St. Vincent – "Slow Disco (Piano Version)" (2017)

I’m so glad I came

But I can’t wait to leave

The soundtrack for the fourth season of the FX television series The Bear features two variants of St. Vincent’s “Slow Disco,” which was released in 2017 on her Masseduction album.

The 2000-odd records that I’ve featured on my wildly successful little blog include representatives of just about every musical genre you can think of – pop, rock, jazz, country, blues, punk, metal, hip-hop, Broadway, etc.  But the typical 2 or 3 lines post features a record that I first heard on the radio in the sixties or seventies.  

St. Vincent’s Masseduction album

I’m still listening to that music half a century later.  Prospecting for worthwhile new music is hard work, and I’ve always been pretty lazy.  It’s soooo much easier to just listen to the old familiar stuff.

If I do feature a newer record on 2 or 3 lines, there’s a good chance that I  became acquainted with it because it was on the soundtrack of a TV series I watched – for example, The Bear.

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I’ve heard of the artist known as St. Vincent – her real name is Annie Clark – but I don’t think I had ever heard her music before watching the third episode of the fourth season of The Bear a few days ago.

St. Vincent on stage

St. Vincent is kind of a big deal.  Three of her albums have won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album – tying Beck and the White Stripes for the most wins in that category – and the critics have gone gaga over her.  (Masseduction was described as “an album that defies explanation and critique, rendering the critic a dead weight in the dust of its ever-accelerating sucker-punch of ideas,” “nothing less than an absolutely towering achievement,” and “a genuine masterpiece: complex, funny, sexy, bleak, uplifting, inspiring and enthralling from start to finish.”)

Of course, St. Vincent is not even close to being the biggest recording artist whose music I know next to nothing about.  That title probably belongs to either Taylor Swift (who is a good friend of St. Vincent’s) or Phish.

A number of years ago, I featured one Taylor Swift record on 2 or 3 lines – but my knowledge of her music is very limited.  (Honestly, my five-year-old granddaughter would be a better source for info about Tay Tay’s records than I would be.)

But I know infinitely more about Swift’s music than I know about Phish’s oeuvre.  I think it would be impossible to know any less about Phish than I do because I’ve never heard a single note of Phish’s music – hard to believe, but true.

The New Yorker recently ran a long piece about Phish that called into question all my preconceived notions about that group.  So I’m going to add “Phish Radio” – Sirius/XM channel 29 – to my car’s presets and dive in.  I’ll let you know how that goes in a future 2 or 3 lines.

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I occasionally get obsessed with a record that doesn’t fit into any of my usual categories.

I’m talking about records like “Guided By Angels” by Amyl and the Sniffers, “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg, or “Charleston Girl” by Tyler Childers.

But I’m mostly talking about “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star, a slowcore/dream pop masterpiece that has a curare-like effect on me whenever I allow myself to listen to it.

“Slow Disco (Piano Version)” may become my new “Fade Into You.”  Time will tell, but it’s off to a good start. 

Click here to listen to “Slow Disco (Piano Version),” which is featured in the soundtrack of episode three of season four of The Bear.

Click here to listen to just the piano part of “Slow Disco (Piano Version).”  

Click here to buy “Slow Disco (Piano Version)” from Amazon.

James Brown – "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" (1966)

Man made the cars to take us over the road

Man made the train to carry the heavy load ...

This is a man's, man's, man's world

Every so often, 2 or 3 lines feels compelled to write a long, involved “think” piece on some complicated and controversial topic.

Whenever 2 or 3 lines does this, things never turn out well – especially when the complicated and controversial topic involves women.

But 2 or 3 lines never learns.  Hence, today’s post.

My choice of the 1966 James Brown hit, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” as the featured song for today’s post proves just what a well-developed sense of irony I have.  Because it is most definitely NOT a man’s man’s man’s world fifty years later.

To wit:

– Only 49% of college-age Americans are female.  But women are now receiving some 60% of all degrees granted by American colleges and universities.  (When men constituted 60% of the college population, that was viewed – and rightfully so – as a clear indication that women weren’t being treated as equals.  But have you heard any expressions of concern about the fact that the tables have turned and 60% of new college graduates are female?)   

– Women now dominate the service professions, while industries that have a higher proportion of male employees – like construction and manufacturing – are shrinking.  In fact, three-quarters of the eight million jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008-09 were lost by males. 

– The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964.  And the gap is growing, too: ten million more females than males voted in 2012.  (If you women out there don’t like the last half-dozen or so Presidents we’ve elected, you have only yourselves to blame.)

– Within a few months, women will likely be leading the governments of the United States, Britain, and Germany – the three largest Western economies.  (This is good news for American, British, and German males: it won't be our fault when things go FUBAR, which things always do sooner or later.)

In 2010, an Atlantic magazine cover story famously declared “The End of Men.”  

Perhaps the most startling fact noted in that story was how rapidly the traditional gender preferences of prospective parents around the world were changing.  According to that article, American parents who utilized a new sperm-selecting technology that enabled them to choose whether they wanted a boy or a girl were choosing to have a girl 75 percent of the time.  

Even feminists are realizing the pendulum has swung too far.

The Washington Post recently featured a column by Cathy Young, an “equity feminist” (that’s the best kind), who decried male-bashing:

[A] lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior: the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit.  Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity.  Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.

For example, it is now common for women to complain about “manterrupting,” a neologism that is used to describe the supposedly common male practice of interrupting female speakers in business meetings rather than listening to what women have to say.

Kanye West "manterrupting" Taylor Swift

Here’s what a Time magazine columnist had to say about “manterrupting”:

[A]sk any woman in the working world and we all recognize the phenomenon.  We speak up in a meeting, only to hear a man’s voice chime in louder.  We pitch an idea, perhaps too uncertainly – only to have a dude repeat it with authority.  We may possess the skill, but he has the right vocal cords – which means we shut up, losing our confidence (or worse, the credit for the work).

But there’s a teeny-weeny problem with all the talk about “manterrupting.”  

While a 2014 study confirmed that male listeners interrupted female speakers more frequently than they interrupted male speakers, that same study found that female listeners interrupted female speakers even more often than male listeners did.  

Maybe “manterrupting” should be “femterrupting”?

More from Cathy Young’s Post column:  

Things have gotten to a point where casual low-level male-bashing is a constant white noise in the hip progressive online media.  Take a recent [online] piece titled, “Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms.”  The actual study found something very different: that both men and women overwhelmingly think someone described as “creepy” is more likely to be male. 

PSYCHOLOGY

Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms

Imagine if a study had found that most people think that someone who is described as “cheap” is more likely to be a Jew.  Can you imagine a story reporting on the findings of that study being headlined, “Jews Are Cheap, New Study Confirms”?

What’s bad for the goose is perfectly OK for the gander when it comes to misogyny (bad!) vs. misandry (not a problem)  at least in the eyes of those feminists who view sexism as a one-way street.  They believe that gender-based prejudice isn’t sexism unless it’s directed against the oppressed and disadvantaged – i.e., females.  Since males hold the power in our society, they’re fair game.

Except for the fact that males don’t really hold the power any more.  Remember: ten million more women than men voted in the 2012 presidential election.  

That trend may sound like a bad thing for men, but it does offer one big advantage for males.  We’ll explain what that advantage is in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” was recorded back when males did hold the power in our society.

Officially, the song was co-written by James Brown and his girlfriend Betty Jean Newsome.  Brown later said she had nothing to do with the song, while Newsome claimed just the opposite and took the “Godfather of Soul” to court – unsuccessfully.

Betty Jean Newsome in 2007

The Village Voice published a long and sordid story about the Brown-Newsome relationship and the squabbling over who deserved credit for writing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in 2007.  Click here to read it.

Here’s my favorite paragraph from that article:

[Newsome] says Brown asked her to have a baby with him, but she rebuffed him, saying, "I ain't gonna be having one of your little monkey babies."  The Famous Flames, Newsome recalls, marveled at the fact that James didn't kill her right then and there.

Here’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Taylor Swift -- "You Belong with Me" (2009)

She wears short skirts

I wear T-shirts

She's cheer captain

And I'm on the bleachers

Tout le Cape Cod was abuzz a year ago when pop songstress Taylor Swift plunked down $4.9 million to buy a house next door to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.  

At the time, Miss Swift -- then 22 years old -- was smitten with Conor Kennedy, one of Robert F. Kennedy's 34 grandchildren, who had just turned 18.

Taylor Swift PDA'ing with Conor Kennedy

Taylor has had a number of older boyfriends, including singer John Mayer (she was 19, he was 34) and actor Jake Gyllenhaal (she was 20, he was 30).  Those relationships didn't turn out so well, so the "country songbird" turned to the much younger "Kennedy boy toy" (shout-out to the New York Daily News), who was a 17-year-old high-school student when they started dating.

Several years ago, a single friend of mine introduced me to the "half-your-age-plus-seven" dating rule, which says that a man should not date a woman who is younger than half his age plus seven years.  

John Mayer clearly violated this rule -- half his age at the time he and Taylor were a couple (34) plus seven is 17 plus seven, or 24, which is significantly older than her age (19).  

Gyllenhaal also broke this unwritten rule -- half his age (30) plus seven is 22, and Taylor was 20 when they were romantically involved.  (Gyllenhaal probably broke a lot of other unwritten rules as well.)

Taylor Swift's Cape Cod house

I'm not sure is this rule applies when the woman is the elder member of a couple.  Assuming that it does, Taylor broke it when she got together with Conor Kennedy:  she was 22 and he was 17, and half of 22 plus seven is 18.  On the other hand, he was very close to turning 18.  So if we call him 17 3/4 and round up, she's fine.  Plus Taylor reportedly cleared the whole thing with Conor's grandmother, Ethel Kennedy.

I don't know anything about Conor Kennedy, but let's hope the apple falls a little further from the tree that is his father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

RFK Jr.

The elder Kennedy married his first wife in 1982, just a year before he was arrested for heroin possession at a South Dakota airport.  (His younger brother, David, began using heroin while he was still in prep school, and died in 1984 after overdosing on cocaine and prescription medications.)  

Bobby Jr. and Mary Richardson met at a New York City art gallery in 1993.  He divorced his first wife in the spring of 1994, and married Mary three weeks later.  She was six months' pregnant with Conor at the time. 

Kennedy filed for divorce from Mary Richardson in 2010.  Two years later, Mary hung herself.  

Mary Richardson Kennedy

From the New York Post:

In its aftermath, her friends still ponder when and why she made her fatal decision. “She’d been thinking about it,” an insider muses, “practicing. The day that she died . . . there was a coil of rope lying on her bed . . . and, under the covers, a bandana, showing how to tie major nautical knots—including a hangman’s noose. Tying the perfect knot would have appealed to Mary’s extreme sense of order.”

Mary was apparently devastated when Bobby's divorce affidavit was leaked to the press:

Though much has been written, and more whispered, about Richardson’s troubling behavior during her final months, the publication of Kennedy’s 2011 divorce affidavit . . . seemed particularly unsparing to many.  Portraying Bobby as the alarmed family man, fleeing to protect himself and his children from their depressed, alcoholic, physically abusive, suicidal mother, the document infuriated Richardson’s family, who publicly dismissed his “vindictive lies, proof of the unbelievable emotional and psychological abuse that Mary endured during the last years of her life, and now in death.”

Cheryl Hines and Robert Kennedy Jr.

She reportedly held out hope for a reconciliation with Kennedy, who was very publicly involved with Curb Your Enthusiasm star, Cheryl Hines:

“Mary was brainwashed,” adds another Richardson friend, “believing everything that Bobby said. And he was leading her on.  He might have been with Cheryl [Hines, his girlfriend during Richardson’s final years], but he was still giving Mary enough encouragement to stay hopeful . . . Bobby did everything he could to demean and hurt Mary.”

Some accused Cheryl of contributing to Mary's distraught state of mind by "flaunting" her relationship with Kennedy.  Here's a photo of Bobby and Cheryl "getting frisky" on the beach at the Kennedy compound a few months after Mary's suicide:

It's all very sordid stuff, like so much of the Kennedy clan's history.  Taylor Swift's dating a 17-year-old high-school student is small potatoes when compared to the sordid events that resulted in his mother's suicide -- not to mention the even more sordid tale of Conor's great-uncle, Teddy Kennedy, and the unfortunate Mary Jo Kopechne.  

One final note about Bobby Kennedy, Jr.: he is a licensed master falconer, and a former president of the New York State Falconer's Association.  In Kennedy's words:

Since I was 11 years old, I always loved raptors. I could look up on the old post office building in Washington, D.C., and there was a pair of Eastman and Adams peregrines nesting up there, which are the most spectacular predatory bird that we have in this country. . . . It was the most beautiful subspecies of the peregrine falcon, and I could watch these birds come down Pennsylvania Avenue from top of the post office at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40 feet above the heads of the pedestrians, and then fly back to the cupola of the post office.  And to me, something like that was as exciting as visiting my uncle at the White House. But that's a site that my children will never see.

Kennedy and friend observe
"Take Your Falcon to Work Day"

RFK Jr. claims deep admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, because he "understood the way God communicates to us most forcefully is through the fishes and the birds and the trees, and that it is a sin to destroy those things."  Unless the birds are pigeons, of course -- Kennedy gets a real kick watching pigeons getting nailed by his beloved falcons.

Back to Taylor Swift and her 4400-plus square-foot Cape Cod house.  She and Conor Kennedy broke up a few weeks after she bought it in August 2012, and she must have decided that they were never ever getting back together: she immediately put the house on the market, and it sold a few months later for almost a million bucks more than she paid for it.

Taylor Swift's Rhode Island mansion

In May 2013, Swift rolled that cash and several million more into the purchase of a spectacular waterfront mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.  That property had an asking price of $24 million, but Swift haggled the owners down to less than $18 million -- a real bargain.  

I'm guessing that Conor Kennedy broke up with Taylor because he was embarrassed by the granny-panty bikinis she wore.  Here's one example:

Here's another:

She muist have a whole closetful of the awful things:

"You Belong with Me" was released as a single in 2009.  It made it to number one on the Billboard "Country Songs" chart, and reached number two on the Billboard "Hot 100."  The song that kept Taylor from getting to number one on the pop chart was "I Gotta Feeling," by the Black Eyes Peas. 

Coincidentally -- or perhaps not so coincidentally -- the two songs were mashed up by the Super Mash Bros. on the "M.A.T.Z.O." track of their Mile(y) High Club album:

The song's narrator is a girl-next-door type.  She has a crush on a boy who is dating a high-maintenance cheerleader -- a real b*ll-buster -- and dreams of the day when he will pull his head out of his ass and realize that she is the girl he belongs with.

The music video features Swift as both the shy, nerdy protagonist (who wears huge glasses, of course) and the bitchy villainess.  (Taylor dons a brunette wig for that part.)

Good Taylor, bad Taylor

Spoiler alert:  the video has a happy ending.

When "You Belong with Me" won the 2009 MTV Video Music Award for best female video, Kanye West famously interrupted Swift's acceptance speech and told the crowd that Beyoncé deserved the award for her "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" video.

Kanye taking the microphone away from Taylor

West's rudeness got a lot of attention, all of it unfavorable -- even President Obama weighed in, calling Kanye a "jackass" in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter.

To read what Songfacts has to say about this song, click here.  

Here's "You Belong with Me":

Click here to order the song from Amazon: