Category: Scholarship In Action (Page 1 of 15)

Kiss-and-Tell Autobiographies

June 24, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I was using an online bootleg of Sonny & Me; Cher Remembers to finish documenting what was in that TV special and I discovered at the end of the bootleg were some Entertainment Tonight segments from 1998 tagged on, including interviews of Cher on the set of the movie Tea with Mussolini responding to news about Mary Bono helping mount a TV movie about Sonny & Cher based on Sonny’s 1991 kiss-and-tell biography. It was around this time when Mary Bono started to come across as not-a-friend-of-Cher, this biopic news coming after Sonny’s funeral bruhaha died down.

It wasn’t the first gossip of tension there. It was rumored Cher took issue with some of the things Mary Bono had been revealing around Sonny’s late-life struggles with prescription drugs. Cher, like a regular Italian mafioso, was rumored to want to keep such news in the family.

I don’t know where to put this TV movie, to be honest, for various reasons. The origin of it, Sonny’s book, like Sonny himself was “a mixed bag” (as Cher has said recently). There were some good behind-the-music stuff in the book, but then he goes and talks about his sex life with Cher. Icky but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The movie didn’t crawl into bed with the sex storyline which was good. Although I have to admit I do have a fascination with “the Sonny & Cher Bedroom” but only up to stories about them having sex. For me, Sonny & Cher were more like my fantasy parents. And who wants to go there with their real or fantasy parents? I prefer the quaint stories of Cher reading a book all night in the master bathroom or her wanting to keep the TV on all night to sleep, bedroom stories which sounds interesting in a sort of innocent, albeit still groovy, way. The bedroom seems symbolic for Cher as the core of the house. She has for decades held court in her bedrooms over interviews and Sonny & Cher even captured their bedroom on their last album cover.

The biggest problem I have with the movie, which is the problem I have with any Sonny & Cher re-enactment, is that it is always hella-boring. And Sonny & Cher were anything but boring characters. It all just proves how completely inimitable they both are, Sonny too. Not to mention that the re-enactments keep portraying Sonny incorrectly, like a happy-go-lucky, trod-upon, luckless, aw-shucks fellow. And that is so far off-the mark when you consider the portrayal of anyone who has ever described Sonny: his family, his friends, his colleagues, his ex-wives. It’s not even an accurate on-stage read of Sonny. And you can tell this if you just pay attention. What we continue to get are just cliched readings of Sonny, dismissive shallow looks. And it is so annoying, a disservice to both Sonny and Cher.

I also don’t know where to place the movie in the Cher-o-sphere. It’s not a TV special but it is a legitimate moment of Cher history (for good or bad). It’s not a TV appearance. A network movie has been made depicting her life. So which bucket does it live in?

I do have Sonny’s book listed on by Book page. It’s Sonny’s documented point-of-view. You can’t fully dismiss it.

Cher Universe just published an MTV Rockline interview from the early 1990s which includes Cher response to Sonny’s book when it came out. Cher maintains in the interview that she did very much want to refute much of what Sonny said in his book but decided she didn’t want to kiss-and-tell. She wasn’t going to respond in kind.

To be fair, Sonny did some great things for Cher and he did some horrible things to Cher. His evaluation of their career are valuable. But his tales of their private sex life comes across as seedy and self-serving. And since we have to go there, (like walking in on your fantasy parents having sex), I feel I have to dance around what he said. And I just want to say that when you’re considering healthy sex between two people, it stands to reason that a 16-year old in a relationship with a 27-year old might be a different sexual relationship than a twenty-something TV star will have with a rock star of approximately the same age, or a forty-something rock/movie star will have with a younger man or whatever the combinations are. Different relationships have their own energy systems.

And why are we even talking about this? Because Sonny’s comments weren’t meant to be anything but tales out of school, the jackpot gossip of “What was it like to sleep with Cher?” (at best) or designed to continue to make Cher feel bad in a public space (at worst), like a punishment for a separate success that had occurred without him. In any case, not a loving or paternal move.

Cher didn’t respond in-kind and I think that says a lot about her character. After Sonny died, she became even more protective. Since then, for years she said she wouldn’t tell her story until “everybody has died.” Well, everyone has pretty much died and she still seems to be struggling with it. She still doesn’t want to throw anyone under the bus, I think she has recently said.

Telling your story is important, but it’s tricky, no doubt. What greater purpose can your stories serve? Fans are interested in details and things we might not know, how things came to be. What were the disappointments and joys we don’t know about.

On the borderlines, maybe it would be good to stick to feelings. We truly own our feelings, after all.

On a micro-level people deal with this every day: how much should I tell my friends and family? Sharing stories creates intimacy between people. But how much intimacy do you want? Whatever the case, we all own the story of our own lives.

Maybe it’s like talking to a therapist. You’ll get nowhere in self-discovery unless you try to be as fair to all parties involved as you can be. Maybe that’s a good rubric for public stories as well. A balance in all blame and kudos; humility in all stories.

Rock and Roll Royalties and Royalty

June 1, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

April 28, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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.

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

The Cher Autobiography and Biography in Interviews

February 18, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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 Story. It 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

January 4, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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:

Unboxing the Christmas album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z24VNjbzgFQ&t=46s
Unboxing a Believe CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF2zUUo5IXo
Unboxing the Believe CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpz4UWLa1B4&t=231s
Unboxing the It’s a Man’s World CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAN99o3mXk
Unboxing It’s a Man’s World vinyl box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OneddA7ZTOg&t=124s
Cher’s Eau de Couture perfume unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKGcxNgmNM (classic ASMR)
Unboxing the Chersace shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F1uc7rz6lI&t=146s
Some lucky fan got a box of Cher stuff and unboxed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywlU2kdvPV4&t=2154s
Unwrapping the I Paralyze CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgAoAStxayA
Unwrapping the Living Proof CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdONiBIIdA
Cher samples of vocal fry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKJxbNynro8&t=261s
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.)

The Biopic Problem

December 12, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

This is so majorly NOMB, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher Christmas Reviews & Upcoming Appearances

November 20, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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.

DJ Play A Christmas Song (Extended Mix)
DJ Play A Christmas Song (Extended Instrumental)
DJ Play A Christmas Song (7th Heaven Club Mix)

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

Proust and the Fan Squeal

March 23, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

If I’m cocky about anything in this life, it’s my nerdiness. I can’t really be out-nerded. I don’t have a stamp collection and I don’t spend my time solving math or science puzzles; but I do plenty of other lit-nerd things, like slog through JStor essays and some very dry, academic books. You can’t out-nerd me by dropping titles like Gormenghast or authors like Proust.

Yeah, maybe you’ve read Proust. How cute. I have a Proust shelf. I have two sets of the Moncrieff translation, (the Vintage edition and the Modern Library edition), the Quarto Gallimard edition in French, Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust (which I perused concurrently with the novel). I’ve read the first volume, Swann’s Way, three times, (once at Sarah Lawrence College, once in a book club and once reading the full epic with someone who had previously read it in French) and along my journey I have the collected The Paris of Marcel Proust, his biography by George D. Painter, lighter fare like How Proust Can Change Your Life and his Letters to His Neighbor, the book that traces the origins of all the characters called A Proust Souvenir (in English and French), and two actual human students of Proust!

And let us not forget the two books of poems based on the novel, Proustiennes by Jean Fremon and The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson.

I have also visited the cork-lined bedroom of Proust at the Musee Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris in Paris, at the suggestion of one of those aforementioned Proust students, Ann Cefola, and I purchased the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way so that Cefola and I could compare the paragraphs of the Davis edition with the Moncrieff edition with the original French novel in a month-long email and phone project to see which translations was more faithful to the original vocabulary of Proust.

It was great!

But none of this is to say I’m a Proust Scholar. That shelf is probably a small fraction of the Proust universe. Actually, I would say I am no Proust expert at all. I only understand In Search of Lost Time in fragments, kind of like I understand the poems of Anne Carson.

And, in fact, after five years of high school French classes, I can’t even speak French! So some of the books on this shelf (like the French ones, for example) are my husbands, a former French major. But I’m still buying and reading essays on Proust and he is not. And I think this is because I am what you would call a fan of Proust, and a pretty flamboyant fan at that (judging by the cock-a-hoop paragraphs preceding).

But even so, it took me a very long time to decide to read Proust. It seemed a pretentious thing to do, even for a lit major. Faulkner, Pynchon, okay; but Proust?

And when I did start reading the world’s most famous novel, I realized it was what we used to call, (in less PC times), very, very gay (as in that is so gay!). Which just means the novel has a queer sensibility and this is most likely because Proust himself was a gay man, a fact I didn’t know and if I had known I would have read the books decades earlier. Because I too have a kitschy, campy sensibility that is very closely aligned to queer culture. Is this because I am a life-long Cher fan? Or am I a life-long Cher fan because I instinctively appreciate camp? It’s a mystery.

In any case, when I describe Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as having a gay sensibility, it’s hard to explain to people what I mean. I keep saying Proust has a kind of exuberance you don’t normally see in straight male writers.

It’s not that certain straight men don’t go on and on about a subject like Proust does but that they might do so in ways like pontificate or lecture. You might hear someone talk about a particular thing they are excited about with words like ‘awesome’ or ‘great’ or, if they’re feeling really compelled, ‘so cool.’ But that’s as hyperactive as they may allow themselves to get; the remainder is at an emotional reserve, intellectualizing, doing what fan-scholar Mark Duffett calls distancing.

And I must say here that when I reference straight males, this is not at all exclusive. Some straight women, gay women, gay men and non-gendered people I know have a tendency to restrain a grand enthusiasm just as much as anybody; but usually they do it for the same reason.

I started putting it all together, myself, very recently while I was reading yet more Proustian analytics, the triad of Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast, The New Yorkers’ May 10, 2021 article “Peripheral Proust,” (where Adam Gopnick ponders why “secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers”), and the textbook Understanding Fandom, An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture by Mark Duffett.

Today, we have such a plethora of things to be fannish about: tv shows, movie auteurs, music artists, authors, whole food genres. Proust didn’t have many of those things. He had sights (architecture and painting), sounds (both ambient and music), and ideas (books, articles, the Dreyfus affair). Oh, and the Guermantes. He had nobility (which was the celebrity obsession of his time).

In Understanding Fandom, Duffett talks about hierarchies of fandom. All of Proust’s pleasures are high brow, for the most part respectable pursuits. The Proust novel is itself a respectable thing to be a fan of. However, Proust had plenty of what we now define as guilty pleasures including the theater, one of those things that has flipped from low to highbrow for us.

Mark Duffett explains one of the basest of fan gestures is considered to be the fan squeal. It immediately signifies lowliness. And the squeal is most often applied to “girls” because they do it with such lack of inhibition. And by definition this marks these girl fans as a lesser kind of fan because they are offering up an emotional versus intellectual response. And further, any object that elicits the girlish fan squeal will become quantifiably downgraded in the hierarchy of subjects.

You can easily picture this, girls circled together in a bedroom verbally expressing shrieks of delight over handsome pop objects. At its screechy worst, it becomes a public scream, Beatlemania. When boys were Beatle fans, it means one thing. But when the girls arrived, it got screechy.

Steve Miller explains this repeatedly and unapologetically in his book Detroit Rock City. When girls start offsetting the audience ratio at any heavy metal rock show, the band is no longer cool.

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

Girls defy this edict, but so do a certain segment of the gay male population, men who also squeal performatively in public. ‘Flaming’ was once the derogatory term used for this type of very effervescent man.

And some gay boys were probably squealing themselves over John, Paul, George and Ringo…behind closed doors. Squealing is actually a highly acceptable practice within most circles of girls and girls hanging out with gay boys. And I believe this is partly why certain types of girls, (equally reactive ones, I would argue), develop such close friendships with them.

I, myself, do the very act of of distancing Duffett describes as a Cher fan. I do this very likely because I had two disparaging, older straight teenage boy music aficionados in my house growing up. Your ideas about music would be discounted otherwise.

Duffett quotes music critic Caroline Sullivan as using the word credibility in her book about the Bay City Rollers. As a fan of boy bands, your ideas lose credibility.

But there’s something absurd about that. And this was part of my original joke, Cher Scholar. But then when I actually began Cher scholarin’ there was respectability inherent in the endeavor. And I appreciated that. It was helpful to me and to the ways we speak about Cher. There’s nothing innately wrong with intellectualizing. But I was probably doing it just as subconsciously as consciously. So I would include myself as one of the straight females who tends to “tone it down,” to downplay my own version of the flaming squeal.

Another thing I notice that I do, and I noticed it while writing this essay and the one on Philip Levine, is that when I talk about poetry, I tone down my academic vocabulary and sentence constructions and when I talk about music I rev it up.

But I actually do love exaggerated enthusiasms and so it annoys me that I self-protect myself in this way. And so I try to offset my reticence with the occasional, politically-willful, calculated squeal. It’s not hard to find the object that will do it. Usually, it’s a Cher doll. In fact, I can remember my first Cher doll squeal all the way back to Christmas 1976. I can get plenty squealy about the dolls.

Because I can.

Speaking of dolls, I am revamping the nativity of the Christmas Cher doll tree.

I finally bit the bullet and bought the Val Kilmer action figure from the movie Willow. Then I found a hip, online paper doll artist from Perth, Australia, for our new nativity member, Alexander Edwards, and we had no Robert Cameletti! How did that happen? And while doing that, I decided to upgrade the paper dolls for Gregg Allman and David Geffen.

Anyway, we can see that there are strict boundaries around fandom all the time. And here we come back to Proust. He can go on for pages and pages of happy exuberance about a madeleine in a cup of tea, the passages of the moon or a flower patch. He uses words like bliss and glorious over things like train timetables, steeples and trees.

And although arguably he doesn’t squeal in volume, I would argue he does squeal in the amount of ink dispensed and the emotional particularity he demands from that ink.

Even if you didn’t know Marcel Proust was a gay man, you might consider the long, meandering Proustian sentence feminine just as you may consider the brief, single-syllabled Hemmingway sentences as masculine. That’s the dichotomy, although it’s inherently unfair (and inaccurate) to both Proust and Hemmingway. Hemmingway famously had his own feminine side and as for Proust, as feminine as any gay man might seem he is still a man.

The dichotomy is false but easy to digest with our primitive ‘othering’ instincts. And intellectual distancing is an armor, which makes straight men particularly good at it. It’s a masculine effort. Women and gay men tend to have less armor, by design or by choice.

In any case, this is my somewhat distanced yet attemptive emotional fan squeal about Proust’s own fan squeal. And such as it is, I value it more dearly than all the nerdy academia of Proustlandia and you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

We’ve Moved!

February 10, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

The timeline of the move looked like this:

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

When Cher Sings a Song: What It Means

August 16, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 3 Comments

So I’ve mentioned before how when different people sing the same song, it can have different meanings; and this is because every person brings to a song their own “star persona” and personality and backstory and public backstory.

Andrew Goodwin talks a lot about this in his book Dancing in the Distraction Factory about music videos in the 1980s and 90s. A music video was never just a music video, but a piece in a conglomeration of promotional materials, star personas, the history of entertainment on television, (and he doesn’t mention it but this includes musical segments on old variety shows), posters, album covers, magazine interviews, TV interviews, aspects of business and the whole cyclone of products, promotions and pressures that circle around a song.

So while I was working on the latest Cher show this week, her opening song came up as a perfect example of this. First of all, I had never heard this song, “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” before last weekend; but I loved it immediately and saw it as the kind of song Cher would often use to explain herself, certain songs she sings over and over again, like “More Than You Know,” and “’Aint Nobody’s Business.”

I was very surprised to discover this was a Simon & Garfunkel song, written by Paul Simon. And when they sing it (and as the lyrics literally read) the song is about being on the road and the perils and pains found there.

But Cher can’t help but lend a different spin to the song. She sings a few bars of the Janis Ian song “Stars” as the initial torch moment of the opening. “Stars” is a song about how alienating stardom can be. This was a significant song on her 1975 album (and not the only song on the album dealing with issues of fame) and it is significant that this was chosen as the title of the album. So from the beginning of this performance, Cher is setting up that “this song is about me as a famous person.” This affects the context of the matching, following song, "Keep the Customer Satisfied" which in her hands focuses more on slander and libel than life on the road.

In her version, the road is more figurative for her whole celebrity life. At the time Cher was the most recurring cover girl on news stand tabloids, which were full of silly, off-the-wall stories about her love life (mostly involving people she had never met). She was also criticized for her divorce and risqué costumes. Here she’s presenting as a working showgirl just trying to do her job and entertain. The sheriff becomes not a literal middle-America sheriff but middle-America itself.

So literal details can become figurative depending upon what the singer persona brings to the song. It’s a magical thing.

It’s also a catchy song. And this isn’t always the case, but here I like the Cher version better, even though the big production of the S&C version has a fun build. I feel the song fits Cher's drawl and delivery. She brings more gravitas to her version. Because really, how slandered and libeled were Simon and Garfunkel compared to Cher.

Or was anyone I submit to you.

The Gary Puckett version.

Category: Scholarship In Action (Page 1 of 15)

Kiss-and-Tell Autobiographies

Rock and Roll Royalties and Royalty

Cher Scholar Catches Up

The Cher Autobiography and Biography in Interviews

Cher Scholarin Out in the World

The Biopic Problem

Cher Christmas Reviews & Upcoming Appearances

Proust and the Fan Squeal

We’ve Moved!

When Cher Sings a Song: What It Means

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