From "Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations/The singer, who died on Thursday at 78, spent decades in the spotlight exercising a very specific and subversive power" (NYT).
You can, like me, download the entire album — "She Walks in Beauty" — here, on Spotify.
By the way, my favorite episode of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast is the one about "Lady of Shalott."
Do you listen to poetry on Spotify? Any recommendations? I was just enjoying "The Best Cigarette" yesterday. Check out "Nostalgia."
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14 comments:
It's easier to upend expectations if you're a woman.
She did a nice job with "Ozymandias" -- an all time favorite. My mother read it to me when I was very young --5? -- and it stayed with me ever since.
RIP, Marianne.
So "upended" is the word of the day? Should it not be "up-ended," just to make things clearer?
Why is "Unending expectations" and Being "Subversive" a good thing? It seems to me thats all artists have been doing for 40-60 years. At some point you have to start producing something thats good, true, and beautiful. And that stands on its own. As opposed to "subverting expectations".
At least they didn't praise her as "dark and gritty".
I'm making a general comment, because I have no idea who this woman is/was , but that's how Pop music is. The few great ones live on, everyone else is remember by the Generation that liked them. And then its gone. Replaced by new pop music speaking to a new Generation.
Her life cycle was much more attenuated than most, one of extremes. I admire her commitment to creating art, she was a genuine article and a creature of the edge. RIP.
As I said elsewhere, I'm just thinking what a JFK Jr. and Marianne Faithfull duet would sound like.
Considering that they are both dead, I’m guessing it would sound like The Sound of Silence.
Tennyson isn’t a Romantic poet. He’s a Victorian poet. The Lady of Shallot is an Anti-Romantic poem. Lancelot’s “she has a lovely face” trivializes the whole notion of Art or Poetrt as some kind of Saving Force
She's up there with Piaf and Billie Holiday. She could find the melody in misery. Given all the dislocations and wrong turns, she lived quite a long life. Perhaps there was some part of her that embraced life, but you'd never know it from her best songs..
Eager to escape the pigeonhole of being Mick Jagger’s beautiful girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull dropped out of her life of privilege and wound up a heroin addict on the London streets. In 1979, she resurfaced with her seventh studio album, the new wave-inflected Broken English. Her sweet and lovely lilt had disappeared, replaced by a gravelly snarl that was the permanent aftermath of an untreated case of bronchitis. It turns out that this was the voice she needed to unleash her innate powers; she spat sonic bombs in the title track, summoned her dark tribe in ‘Witches’ Song,' and eviscerated a cheating lover in ‘Why’d Ya Do It.’ But it’s in ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ that her masterful reading of a lyric really shines.
At the age of thirty-seven
She realised she'd never ride
Through Paris in a sports car
With the warm wind in her hair
So she let the phone keep ringing
As she sat there softly singing
Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised
In her daddy's easy chair
She probably did have the whole Paris experience. That sort of goes with being Mick Jagger's beautiful girlfriend.
It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch as tears go by
As part of the British Invasion she made a big impact on my teenage self. I copied her look as well as Jane Asher and Patty Boyd. Straight hair and bangs!
Sorry, but I prefer the sweet sixties version to the scarred, raspy one.
Loreena McKennitt does a lovely singing rendition of The Lady of Shallot.
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