala fashion Icon

– A Vogue cover girl in the Richard Avedon era

– The Crown Jewel of Bob Mackie

– A hot ticket in Old Las Vegas in the late 1970s (the Sinatra/Barely-Post-Elvis Vegas)

–  Part of the Studio 54 scene

– A late-allowed MTV participant but made MTV history with a pretty tame video that was banned from daytime MTV (while in her 40s!)

– Acted under the iconic auteur directors of the 1960s and 1970s: Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Yates, Norman Jewison and Franco Zeffirelli

– Infomercial Queen
Can I just say I still love the infomercials and I may be the only one. In a recent bio-drama, I heard the statement made that Cher had fought so hard for acting respectability and then blew it with these. But did she fight so hard for respectability?  I thought that was what the whole thumbing her nose at the Academy with the 1986 dress was about. Why wouldn’t she thumb her nose at them again with infomercials? Unless you only thumb your nose as an outsider? I am totally fine with Cher going off-script with these postmodern delights.

– Auto-tune ground zero (while in her 50s!)

– Spearheading the big circus live show before subsequent fierce divas followed suit (while in her 50s and 60s!)

–  Newly sainted and recurring Icon Award recipient (while in her 70s!)

 

In the bio-drama mentioned above Josiah Howard can be seen talking about how long Cher has been famous and how she has become part of everybody’s cultural memory because, “we remember it all.” She has become time itself.

Rock and Roll Royalties and Royalty

Rock and Roll Royalties

Cher has won her battle over Sonny & Cher song royalties with Sonny’s widow, Mary Bono. The court ruled that the “terminations rights” section of the Copyright Act does not trump a divorce agreement, which gave Cher 50% of the royalties on Sonny &Cher songs. Mary Bono and her family of heirs still maintain the other 50% of Sonny’s royalties.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “isn’t Cher rich enough” thing. I think here is where it is important to remember that of all the wealth Sonny & Cher accumulated from 1964-1975, Cher received nothing. In fact, the contracts were written so much in Sonny’s favor that, at the divorce, Cher was forced to pay Sonny millions in “lost future earnings” due to their act breaking up. So for all Cher’s work for ten years, she walked away with their house and primary custody of Chastity, which she ended up sharing with Sonny anyway because, as she said at the time, she wasn’t about to take Chastity’s father away from her.

And although Cher didn’t write the songs, her participation in them made them hits and this divorce settlement can be seen as a reparation of that great abuse of contracts a man made against his own wife.

Rock and Roll Royalty

Paul Grein has written a great article called “12 Reasons Cher Belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” which was published last December during the Christmas album bruhaha and I completely missed it. To be honest, I got kind of tired of these rock-and-roll hall of fame crusades. And since this article was written, (maybe because this was written), Cher was finally included to the 2024 induction list.

And really this isn’t about a hall of fame. This is about Cher’s legitimacy and credibility in music. That’s what I’ve always been blathering on about. Cher fans are always concerned about her credibility in ways other fans of other artists (working in more respected genres) are not. So I really appreciate this article and I would like to talk about its points because they are the very markers of coolness and legitimacy in rock music.

Grein already points out that the HoF itself has broadened into many sub-genres, like R&B, rap, country. “If ABBA, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton are in, what’s the rationale for leaving Cher out?” And here I’d like us to keep focus on the “keeping out” from the idea of legitimacy and credibility every time Grein mentions the HoF, because that is just what a hall of fame sanctions, a pre-existing status of credibility and legitimacy.

Grein pretty much follows the trail of rock legitimacy I’ve been tracking over the last umpteen years. What makes a person worthy of respect in music: is it record sales, is it concert tickets, is it loyal fans (or should we say the more male-coded aficionados?), is it years aboard the show biz, is it good critical reviews, is it influence, is it innovation, is it a stance or posture, did she help define an era or genre?

And…

Yes, She Helped Define an Era or Genre

Sonny & Cher helped define the mid-60s folk-rock and pop-rock era. Grein notes that Sonny wrote three “fine songs” with “I Got You Babe,” “Baby Don’t Go” and “The Beat Goes On.” I would add “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” to that list and call them strong songs of that era. Grein concedes that S&C were more pop-sounding than The Byrds (or the Mamas and the Papas, I would add), but that “their sound and look” helped define that era.

I would add that any thought of the summer of 1965 necessarily includes Cher singing “I Got You Babe.”

As a subset of this, Cher “was one of the first artists to have a big hit with a Bob Dylan song.” Her version (at #15) trounced the Byrds version at #40). Cher’s hit Bob Dylan song even preceded Dylan’s own first hit by a week (“Like a Rolling Stone”).

Yes, She Defines Rock and Roll Attitude

Grein says Cher has proven to be a risk taker. She gave up a lucrative Vegas career to become an actress. He says the HoF’s focus seems to be a youthful “rule-breaking attitude and spirit.” Grein says Cher telling the HoF to go fuck themselves on National TV was “a pretty rock and roll thing to do.” Grein also notes that, like Willie Nelson, “Cher exhibited an IDGAF attitude long before anyone had coined that acronym.”

Grein calls Cher’s Oscar dress of 1986 “one of the greatest sight-gags in Oscar history.” It was also a f*ck-you to the Academy for their snobbery around her performance outfits, boyfriends and prior status as a music and television star.

Cher: not afraid to say F*ck You.

Yes, She Has Many Hit Records Spanning a Record-Breaking Period of Time

All while multi-talking. “One month before she won the Oscar,” Grein says, “she had a top 10 hit with the rock ballad ‘ Found Someone.’ The very week she won the Oscar, she entered the Hot 100 with the follow-up hit, ‘We All Sleep Alone,’ co-written by Rock Hall members Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora.”

Her albums, Grein says, span53 years from Sonny & Cher’s Look at Us in 1965 to her Christmas album of 2023. Her No. 1 singles on Billboard Hot 100 span 34 years from “I Got You Babe” in 1965 to “Believe” in 1999.  Grein also points out that her Grammy for “Believe” spanned 34 years after Sonny & Cher were nominated for best new artist.

Yes, She Has Killed It In Concert Tours

“Cher was among the first female artist to undertake a massively successful solo tour.” She has headlined “seven major concert tours” including her farewell tour which “was one of the top 10 highest-grossing  tours of that decade….For the first half of the decade, it was second only to The Rolling Stones’ Licks Tour in total grosses.” At that time it was “the most successful tour ever undertaken by a female headliner. The 236-date tour finally ended in 2005 after having played to more than 3.5 million fans and earning more than $250 million.”

The TV special of that tour earned Cher a Primetime Emmy, joining “an impressive array of women who have won in that category for one-woman concert specials” including Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand and Adele.

Yes, She Has Had and Impactful Influence

Grein also talks about the artists Cher either paved the way for or artists who cite her as an influence: Madonna (the aesthetics of shock), Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift (there’s a Cher quote on the wall that begins the great song, “You Need to Calm Down.“), Cyndi Lauper, Little Big Town, Adam Lambert, P!nk. Tracy Chapman and Chrissie Hynde (who re-recorded “I Got You Babe”) have cited Cher in interviews as well.

Grein quotes Shon Faye to say, “If Madonna and Lady Gaga and Kylie [Minogue] and Cyndi Lauper were playing football, Cher would be the stadium they played on, and the sun that shone down on them.”

Yes, Cher Has Had the Harshest, Meanest Critics but Some Great Critics, Too

As I wrote in 2020, Cher escaped bad reviews from famously harsh reviewers Lester Bangs and John Mendelsohn (who some claimed would have given God a bad review).

Lester Bangs reviewing All I Ever Need Is You in 1972:

John & Yoko. Grace & Paul. Paul & Linda. Sonny & Cher had the formula down years before any of those melodious romances hit the stage and were a hell of a lot more appealing too., although that may not be particularly significant—the same thing could be said for Louis Prima and Keely Smith. And let us not forget Paul and Paula. The reason that Sonny & Cher are so much nicer to think about than the aforementioned crew of dilettantes, barterers and their wives is that Sonny & Cher don’t put on the same kind of airs.  How you feel about them at this point pretty much depends on how you feel about showbiz in general. If you think that Johnny Carson is a honk and the Copa just a hangout for alcoholics, if you cannot abide the sigh of black ties and/or tiaras between you and your artist-heroes, then you probably don’t like Sonny & Cher; I have seen reviews of their recent albums by earnest 17-year old rock critics lambasting the devoted duo entirely in terms of “us” versus “them.” And at the recent MCA convention in Burbank, when Sonny & Cher played a long, slick supperclub set climaxing with their eight-minute histrionic orgy on “Hey Jude,” I observed people all around me set their faces in that grimace they never pulled out for bluejeaned mediocrities. And those that thought themselves too hip for this schmaltz would make remarks later about the “tastelessness” of it. Why? Because Cher tells Sonny she’s not gonna ball him after the show, and drops innuendos about the size of his dong? Well, I’ll settle for Sonny & Cher being just blue enough for them poor old farts and fraus in the belly of the beast, because I like slick supperclub music, I like glittery Las Vegas-style entertainment without one iota of artistic aspiration. I’ll even put on a tie. Maybe I’m just getting old but I would rather see Sonny & Cher with a bourbon and water in front of me anytime than squat sweating in another concert hall while another rock group runs through amplified oatmeal highlights from the last big album it took them eight months of overdubs to produce.

John Mendelsohn reviewing Sonny & Cher Live in 1972:

Granted that they’ve gone through some heavy changes since they practically single-handedly insinuated folk-rock into the American musical consciousness, 

….what Sonny & Cher’s detractors always fail to mention is that the couple have matured into such sensitive interpreters that they can transform even the most over familiar material into searingly soulful expressions, as witness Cher’s fiery treatment of “Danny Boy.” Truly Cher has developed into one of our most inspiring ladies of song, capable of evoking emotions that not even a Nancy Sinatra or Marcia Strassman can deal with without some evidence of strain..

Grein lists some other great Cher reviews I had never seen before. like Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone in 2019:

…there are no other careers remotely like hers, [particularly] in the history of pop music” and he referred to Cher as “the one-woman embodiment of the whole gaudy story of pop music.”

James Reed from The Boston Globe in 2014:

Along with David Bowie, she is one of the original chameleons in pop music, constantly in flux and challenging our perceptions of her.”

Joe Lynch in Billboard from 2017:

It seems odd to say anyone as famous as Cher is under-appreciated: the woman has five No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, an Oscar for best actress and has remained a household name for half a century. even so, Cher’s impact as a musical force is unfairly disregarded or minimized…Years before David Bowie toyed with gender-bending, Cher brought her deep contralto voice to the top of the Billboard Hot 100…

James Dunn in Rolling Stone in 1996:

Cher is the coolest woman who ever stood in shoes. Why? Because her motto is, ‘I don’t give a shit what you think, I’m going to wear this multicolored wig.”

Alec Mapa in The Advocate from 2003:

Cher embodies an unapologetic freedom and fearlessness that some of us can only aspire to.

It just occurred to me all of the above are men. Some of the womens in rock criticism need to say something methinks. Besides me.

As Grein points out, right now the HoF is 25% women. If there are only 25% of women in rock music right now, that would be a fair amount. How many women are there in rock music since the dawn of rock and roll? Someone else please do the math.

Yes, She Is An Innovator

Like or despise auto-tune, it had a huge impact on Rap music. She also innovated many rock and roll “looks” including popularizing bell bottoms, long straight hair (she had girls using irons on their hair!) and inspiring the term “Giving Cher” for innovating the biggest kind of iconic attitude.

In fact, in fashion Cher is both an influencer and an innovator. With Bob Mackie, she invented the scene-stealing red-carpet look. Grein says that her Met Gala dress from 1974 is still being imitated “40 years later.”

And Bonus Yes, She Loyally Supports the Cause

Grein also says she “brought a rock sensibility to prime-time” television all through the 1970s variety series solos numbers and guest spots. This, he feels, (as does Cher scholar Robrt Pela), was Cher’s “biggest hurdle to being taken seriously…the smash success” of those shows. The shows “gave airtime to a lot of rock artists.” He mentions this includes Linda Ronstadt, Ike & Tina Turner, David Bowie (in his U.S. television debut), The Jackson 5 and Patti Labelle (among many others: The Spinners, The Supremes, Fanny, early Rick Springfield and Elton John). The shows also showcased original rock and roll artists in tribute shows, including Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis,

And most of all, Cher has been loyal to Sonny, (even after he tricked her out of a decade of earnings). Years of fake-snipping aside, years of mutual-real-snipping aside. Cher time and time again has given Sonny his due (as well as fair criticism, most recently calling him truthfully, “a mixed bag.”) She has tried to support their legacy together, despite the lack of respect he continues to receive (disrespect even), and there is not a thing more rock and roll than that.

Cher Scholar Catches Up

I’m woefully behind. I feel like I’ve been through something in the past few months.

Here’s what we’ve missed in Cherlandia.

Cher TV

I’ve kept working despite a LOT of drama, including but not limited to, losing one of my two dogs and twice, almost losing my mother. As a coping activity, I spent a day or two adding information and links to the Cher TV page in the TV Appearances and Interviews section: https://www.cherscholar.com/tv/. I’m not finished. I keep finding more. So far we’re up to 332 TV appearances but I’m not trying to list every Entertainment Tonight appearance or local interview. Just indicative ones.

Cher Documentary

I came across a recent YouTube documentary, Cher, In Her Own Words. I think artist documentaries are sometimes great for fans but sometimes not great for the kind of fan who finds a lot of errors or don’t understand why certain things are covered and not other things. Or how they don’t get anywhere near the core of the person.

I’ve never seen a Cher documentary I’ve liked. Ever. And this is no exception. I’ve actually lost my notes about it in the mayhem that was my spring. But it has a cheesy voice over and all the same images in the wrong decade buckets. It’s filled with inane, unrelated footage to fill in the space.

But it was interesting in that it had footage from recent interviews where Cher did seem to focus more on her ideas about her own career. And there was new footage of stuff, like behind-the-scenes filming of Good Times I had never seen. I also noticed that some of the same interview footage was used for the Cher reel at the I Heart Music Awards in April. Here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvBojJMeXdo

Deaths of Peripherals

The director of Moonstruck, Norman Jewison, died in January. She tweeted a nice message about it. I read in April that actor Ryan O’Neal also passed in December and I wondered how I missed it, maybe in all the Christmas album bruhaha. I was never a fan of Ryan O’Neal but he did star in the movie Faithful with Cher, probably a fan and critic least-favorite movie. Actually, one of the things I didn’t like most about it was Ryan O’Neal who played an all-too believable schmuck.

Court Cases

Two depressing court cases slogged involving discomforting personal family-drama stuff:

Cher’s attempt to prevent Mary Bono from terminating Cher’s Sonny & Cher royalties looks promising as the judge seemed to side with Cher. A friend of mine recently asked me, “doesn’t Cher already have enough money?” to which the logic seemed to be the richest party should always lose, acceptance of which would cause a legal run on the rich people. But in any case, I have to side with Cher on this one. She was already hornswaggled by Sonny for all their earnings. This was his mea culpa or at least a legal agreement to avoid spousal support. Mary Bono has two of Sonny’s children to think about but there are two other children of Sonny’s out there as well. Mary Bono also had her own congressional career and was not left high and dry when Sonny died.

And Cher’s bid for conservatorship over her son, Elijah Allman, continues (along with its unfortunate timing after the emancipation of Britney Spears). It seems Allman has reunited with his wife in the meantime and he appears to be back on the wagon. I do believe Cher is working out of motherly concern and not out of greed. It’s a tricky situation because Elijah is an adult. I’m not a mother so I’m not going to do any further speculating.

Dinner at Cher’s House

For months, Cher was promoting a charity event (which took place this weekend) in support of Free the Wild. Both the top bidder and a selected-fan would win a dinner party at Cher’s Malibu manse. I would love to hear more about the dinner. What food was served? Did the promised witty conversation occur? I wasn’t in any position to attend such a thing myself but I did want to donate to the good cause. If you are so inclined, you can too: https://www.freethewild.org/.

Cher Feting

Cher had a spring of accolades. She won the Equal Justice Icon Award on 29 March. She was given the Icon award at the I Heart Music Awards on 1 April with Meryl Streep doing the introduction and dueting with Jennifer Hudson. Cher’s speech was a bit of a ramble but that’s kind of her speech style. I love Meryl Streep but her speech was no great shakes either, especially compared to Beyonce’s great speech that night.

There was a bit of controversy about Hudson out-singing Cher during the duet but I think the bigger story is how much support from the black community Cher is receiving right now. It was evident in the night’s show and Hudson’s comments at the end of the duet. Cher will also be part of the Amfar Gala on 23 May.

And so now we proceed to the accolade that many fans have long been waiting for. That Hall of Fame.

Before we get into that I want to say a few things. I’ve been criticized off and on all my life for things I’ve liked. It hasn’t bothered me much. I have no guilty pleasures. We’re all on our own journey, after all. But last night I watched Who Done It, a fan documentary about the movie Clue.

Now I was there to see this movie in the theaters. I can’t remember who’s idea it was to go see it but my friends and I immediately became convinced this was an amazing movie: the level of talent, the perfect but also unusual casting, the tight comedic timing, the comedic range of the script, the creativity, writing, directing, all of it.

But the movie flopped when it opened. It was the Office Space of its decade (another movie I was on board with in theaters). Looking back, the movie was ill-timed amongst the suburban realism and super-gravitas of the 1980s. Compare the movie to Ghostbusters to see what I mean. This unpolished but competent documentary explained how Clue was an homage to not only a thread of camp in Agatha Christie (a writer who was also very uncool in the 1980s), but to the pacing of His Girl Friday (1940). This was a decade where camp was pretty much on the downlow from the mainstream (outside of John Waters movies). The 80s took themselves very seriously. Plus the movie had no megastar, the reviews were mixed and there was that confusing idea of multiple endings which were not packaged together in one viewing experience (until cable and home rental). The movie really was a gem under a cheesy pretense.

And many of these things were lost on my high-school self, to be fair. But my friends and I were obsessed with the movie in a way our other classmates were not. It was part of our oddball identity. We memorized the lines and watched it on cable and then as a VHS rental over and over again. We loved Tim Curry, not just for Rocky Horror but for Clue. We idolized him just as much for Clue. His work in the movie musical Annie was similarly overlooked, that being another movie that tanked with critics and moviegoers when it was in theaters but later found respect.

And until yesterday I thought Clue was just another odd-ball misfit that I loved and defended. But no. It has become a bonafide cult hit with younger generations. And as I was watching this documentary I was like yeah, another thing I was onboard with years before it was cool or understood.

I would say I have a taste for the underdog but I really don’t think that’s what it is. I like good things. Things I like are great. I mean not everything they do might be great. (I think we can all agree this is not great. But this is fucking great.)

Last night I felt something that was not quite smugness, but definitely a better assurance about my barometers. I don’t like bad things. I’m usually on to something.

And I have been proselytizing about Cher all my life. Like since I was five in whatever rudimentary way I could. And I’ve also been questioning what is it that gives something value, which includes challenging the status quo because when you start poking around, popularity is usually on shaky ground: is it record, concert and swag sales, is it criticism, is it influence on younger generations, is it breaking records, working with the best people (musicians and directors)?

Or is it a cabal deciding? Because that is the least rational of the things. Which is what bothers me about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the trumped up scarcity (that is really ceaseless marketing) and its cabal of judges.

The RnR HoF takes itself very seriously. Which is why Spinal Tap is so great. It’s also why Clue is so great. And that very seriousness undercuts its own blind-spot valuations by over-valuating personal taste.

And yet, I also can’t pretend Cher’s 2024 induction is not significant in any way. The fans are very happy. This is a good thing. They have wanted this for a long time. She did very well in the pre-selection fan voting (as the top woman, if that’s the bar we must watch).

Cher was included in the final roster for induction in October in Cleveland, Ohio. I have been making the case for Cher’s credibility for so long, it does feel like a small vindication. Her rise to respect has been slow and ongoing. I track its origins to the 1990s when VH1 started airing old Cher show episodes on Tuesday nights and also when her Behind the Music episode ran for an hour and a half instead of the typically alloted hour.

Slowly since then a new generation of cultural critics and performers like Pink! and Perry Ferrell of Jane’s Addiction have been making the case as well. In the last five to ten years she’s been almost revered with an iconic status. This was not the reality for fans in the 1970s when she was a fashion joke akin to Paris Hilton. Or in the 1980s when she was given acting credibility but still withheld from any kind of music credibility, although her music output far outweighs her acting output.

Allegedly Cher wanted to be inducted as Sonny & Cher, which is another amazing facet of this story, how loyal Cher is to Sonny at the end of the day and after all these years and how she clearly and repeatedly states that her entire music career was Sonny’s dream. Which is why Cher’s induction is Sonny’s accolade as much as it is Cher’s. Sonny is vindicated here as much if not more than all the fans are. And Sonny deserves a great amount of credit. Cher was his discovery and his insistence. He is a crucial piece of Cher as she stands today.

But we also have to realize that it is Cher who has broken the big records. Her solo records, her longevity, her continued stance of rebellion, her own Cherness. So it seems fully logical that she would be the inductee. Sonny was like the rocket launcher. An impossibly strong and brilliant one. As Cher states in the aforementioned documentary, there was nothing about Cher early on that screamed movie star or rock star. But Sonny saw it.

I still feel the same way about the HofF, even now that Cher is “in.” But I do acknowledge the acknowledgement. The complaint that “Cher is not rock” can still be heard out there in the complainosphere? To which I would say exactly, she is much bigger. Rock and roll is nothing but all those many things that prop it up: blues, gospel, folk, punk, torch, country, showtunes, jazz, dance, rap, metal, the infinitely-alternative everything, the hairdos, clothes and mythology…it’s a posture more than a quantifiable genre.

Cher has recorded in many of those styles and her influence is proliferating as we speak. She is an entertainment Wonder Woman. An ongoing vaudevillian Viking.

Yes, I have been making the case for Cher, like I said, since I was in the single digits and I’m gonna keep doing it. Because I know I’m on to something. The HoF feels like a hard-won concession at this point.

But the things I like are much bigger than that.

 

Read More!

How Pink! exists as a singer because of Cher

How Perry Ferrell of Jane’s Addiction encouraged votes for Cher in the RnR HoF

The Cher Autobiography and Biography in Interviews

So I continue to think about Cher’s in-progress autobiography, in both its book and movie form.

Just to note: cherscholar.com does have a Cher biography reference page. There have been only a few good Cher books despite the span of seven decades. The best writers have been J. Randy Taraborrelli, Mark Bego and Josiah Howard, although there have been some really great fan-created books as well. Check out the full list: https://www.cherscholar.com/books-2/.

After we last left this topic, Cher scholar Toby recommended I watch the Bob Dylan biography I Am Not There. And I should have watched it sooner because I really loved Cate Blanchett in Manifesto (it was very literary). And experimental biography is what I most liked about Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life.

But I guess you can have too many experiments going on because then it’s hard to evaluate the results of any single one. It’s like the scientific maxim to keep your hypothesis simple. Maybe this is true of art as well.

And due to too many experiments working their way through I Am Not There, to coin a Gertrude Stein phrase, there becomes no there there. But they were all interesting experiments individually, so let’s discuss them one by one.

(Let me know if I’m missing any.)

Experiment 1:

Biopics of music artists often suffer from impersonations instead of interpretations. This was the great failure of the one biopic of Cher we have already seen, And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny & Cher StoryIt would be difficult to put on the skin of any iconic performer, but nearly impossible for the inimitable ones.

Why not experiment with multiples? Christian Bale and Kate Blanchette were my favorite Bob Dylans in I’m Not There.  The deployment of multiple Dylans seemed like a genius solution to the problem of finding one actor who can hit all the different eras. Cher has already borrowed on this idea with her Broadway show and three Chers co-habituating and communicating throughout the entire story, albeit those Chers without name-brand interpreters.

And collectively, maybe multiple actors gets to the same point that a really good deep-layer interpreter would get to anyway, something beyond the surface level of looks and mimicry, something that can live above and apart from the person described.

I think Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita is a good example of this. And as I’ve said, the Fanny Brice musicals. Another actor can come in and embody the spirit without our fretting about lookalike and soundalike-ness.

To me that all seems like a red-herring at the end of the day (or the end of the soul, as it were) and so it makes the idea of multiples a moot point. Yeah, we’re all comprised of separate people. But we’re all also one person too.

Experiment 2:

I love the idea of entangling the myth of a life with its facts, myths created by iconic images and I’m Not There did that really well. And like with multiple actorly embodiments, this experiment plays on the idea of there being no “I” there or “no there there” as Gertrude Stein would have it.

And I think this dilemma is baked into the whole Bob Dylan thing so this experiment was not only the most interesting to me but felt very pertinent to its subject.

I think the very same issues play similarly into the Cher story, (most ideas formed about Cher are based on a few iconic images), so this would be an interesting experiment to borrow from.

Experiment 3:

The different Bob Dylans were also embodying Dylan’s own iconic mentors in somewhat interesting mashups: Dylan with Woody Guthrie or Billy the Kid or Arthur Rimbaud and this was probably one of the least interesting experiments for me. How much of you is what you love and admire? Maybe that’s its own movie right there. Because this is one experiment that requires more finesse than there is time for as one experiment of many. It just came across as too surface-level for me. One of my favorite quotes is from Charles de Gualle, “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” It’s so complicated.

We all put on uniforms to walk through the world and we often borrow the clothes of those we admire. But what then? There’s a lot more to explore there.

Experiment 4:

Time shifts, which are interesting in any other postmodern depiction, but here they just felt too tangled up in all the other experiments, different times interspersed with different Dylans.

Experiment 5:

Let’s make it a musical, but just barely.

That all said I actually liked the movie. All the competing experiments just made the film extremely self-conscious as a biopic. That’s not a crime though. There were beautiful and interesting shots (which could save any flawed Cher biopic, by the way).

On a related note, I’m making my way ever-so-slowly through a bathroom stack of New Yorkers. My friend Kalisha recently gave me a more modern issue from July of 2023 because there was a short story in it that reminded her of Haruki Murakami, a writer we both like. In the same issue there was an essay by Parul Sehgal, “Tell No Tales,” about how storytelling has pervaded areas where it shouldn’t, like politics, office PowerPoints, religious screeds.

But also biographies. Sehgal says,

“The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, ‘You Could Make This Place Beautiful,’ notes wryly, ‘It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?’ She goes on, ‘At any given moment, I wonder: Is this the rising action? Has the climax already happened or are we not even there yet?’ It’s not just the unruliness of life that is ill-served by story and its corrective resolution.”

Cher only had one long-form interview last year while promoting her Christmas album on the 60-minute BBC special “Cher Meets Rylan.” It’s the last interview we have to talk about from that blitzkrieg of publicity and it’s relevant to our topic today because Cher had a few new biographical stories to tell in it.

Ryland calls Cher a s diva, icon, goddess, a pioneer in fashion. The fact that Rylan is so young he came to Cher from the song “Believe” sill seems incredible to me. Therefore the majority of the retrospective Cher reels were from the 1980s and beyond.

They talk about how much she loves London and how some of her outfits are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They talk about her Christmas album and Cher says that because the songs didn’t really go together, she worried people wouldn’t “get it.”

She tells a story about her mother Georgia getting up on the roof of her house and nailing her shingles back on as an example of how kick-ass she was. Cher also said Georgia was talented, hysterical and Cher said she died so she could be herself again.

They talk about the dyslexia, the Cher sayings (“If it doesn’t matter in five years,” borrowed from her mother, and “I am a rich man.”)

Cher has been wearing fingerless hand-gloves for all of these interviews for some reason.

She tells a new story about running away at nine-years old with her friend Anita, first on a horse and then on a train. This has to be in the biopic. And it’s eerily similar to Dylan’s young train mashup-moment in I’m Not There.

She talks about playing all the boy parts in a backyard-like production of  Oklahoma when she was in grade school. She covers her jobs at Robinson’s department store and the candy store with the old ladies. She talks about meeting Sonny in the coffee shop below the popular radio station, Sonny’s smile and how he wanted to make her a singer but that she was just loose energy at the time, not focused and really shy.

She notes that Sonny & Cher had five songs in the top 40 at the same time, some songs which were prior-nonhits re-released  when “I Got You Babe” became a summer phenomenon.

Steaming has confused statistics like these. My friend Christopher recently gave me a phone lecture on the way the charts worked before and after streaming and how Taylor Swift just scored 26 songs at once on the Top 100.

Cher talks about how she used to make  clothes with her friends and how Sonny was so game to wear whatever she came up with. “We thought we were beautiful. People thought we were grungy.”

And then strangely, we skip to 1979 to talk about Studio 54. The new shocking story there is how Cher once took Al Pacino to Studio 54.

It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of Cher and Al Pacino on an outing together (just like it is for me to get my head around Sonny & Cher singing late 1970s rock ballads).

Al Pacino was working on a Broadway play. A quick scan of his Wikipedia page and knowing the span of Studio 54 was 1977-1986, the play was either “The Basic Training of Pavlo,”  “Richard III” or “American Buffalo.”

Anyway, after Cher invited him, he brought the whole cast, Cher says, and everyone had a great time except for Al Pacino who looked uncomfortable the whole night. Oh dear. Not surprising but quite an embarrassing Cher-date-fail for Al Pacino.

Cher talks about her acting in “Jimmy Dean” and how the actresses were great. She talks about being pen pals with her idol Audrey Hepburn. She says she doesn’t work for the accolades, that “you do work for the work” and the awards are a bonus. She calls Meryl Streep Mary Louise.

She again says she was dropped from two record companies and that the song “Believe” took a lot of people because the verses were not good. Rylan reminds us that “Believe” is still the UK’s biggest selling single by a woman artist.

Cher talks about her former place in Wapping where she was living at the time of recording “Believe,” that it was an old rum warehouse. Ryland says the song was crucial for a gay boy to hear, how he believed “this is the world I’m gonna grow up in now.” (That was actually very moving.) He talks about the song’s impact on the music industry. Cher says AI pisses her off.

So the technology thing is complicated.

Cher talks about how for her 1970s-era variety shows, she would meet with Bob Mackie for three hours each Wednesday and how Mackie was making one amazing thing after another. She still goes out in jeans. She’s still a jeans person. But she also loves wigs.

She says she met Elton John the first time he came to America and she found him adorable. They were all friends: Elton, Diana Ross and Bette Midler and she tells of a time they all went shopping in New York.

She says she’s lived a thousand lives, (she calls herself “older than dirt”) and that this is a biography problem.  Rylan asks her if she’s had a fav Chera.  She says she’s been written off in so many eras and accused of reinventing herself. She says she wasn’t reinventing; she was just out of work.

Cher Scholarin Out in the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ASMR

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher in Literature

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

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

Page 499

Page 534

Page 544

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

 

Massive New Year Cher Wrap Up

New Dolls

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

Christmas is Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Believe 25th  Anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Countdown to Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I LOVE that!

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

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

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

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

Vanity Fair (Spanish)

Those crimped wig shots are great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

AARP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

New York Times

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

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

Oh dear. I worry about this, myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harumph. There’s always one.

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

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

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

(See? It writes itself!)

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

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

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

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

Cher Christmas Reviews & Upcoming Appearances

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

Remixes

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

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

Good Reviews

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

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

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

Some other four-star examples:

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

Or this funny four-star:

Good CD except for 2 tracks which are awful

There are more cracked CD complaints.

Some of the five-star reviews:

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

Two fans disagreed over one song:

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

Another fan disagrees:

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

And this hilarious five-star review:

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

Or this review speaking to the variety:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review also had some interview elements.

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

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

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

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

Well, not quite.

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

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

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

That’s kinda true on both counts.

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

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

Bad Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rap Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The microphone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s the thing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appearances & Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29 November – Christmas at Rockefeller Center with Darlene Love

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

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


1 December – at Odeon de Luxe, Cher in Conversation

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

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

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

1 December – Cher on Graham Norton Show

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

 

 

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

 

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