Latest news with #musician
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bryan Adams believes his remarkable UK Singles Chart record will be 'broken'
Bryan Adams believes that his record-breaking 16-week run at the top of the UK Singles Chart wth (Everything I Do) I Do It For You will eventually be broken.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why today's toothless comedians can't compare to Tom Lehrer
If you've ever laughed at a satirical song, whether watching a panel show, a live comedy gig or on Radio 4, there's a good chance that it would not have existed without Tom Lehrer, the brilliant mathematician and musician who has died at the age of 97. Lehrer did not write many songs, but his influence on comic music is almost without parallel; he went further and harder than anyone else ever had before, and the results were jaw-dropping in both their wit and (apparent) tastelessness. Yet what makes his death all the sadder is that, without him, satirical music has lost its godfather, and those who claim to follow in his footsteps are toothless and sedate by comparison. Nobody would dream of tackling the hot-button issues that Lehrer dealt with head-on, and the tentative, unimaginative efforts of even today's best comedians seem cowardly in comparison with what the grand vizier of satire came up with. Lehrer was at least celebrated in his own time by the cognoscenti. Sometimes, this was not entirely shared by the wider world; the New York Times sniffed that 'Mr Lehrer is not fettered by such inhibiting features as taste'. The subject of its disdain was, of course, delighted by such criticism, because the whole point of satire is that it should not be tasteful or polite. Instead, at its most devastating, it should be rude, crude and raucous. The fact that Lehrer performed his songs over nicely judged piano arrangements does not detract one inch from the sentiments contained within them. In this, he was the natural heir to a tradition that had begun centuries before. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was quite normal for ballads to be sold on the street for a penny or so, to be sung over a simple tune. Often the point of these ballads was to poke fun at politicians or royalty or at some risible custom or tradition of the day. These stabs at satire were not always appreciated by those who they were aimed at, and their creators could be whipped or placed in the stocks for their transgression: in extremis, satirists could have their noses cut off. Musical satire ventured into the mainstream in the 19th century, finding perhaps its greatest expression through the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. (Lehrer would later appropriate the duo's most vitriolic work, The Major General's Song, for his scientific satire The Elements.) Many early 20th century music hall performers were unsparing in their criticism of British wartime ineptitude and waste – some of the songs can be found in the revue Oh! What A Lovely War – but after WWII, public appetite for satire on the horrors of war appeared to be at an all time low on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, gentler parody was in vogue, such as the pianist Victor Borge's mild, inoffensive Happy Birthday in the style of Rachmaninov. By the time that Lehrer emerged in the mid Fifties, there was a pent-up desire for a different and more challenging kind of comedy. Such songs of his as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango represented an edgier black humour that played extremely well with his university-educated, literate audiences, who delighted in the sense of boundaries being transgressed and good taste being left at the door. Lehrer was working on two separate levels. The first was straightforward humorous parody, such as his Harvard football song Fight Fiercely Harvard and The Elements, in which he listed the periodic table to the tune of the Major General's Song (which, of course, represented a tip of the hat to his musical comedy predecessors.) The second, however, was more pointed and overtly satirical. When he wrote We Will All Go Together When We Go in 1959, it might have been seen as a commentary on the American way of death. However, with the impending sceptre of nuclear war, it soon became clear that such lyrics as 'we will all fry together when we fry/we'll be French fried potatoes by and by' were not simply wry observation but instead commentary on the rapidly accelerating atomic age. Lehrer was especially popular in Britain by this time. It is not hard to see him as a transatlantic cousin of such satirical acts as Beyond the Fringe, the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann and the members of That Was The Week That Was, which occasionally used similarly Lehrer-esque songs in their shows to illustrate some topical point. Yet even here, the Cook-Moore-Miller-Bennett quartet preferred to veer into silliness rather than the cutting and focused anger of Lehrer. When he wrote National Brotherhood Week, a satire on race relations, and prefaced its live performance by saying 'this year, for example, on the first day of the week, Malcolm X was killed, which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is', the gasps of shock from the audience are barely concealed by the giddy laughter. It is simply impossible to imagine that someone would have made a similar joke today about, say, George Floyd without being cancelled. And this, unfortunately, proved to be the issue with Lehrer. Underneath his Harvard professor exterior, all big smiles and thick glasses, his most famous songs tore into contemporary society with a rare degree of wit and viciousness that set an impossibly high bar for any musical comedian to follow him. In many regards, he was the punk rocker of his day, tearing polite and acceptable convention to pieces in outrageous yet hilarious fashion. Even today, his work is still bracing, and deeply funny. Yet by the mid Sixties, Lehrer had retired from creating music and instead focused on his academic work. He remarked, in a quip that defined the rest of his career, that 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'. It's a great tragedy that Lehrer proved himself a brilliant one-off rather than the father of a new strain of musical satire. Monty Python, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and America's Weird Al Yankovic had their moments, but their humour was parodic and broad, as opposed to the refined scalpel that Lehrer liked to use, and they lacked the devastating anger of their predecessor. The songs would make you laugh, but they would seldom make you think too hard afterwards. (In the late Eighties, the British duo Kit and the Widow came close with the anti-Section 28 ditty Burn the F----ts.) Today, the fine art of the satirical song seems almost to have died out with Lehrer. Tim Minchin and Randy Newman are fine, but we look in vain for the great satirical song that will take on British or American politicians, the trans movement, wokery or the Israel-Palestine conflict. (For my money, Blame Canada from the South Park film is the only satirical song of the last few decades that really comes close to Lehrer's heyday, mixing a brilliant tune with lyrics that make you sit up and gasp with their daring and vitriol.) Perhaps this is inevitable. Lehrer himself remarked in the early 2000s that 'I don't think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It's not even preaching to the converted; it's titillating the converted'. Tom Lehrer's five funniest songs 1. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park (1959) One of Lehrer's best-known and best-loved songs, this one focuses on the idea of a romantic Sunday morning seeing the narrator and his sweetheart laying waste to the local pigeons. The lyrics are some of Lehrer's finest – 'We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment/Except for the few we take home to experiment' – and the joyously macabre sentiments make this a perennial favourite. 2. I Hold Your Hand In Mine (1953) If you can imagine what a Roald Dahl short story would sound like if it was turned into an elegant parody of a torch song, I Hold Your Hand In Mine is pretty much it. As Lehrer's besotted narrator segues from swooning romantic to obsessed murderer, the laughs keep coming, even as he complains: 'For now each time I kiss it, I get bloodstains on my tie.' 3. National Brotherhood Week (1965) Even by the often uncompromising standards of Lehrer, this song – which rivals Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler for jaw-dropping tastelessness – is strong stuff in its denigration of racial tensions, which the singer calls 'as American as apple pie'. As he declares 'Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/And the Catholics hate the Protestants/And the Hindus hate the Muslims/And everybody hates the Jews' the listener is briefly transported into another, edgier world, in which satire of this kind was ever considered not just possible, but hilarious. 4. Send The Marines (1965) That Lehrer stopped writing and performing songs before the Nixon era began is always to be regretted, but it is likely that his reaction to that (and to many other political issues) might be encompassed by his attack on mindless imperialism. It is beautifully and simply expressed in lyrics such as 'They've got to be protected/All their rights respected/Til someone we like can be elected'. Like so many of Lehrer's songs, there are countless conflicts that it could apply to, and it seems every bit as prescient as it did 60 years ago. 5. We Will All Go Together When We Go (1959) It is not yet known what form Lehrer's funeral will take, but it would not seem inappropriate for this particular song to be played at it. Initially it appears to be a dark satire on the American way of death, poking fun at how we are all reduced to the same insignificance after we die. But when Lehrer sings 'For if the bomb that drops on you/Gets your friends and neighbours too/There'll be nobody left behind to grieve', the well-observed balance throughout his work between horror and hilarity finds perhaps its simplest, and nastiest, expression.
Al Arabiya
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Al Arabiya
Lebanese icon Fairouz makes rare public appearance at son's funeral
Lebanese icon Fairouz made a rare public appearance on Monday to attend the funeral of her son, Ziad Rahbani. Fairouz arrived with her daughter, Reema Rahbani, and stepped out of the car to applause from the crowd gathered to bid a final farewell to Ziad, the renowned musician and composer. TV footage showed Fairouz entering the church in Bikfaya before taking a front seat facing the casket. Cameras captured the icon in her somber moments. For privacy reasons, the church hall was nearly empty except for a few people, including Lebanon's First Lady Nehmat Aoun. Despite her rare public appearances, Fairouz remains one of the most prominent and legendary singers in Lebanon and across the Arab world.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
American musical satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97, US media report
American musician and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at the age of 97, according to US media reports. Lehrer, a Harvard-trained mathematician, wrote darkly humorous songs, often with political connotations, that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern comedians such as Weird Al Yankovich said they have been influenced by Lehrer's work. His death was confirmed to the New York Times by David Herder, a friend. Born in Manhattan in 1928, Lehrer was a classically trained pianist. But despite his musical success, he spent most of his life pursuing academia. His teaching posts included spells at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California. 'I remember Ozzy missing a gig and it caused a riot' Brian Wilson obituary: Troubled genius who wrote most of The Beach Boys' hits He graduated early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, according to the New York Times, and then went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor's degree in 1946 aged 18. He completed a masters there and also pursued a PHd at Columbia University, which he never completed. He began writing lyrics while at Harvard to entertain friends. Lehrer's most enduring songs include The Elements, a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General from The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera. Other fan favourites include The Masochism Tango, in which singer extols his beloved's violent passions with the lyrics, "I ache for the touch of your lips, dear / But much more for the touch of your whips, dear..." He was renowned for his darkly comic ballads, including the necrophiliac epic I Hold Your Hand in Mine, I Got It From Agnes - where he sang about the transmission of a venereal disease - and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, which detailed the birds' apparent appetite for "peanuts coated with cyanide". In 1953 he released Songs by Tom Lehrer, a record that was sold through the post. It became a word of mouth success and sold an estimated half a million copies. The BBC banned most of Songs from the airwaves the following year. Following the success of the album, Lehrer began playing in nightclubs in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and at events for anti-war and left-wing groups. He wrote songs for the US edition of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was, which were were made into an album in 1965. The highly controversial Vatican Rag, a Catholic hymn set in ragtime that mocked the Church, was featured among other songs that condemned nuclear weapons. He wrote for the 1970s educational children's show, The Electric Company, and in 1980 his songs enjoyed a revival when theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh staged the musical revue "Tomfoolery" featuring his work. He also taught maths and musical theatre courses at the University of California from 1972 to 2001, according to the New York Times. In 2020, Lehrer placed his song writing copyrights in the public domain, allowing anyone to perform, record or interpret his work for free. He also relinquished all rights to his recordings. In a statement on his website at the time, he wrote: "In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don't send me any money." He also warned the website would be "shut down at some date in the not too distant future". The website was still live at the time of writing.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ziad Rahbani, Composer Who Defined a Tragic Era in Lebanon, Dies at 69
Ziad Rahbani, an era-defining Lebanese composer, playwright and musician whose songs forged a new sound for the Arab world and whose plays leveled biting critiques of his country's corrupted politics, died on Saturday in Lebanon after a long illness. He was 69. His death was reported by Lebanon's government-run National News Agency. Since Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, from which it has never fully recovered, generations of Lebanese have grown up learning Mr. Rahbani's Arab-meets-Western songs by heart and quoting his satirical plays, such as 'A Long American Film' and 'What About Tomorrow?' Those who came of age during the war, like Mr. Rahbani, saw in his pensive, sardonic lyrics the brutalities and contradictions of their tiny country on the Eastern Mediterranean as it tore itself apart. He remained beloved by Lebanese who grew up later, in the war's long shadow, when sectarian divides, corruption and economic malaise came to haunt Lebanese life. Mr. Rahbani came from Lebanese music royalty. His mother, Fayrouz, is a living icon, considered one of the Arab world's greatest singers. His father, Assi Rahbani, was a pioneering composer, who, with his brother Mansour, wrote many of Fayrouz's songs. After his father's death, Ziad Rahbani later assumed the mantle of Fayrouz's chief composer, shifting her style late in her career. In her earlier music, Fayrouz and the Rahbani brothers cast a golden-hued, nostalgic spell, weaving an idyllic vision of life in Lebanon's mountain villages in the prosperous days before war, displacement and upheaval tore the Middle East apart. Ziad Rahbani's compositions for his mother and others were a departure in style and substance. In albums like 'Houdou Nisbi' and 'Abu Ali,' he blended the quarter tones and instruments of traditional Arab music with Western-style jazz and funk, once describing his music to an interviewer as 'Oriental jazz,' or 'something like a hamburger that tastes of falafel.' Yet while he admired Western musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he said, his music was Lebanese. It was music that spoke to Lebanon's distinctive position as an Arab society that embraced Europe and the West. Unlike his mother's earlier work, his songs hewed closer to the reality Lebanon's people lived. 'He left the so-called image of a unified Lebanon or the state of an ideal homeland for the state of a real, divided and fragmented Lebanon,' said Jad Ghosn, a journalist and filmmaker who made a 2019 documentary about Mr. Rahbani. 'He came after Fayrouz to say, 'Enough with the romantic art and enter into realistic art with jazz, contemporary music and realistic poetry.'' The ethereal Fayrouz floated above politics, a difficult feat in a country where most people are identified, and divided, for life by their religious and ethnic backgrounds. But her son Ziad was avowedly political, though not in the way his Greek Orthodox Christian identity might have predicted. An avowed Communist, Mr. Rahbani long supported the Palestinian quest for rights and statehood. His ideas took shape, he said, after right-wing Christian militiamen besieged and massacred Palestinians in Lebanon's Tal el-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976, early in the civil war. He lived with his parents across from the camp during the 53-day siege, and he later told an interviewer that he had surreptitiously recorded meetings between Syrian intelligence officers and right-wing Christian officials that took place at his parents' house so he could report them to pro-Palestinian groups. Because he 'could not bear the situation,' he later told an interviewer, he decided to move to Muslim-dominated West Beirut and leave the family home in Christian-dominated East Beirut, where his pro-Palestinian stance made him unwelcome. Ziad Rahbani was born in 1965 and grew up in Antelias, a coastal town north of Beirut. He began composing when he was around 7 years old, Mr. Ghosn said. By the time he was a teenager, he had already launched a career as a songwriter and musician. The plays he wrote starting in his teens became famous for their sardonic takes on Lebanese politics and society, with humor dark as ink. In 'What About Tomorrow?' (or 'Belnesba Libokra Shou?' in Arabic), which Mr. Rahbani wrote, directed and starred in, in 1978, when he was 22, he depicted a couple struggling to run a bar in the trendy Hamra neighborhood of Beirut. A grainy collage of footage taken during performances of the play was released in 2016 as a film, breaking box-office records in a Lebanon still struggling with many of the same roadblocks. 'They say tomorrow will be better, but what about today?' one character says, one of a number of Rahbani quotes that circulated among Lebanese on social media on Saturday after his death. Lebanese politicians across the political spectrum paid tribute to Mr. Rahbani on Saturday. President Joseph Aoun called him 'a living conscience, a rebellious voice against injustice and an honest mirror for those who suffered and were marginalized,' adding, 'He wrote about people's pain and played on the strings of truth, without ambiguity.' Yet many Lebanese social media users pointed out that such authority figures were exactly the type Mr. Rahbani spent his career skewering. Later in life, Mr. Rahbani openly aligned himself with the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, celebrating the 2006 war with Israel in which the Iranian-backed militia fought the much better-armed Israelis to a draw. He also voiced support for former President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the dictator who brutally repressed his own people during Syria's civil war, which began in 2011 and ended with Mr. al-Assad's overthrow in December. Such attitudes alienated some fans. But Mr. Rahbani was growing more bitter and alienated himself, despairing of Lebanon's prospects and increasingly socially isolated as he grew older. He had stopped answering most calls, Mr. Ghosn said, and had developed a liver condition. Besides his mother, Fayrouz, he is survived by a brother, Haly, and a sister, Rima.
