The ‘Song Birds’ Suck… Again
This reviewer recently had the unique misfortune of catching the early matinee performance of the ‘Song Birds’ at Third Street Elementary, expecting an uninspired but nevertheless professional performance. Make no mistake—though it sounds cute enough, this show was simply awful– there’s no musical precedent for how pretentiously nauseating these blaspheming 8 and 9 year olds were. Rife with aureate vocals and blatant performance gaffes, the ‘Song Birds’ showcase was an ultimately embarrassing forty minute ensemble of Jukebox Hits of the ‘70s complete with several so-called ‘soloists’ who couldn’t sing their way out of a kid-sized body bag. In fact, the most entertaining aspect of the entire show was the fat girl in the top left who scratched her crotch halfway through the third number.
Considering that the show was patently awful from start to finish, it’s difficult to pick which parts to highlight. Without a doubt, the most egregious bit was an extremely truncated version of the Three Dog Night classic Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog. After butchering the intro due to bad timing, they proceeded to belt out “Jeremiah was a bullfrog/He was a good friend of mine/he never understood a single word I said/and we all had a mighty fine time”. As if the sheer act of performing the song wasn’t insult enough, some anti-free-speech fascist decided to censor Three Dog Night’s reference to ‘wine’, which our White Lord Jesus himself was fond of drinking. The exclusion of alcoholic beverages from the program was even more onerous considering the inclusion of Little Richard’s loving tribute to anal sex ‘Tutti Frutti’ which was sung with uncharacteristic (and slightly disturbing) zeal. I silently prepared myself for the equally bad rewrite of Marvin Gaye ‘Let’s Get It On (Our Thinking Caps!!!)’
If Obie Benson hadn’t died of lung cancer last year, he surely would have put a shotgun in his mouth over the cover of The Four Tops’ ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ with the young man soloing “Come on, baby, reach out to me!” sounding like a Van Morrison with Down Syndrome. The trip-hop version of Dobie Gray’s Drift Away (or was that just the Uncle Kracker version?) was equally reprehensible, the troupe of singing bastards caterwauling off key to one of the finest couplets ever put to music. The only redeeming value of the concert was the middle-aged conductor, one Mrs. Pennywise Westmoreland, who gave near-seamless direction to this mostly apathetic group of ‘performers’ and should not be held accountable for the overall sound, something akin to Dylan’s 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue, had His Bobness undergone a vasectomy the morning of each show.
As a professional reviewer of serious art, I am incensed by the audacity and carelessness exhibited by this gaggle of god damned children who couldn’t muster one believable bit of musicality betwixt the sixty of them. Not since The Polyphonic Spree has there been an amelodic bunch of cunts so intent on destroying music. Nor in recent memory has there been a bigger group of self-important jackasses displaying such an outstanding lack of relevancy to the fragile times we live in.
If these children are any indication of the future of music, you better stockpile those Shakira and Mandy Moore records, because it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Your faithful reviewer,
Jamie Mayweather III, Esq.