5th Dimension – "Up, Up and Away" (1967)

We can sing a song

And sail along the silver sky

For we can fly! 

When Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon, he described his feat as “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

By contrast, the recent flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft might be described as one small step backwards for feminism and one giant ego trip for the six women – including pop megastar Katy Perry – who were aboard that rocket for the ten-minute round trip to “outer space.”

“Space is going to finally be glam,” Perry told Elle magazine before the flight.  “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut!” 

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One of Perry’s fellow passengers on the New Shepard was CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, who is notoriously afraid of flying but who overcame her fears through meditation and prayer.  “I’m so proud of me,” she crowed after returning to terra firma.   

King’s bestie Oprah Winfrey travelled to Texas to witness the New Shepard’s flight.  “We've been friends [for almost] 50 years . . .  and I've never been more proud of my friend than today,” Oprah said.  “This is bigger than just going to space. I mean, I think for her, who, anytime we're on a flight, she's in anybody's lap if there's the slightest bit of turbulence, as like real-world anxiety flying.  And this is overcoming a wall of fear, a barrier.  I think it's going to be cathartic in so many ways for her.”

BFFs Oprah and Gayle

After conquering her fear of flying, King is ready to tackle another of her phobias.  “I might now get my ears pierced,” she said after the flight.  “I’ve always been afraid.”

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Glamour magazine broke some really important news about the New Shepard mission:

All six women had blow-outs for the flight and were dressed in matching Blue Origin-branded jumpsuits that were cinched at the waist and included the option for a slight flare leg thanks to a slim zipper.  The skintight suits were made for the voyage by the fashion brand Monse, which took a 3D scan of each passenger’s body for the perfect fit.

“Simplicity was important, and comfort, and fit,” said one of designers of jumpsuits. “But we also wanted something that was a little dangerous, like a motocross outfit.  Or a ski suit.  Flattering and sexy.”

Lauren Sanchez – who is best known for being Jeff Bezos’s side piece before becoming his fiancée – told Glamour that she was would be wearing Skims under her jumpsuit.  Skims is the underwear line owned by Sanchez’s friend Kim Kardashian.  (Kim was unable to attend the launch, but Kris Jenner and Kim’s sister Khloe were there.)

We at 2 or 3 lines have been unable to confirm a report that Sanchez was chosen for the mission so that the effects of weightlessness on plastic surgery could be tested:

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It’s no surprise that “Up, Up and Away” won a record five Grammy awards in 1968 (including the big one – Record of the Year).

After all, it was written by Jimmy Webb, who gave us “Wichita Lineman” (which Bob Dylan famously said was the greatest song ever written) and “MacArthur Park” (which 2 or 3 lines famously said was the greatest song ever written).  

And it was recorded by the 5th Dimension – who were the ne plus ultra of pop vocal groups – backed up by drummer Hal Blaine, keyboardist Larry Knechtel, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, and other members of the legendary group of session musicians who became known as the “Wrecking Crew.”

Click here to listen to “Up, Up and Away.”

Click here if you want to buy that recording from Amazon.  But before you do, ask yourself if Jeff Bezos already has too much money.  

Katy Perry (ft. Snoop Dogg) – "California Gurls" (2010)

California girls, we’re unforgettable

Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top

Sun-kissed skin so hot, we’ll melt your popsicle

Here are the ten states that the folks at the Musicoholics website believe had the most impact on American popular music.  (Drum roll, please!)

10.  Minnesota

  9.  Illinois

  8.  Texas

  7.  Michigan

  6.  Mississippi

  5.  Tennessee

  4.  Georgia

  3.  Louisiana

  2.  California

  1.  New York

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2 or 3 lines thinks that Musicoholics ranked a few of those states too high.

One of those states is Minnesota, which was assigned the #10 ranking based almost entirely on the strength of Bob Dylan and Prince.  But two musicians are not enough to justify a spot in the Musicoholics top ten, especially when one of them is Prince.  (Sorry, but I never got Prince.)

Illinois was home to a lot of great jazz and blues musicians, but those aren’t my favorite musical genres – I’m more interested in pop, rock, and hip-hop.  Chicago and Cheap Trick are very good but I would say they are great – there are quite a few rock groups I would rank ahead of them.  And while Kanye West is truly a genius, you need more than one genius for a state to be ranked in the top ten.

The one, the only Kanye West

A lot of great blues musicians (including B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and especially Robert Johnson) came from Mississippi, but Musicoholics ranked that state #6 mostly because Elvis Presley spent the first 13 years of his life there.  I think Elvis is the most overrated American popular musician of all time, so I would drop Mississippi way down in the rankings.

Two of the states ranked in the top five by Musicoholics – Georgia and Louisiana – probably don’t belong there.  A lot of great rappers have come out of Atlanta, and Little Richard and Otis Redding were one-of-a-kind talents.  I’d rank Georgia in the top ten, but #4 is a little high.

Louisiana’s #3 ranking is even harder to defend.  New Orleans produced a lot of great music back in the day, but has been resting on its laurels for quite a few years – what have you done for me lately, New Orleans?  The greatest Louisiana musicians – e.g., Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis – are older than me, and I’m pretty old.

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That leaves five states standing.

I’m going to leave Tennessee right where Musicoholics put it – ranked fifth.  After all, Nashville is the center of the country music universe, and Memphis is almost as significant when it comes to R&B.  

I’d rank Texas ahead of Tennessee by a nose because Texas produced musical standouts in every musical genre – also, a lot of the great country and soul music to come out of Nashville and Memphis was recorded by artists from other states.

I would put Michigan at #3.  I’d like to rank it even higher because so many of my personal favorites – including the MC5, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the White Stripes – came from there.  Of course, Detroit was the home of Motown and its mind-boggling roster of recording greats.  

One possible Mt. Rushmore of Detroit musicians

But I don’t see how anyone can argue that New York and California don’t deserve the top two spots.

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I don’t agree with Musicoholics’ ranking of New York ahead of California.

My decision to rank California #1 comes not from my head, but from my heart – especially that part of my heart that hasn’t changed much at all since the sixties, when I was a teenager.  

If you had asked the teenaged me to choose between Los Angeles and New York City, I would have picked Los Angeles in a heartbeat.  

That choice would have been influenced by southern California’s natural beauty and balmy weather – also by the fact that the prospect of life in New York City was more than a little intimidating for a 16-year-old kid who had lived his whole life in Joplin, Missouri.  

But a lot of the appeal of California derived from music that came from there – the music of the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, Arthur Lee and Love . . . the list goes on and on.

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I was going to feature “California Girls” by the Beach Boys – the quintessential California pop group – but decided at the last minute to switch things up and go with Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.”

Katy Perry was born in Santa Barbara, and spent most of her formative years in California.  (Her parents were Pentecostal ministers who referred to deviled eggs as “angled eggs.”) 

Snoop Dogg, who contributed a couple of verses to “California Gurls,” is also a California native.

“California Gurls” was the first of four consecutive #1 singles that Perry released in 2010.  Each one of them went 8X platinum – meaning that each of them sold at least eight million copies.

But compared to “California Girls,” “California Gurls” is fool’s gold – or, more accurately, fool’s platinum.

Barbi Benton

“California Girls” is like an all-natural Playboy centerfold from the sixties – it’s the Barbi Benton of pop singles.

“California Gurls,” by contrast, is a little like a reality-show star who has had lip augmentation and breast implants – she looks good from a distance, but isn’t entirely convincing when you examine her more closely.

Click here to watch the oh-so-over-the-top official music video for “California Gurls.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Katy Perry (ft. Kanye West) – "E.T." (2011)

Kiss me, kiss me

Infect me with your loving

Fill me with your poison

I used to think that Katy Perry was a completely generic pop star – someone who came right off the teen-idol assembly line.

But Katy's got a little more going for her than I thought.  You don't sell 11 million albums and 81 million singles and get picked to headline a Super Bowl halftime show if you're completely devoid of talent and brains.

Katy is listed as at least a co-writer on most of her big hits.  Some people say she doesn't contribute that much to most of the songs she records, while others give her more credit than that for her songwriting.

Kanye West and Katy Perry

Of course, she's no Kanye West.  Once I saw that Yeezus had contributed to "E.T.," it was a no-brainer for me to feature their collaboration today. 

The following lines could have been written by no one other than Mr. Kim Kardashian:

Tell me what's next – alien sex?

Ima disrobe you

Then Ima probe you

According to the Urban Dictionary, "Ima" – which is short for "I am going to" – is the only triple elision in the English language.  ("I am going to" = "I'm going to" = "I'm gonna" = "Ima.")

Do these lines from Kanye's "E.T." verse remind you of anything?

I know a bar out in Mars

When they driving spaceships

Instead of cars

How about these lines from Blondie's 1980 hit, "Rapture"?

'Cause the man from Mars 

Is through with cars

He's eatin' bars

This post is scheduled to appear at precisely 6:30 pm – which is the official start time for Super Bowl XLIX.  (I'm rooting for the Patriots because I think Tom Brady is dreamy!)

Here's "E.T.," which is the second-biggest-selling single of Katy Perry's career.  It  sold five million digital copies in 2011 and spent five weeks as the #1 song on the Billboard "Hot 100" chart:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Bonnie McKee -- "American Girl" (2013)

I am an American girl!

Hot-blooded and I'm ready to go!

I'm loving taking over the world!

Bonnie McKee is an American girl, and she really, really wants to take over the world -- to be precise, the world of pop music.

Bonnie was a 15-year-old singer/songwriter living in Seattle when a friend got her EP to a popular Los Angeles DJ, who started playing one of her songs regularly on his morning drive-time show.  

That sparked a record label bidding war.  After signing with Reprise Records when she was just 16, Bonnie moved to Los Angeles and started work on an album.

Bonnie McKee

But things didn't go exactly to plan.  That album wasn't released until 2004 -- Bonnie was 20 by that time -- and it didn't chart.  Her record company dropped her.

Bonnie had to get a job working in a vintage clothing store.  One day, she met another broke singer-songwriter, Katy Hudson, who had recently changed her name to Katy Perry.  The two hit it off, and started to hang out together.

Fast forward a few years.  Katy Perry had become a superdupermegastar pop singer.  Bonnie McKee hadn't, but she was a hugely successful pop song writer -- the co-writer of no less than nine #1 singles.

Bonnie and Katy -- BFF!

McKee is now one of the stable of several dozen songwriters and record producers who work for Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald's publishing company, Prescription Songs.  Gottwald, who was recently profiled in the New Yorker, has produced hits for Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Ke$ha, Kelly Clarkson, and the pop music train wreck du jour, Miley Cyrus.  (That's right -- we have Gottwald to thank for Miley's "Wrecking Ball.")

But Bonnie doesn't want to be just a songwriter -- she wants to be a pop star in her own right.  So she's working on a new album, which is scheduled to be released next spring.  

The lead single from that planned album is "American Girl," which was released last summer.  But "American Girl" made it only to #87 on the Billboard "Hot 100," despite the fact that it sounds a lot like a Katy Perry song.  (That's not surprising since Bonnie has co-written no fewer than five of Perry's #1 singles, including "California Gurls" and "Teenage Dream.")

Superdupermegastar record producer
Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald

Actually it may sound more like a Ke$ha song or a Britney Spears song than a Katy Perry song.  Did it fail because it sounds so generic?

I don't see how that can be the explanation, because the hits by those artists all sound totally generic as well.  

The public's lack of enthusiasm for "American Girl" has led to speculation that Bonnie's album will never see the light of day.  Bonnie recently released a second song from the planned album -- it's titled "Sleepwalker" -- but she has said that it's not an official single.  Rather, it's an "in-between-gle" that's intended to give her fans something to tide them over until the next official single is released.  (Sounds like someone is trying to lower expectations.) 

So why is Katy Perry a big star and Bonnie McKee isn't?  I have no idea, but I'm guessing that it has to do more with luck than anything else.

Anyway, that's the wrong question.  Ask yourself not why Katy Perry is a big star and Bonnie McKee isn't.  Ask yourself instead why Katy Perry (and Ke$ha and Britney and Miley and the whole kit and caboodle of 'em) are big stars.  That's the question you should be asking.

I would suggest to Bonnie McKee that if she's going to become a pop superstar, she'd better do it soon -- because she'll turn 30 in a couple of months, and it's going to become harder and harder for her to pull off music videos where she dresses like a slutty 17-year-old and sings about sitting on the curb at the Seven-Eleven drinking spiked Slurpees and bragging to her slutty friends "No, I don't listen to mommy."

Sure, Katy Perry is almost as old as Bonnie, and she's doing just fine.  But Katy has a five-year-plus head start on Bonnie -- Katy's first hit album was released in 2008.

And Miley Cyrus is breathing down both their necks.  Ms. Cyrus -- did you know her real name is Destiny Hope Cyrus? -- is not quite 21.  (Of course, she's 21 going on a very slutty 30.)

So it's probably time for Bonnie McKee to lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way -- but which I mean go back to being an anonymous (although well-compensated) songwriter, cranking out hit singles for others with the help of your fellow Prescription Records assembly-line workers.  That's good billable work, as we lawyers are won't to say.

Here's "American Girl":



Here's a lip-dub video of "American Girl" that features a whole bunch of celebrities, including Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Macklemore, Kiss, Joan Rivers, and -- last and almost certainly least -- George Takei (Star Trek's Mr. Sulu):

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Katy Perry -- "Firework" (2010)

You don't have to feel like a waste of space

You're original, cannot be replaced

If you only knew what the future holds

After a hurricane comes a rainbow . . .

I promised myself that I would never feature a Katy Perry song on 2 or 3 lines.  

She always seemed like the ultimate generic pop star to me -- a creation of the star-making machinery behind most pop songs (to paraphrase Joni Mitchell).

What changed my mind?  A video that was shot in and around the post-tornado Joplin High School, which features not only Katy Perry's "Firework" but also the Black Eyed Peas hit, "Let's Get It Started."

The new Joplin High School

This video is no amateur production.  I understand it was shot by Simon Jayes, who is a big-time Hollywood camera operator.  (His credits include the latest James Bond movie, the latest Indiana Jones movie, and the latest Bruce Willis Die Hard movie.)  It's about eight minutes long, with no cuts, and the camera never stops moving.

To be honest, the video starts off a little slow.  The lip-dubbing itself is not particularly convincing.

From the video

But the Joplin High School students who are featured in the video are just wonderful, individually and collectively.  There are so many appealing kids here -- I have a 17-year-old son, and maybe the high schoolers in the video remind me of my son and his friends.  Whatever the reason, I thought it was great -- especially the second half, which features the Katy Perry song.

It's not a great song -- like its singer, it's a very professional piece of work but pretty generic.  But I'm happily suspending my critical judgment for the night.  The song is perfect for this video and for these kids.  

About five minutes into the video, you'll see a student named Quinton Anderson appear.  (He's wearing a baseball cap and a number 6 football jersey.)

If you're from Joplin, you know all about Quinton Anderson.  But if you don't know his story, I'll summarize it.

Governor Jay Nixon with Quinton Anderson

Quinton and his family lived a few blocks from St. John's Hospital, near where the tornado that hit Joplin on May 22 of this year first touched down.  

Quinton's parents were among the 162 residents of Joplin whose died as a result of the tornado.  He woke up in a hospital in Springfield with a fractured skull, three fractured vertebrae, and a long list of other injuries.  He spent 5 1/2 weeks in the hospital, and had to learn to walk again.

Here's a short video featuring Quinton, who will carry the physical and emotional scars from the tornado for the rest of his life.  But it's clear from the video and from this article about him that those scars will not define him.  In the words of our song, he's an original, and cannot be replaced:

To commemorate the six-month anniversary of the Joplin tornado, here's the Joplin High School lip-dub video.  It disappeared for a couple of weeks after I first saw it -- yes, the copyright Nazis had ordered Youtube to take it down -- but maybe someone sent a six-pack of the milk of human kindness to the soulless bastards in the record company's legal department.  Or maybe it will disappear again -- but hopefully not until after you have a chance to watch it:

Here's a link you can use to buy "Firework" from Amazon.  But if the video has been taken down again, please do not send a penny to Katy Perry's record company.