Music Catch-up (What I'm Listening To): Dancing with the Stars, Janet Jackson, The Oscars 2009, Evita, and a Few Other Favorites

I love music, and every month, I’m always working on my iPod (and now Google Play) transferring music, deleting some (but not off the cloud), adding some others, and listening to them in the car on my CDs, or at work on my iPod, along with the radio.  Out of all the music I worked on this particular month, either downloading or adding from my older CD’s, these are the ones I enjoyed the most this time:

1. Dancing with the Stars – Fall 2013

I love making playlists, and often, I make them based off of the TV shows I’m watching.  I’ve done this with American Idol, The Sing-Off, The Oscars, So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars.  My most recent playlist of this type was from the 2013 fall season of Dancing with the Stars, in which I pick my favorite songs they used from the season (that I hadn’t used from a previous season, so no repeats).  That means there is a LOT of variety, as the songs can be from any time or place, whether I’ve heard them before or not.  Here are the songs I enjoyed the most from this season:

Popular Song – Mika & Ariana Grande

I’m So Excited – The Pointer Sisters

Apologize – OneRepublic & Timbaland

El Tango de Roxanne – Ewan McGregor & the cast of Moulin Rouge

Symphony No. 5 – Beethoven (I chose the version by the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra)

Come Fly with Me – (I chose the version by John Stevens of American Idol season 3)

Bang Bang – will.i.am (from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby)

Sing with a Swing (Raf Marchesini Radio Edit) – DKS

Love Me Again – John Newman (but I chose Will Champlin’s version from The Voice)

Maria (Pablo Flores Spanglish Radio Edit) – Ricky Martin

She’s Always a Woman – Billy Joel

Skyfall (from Skyfall) – ADELE

Blue Danube (On the Beautiful Danube) – Strauss (by London Philharmonic Orchestra)

Mad World (from Donnie Darko) – Michael Andrews & Gary Jules

Welcome to Burlesque (from Burlesque) – Cher

The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?) – Ylvis

Sparkling Diamonds – Nicole Kidman and the cast of Moulin Rouge

Weird Science (from Weird Science)– Oingo Boingo

I Wan’na Be Like You (from The Jungle Book) – new by Robbie Williams & Olly Murs

Try a Little Tenderness – Otis Redding (I chose the Glee cast version)

What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong

2. Gary’s Grab Bag

Even with all of these playlists I like to do, I often hear old or new music on the radio and think, “Man, I wish I had that one!  I love that song!”  This happens more with older music, particularly from the eighties.  So I started making this playlist with songs I’ve always wanted, such as “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top, “Venus” by Bananarama, “I Feel For You” by Chaka Khan, and “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)” by Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer.  There’s a few new ones in there as well, including one with explicit lyrics – “You Fckn Did It” by Jason Mraz - and “Can You Do This” by Aloe Blacc that didn’t quite make it onto my Dancing with the Stars Fall 2013 playlist.

3. Janet Jackson Jams

I don’t like all Janet Jackson’s music, but like her late brother, she’s got some great jams, heavily weighted towards her earlier hits.  So I created a playlist of what I considered to be her best “jams”.  Her Design of a Decade: 1986-1996 CD contains most of them, weighted heavily on her Control and Rhythm Nation CDs, from “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Nasty” to “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” and “Alright”.  These songs comprise most of the first CD from her two CD set Number Ones, but I also included a smattering of interesting grooves from her later period, such as “If”, “Scream” (with her brother Michael), and “The Best Things in Life are Free” (with Luthor Vandross).  On a side note, when I make these playlists, I always burn them to CD and look for cool pictures to use for covers and track listings.  While looking through Janet Jackson Google images, I noticed many of her images were nearly pornographic, and I also noticed that the innocent girl from Good Times, who once sang “Got my own life / I wanna make my own decisions” and “Let’s wait awhile / Before we go too far” eventually started singing songs with lyrics like “Ooh, my body’s yours (spank that) / Spank that back door (like that) / Drive me like a Porsche (yea)” and “If you feel like I do, you can get it tonight / But first you gotta make me say / Ooooooh” and  “Gotta take him home / When I get him alone / I’ll make him scream and moan / He won’t wanna stop.”  I like some of her musical grooves, in her less pornographic songs, but on some of these later ones, she doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to misinterpret her sexual desires, especially with some of her image galleries, which, true to form these days among most pop stars, objectifies her. 

4. Best of Oscars 2009

I love making these Oscar playlists.  This one features such varying music as “You’re Heart is as Black as Night” by Melody Gardot, from the film An Education, the wonderful instrumental track “Discombobulate” by Hans Zimmer, from the Sherlock Holmes Soundtrack, “Gone, Gone, Gone” by Colin Farrell from Crazy Heart, the French track “Loin de Paname” by Nora Arnezeder from Paris 36, and the song “Unusual Way” from the musical Nine, which was sung by Nicole Kidman in the movie, but I was just as impressed by Griffith Frank’s rendition on the soundtrack album, so that’s the version I downloaded.  A few other enjoyable tracks from some of these same films include “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham, “Cinema Italiano” by Kate Hudson, and “Smoke Without Fire” by Duffy.  Those are just eight of the 22 tracks from that years’ films that were nominated for Best Song, Best Score, Best Picture, or that won other awards. 

5. Evita

It’s sometimes hard to believe this movie is already almost 20 years old, until you look at Madonna these days, trying to act like she’s still the young ingénue she was back in the mid 80’s.  She’s still shocking people, but in a different way than before.  She used to “push the envelope” with her immoral behavior, but now people are more disturbed by the fact that it’s a senior citizen is doing these kinds of things.  As far as motion picture musicals are concerned, Madonna will never be better than she was in this film.  It was the perfect vehicle for her.  In the hands of an expert director, the role was all one long music video.  She was able to sustain it throughout the movie, and we can just thank our lucky stars that Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t leave her any room to actually speak.  And aside from those musical interludes and cues, and compositions that are more dialogue set to music without the concept of a song, there are a few really good songs peppered throughout the production.  Both Madonna and Antonio Bandaras managed to do some expert work here, and I still love the pull this old Soundtrack out sometimes and run through it.  Highlights include “Oh What a Circus”, “Buenos Aires”, “Good Night and Thank You”, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, and “You Must Love Me”.