Posts Tagged ‘tutti frutti’
“All that is solid melts into air”*…
The end of ‘The End of History’ arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter Pomerantsev described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, in the Russia of the 2000s, distinguishing between truth and lies became passé. In this world of enlightened, postmodern people, ‘everything is PR’.
Reality television has rendered obsolete the boundary between the fictional and the real. Truth is a constraint that has been overcome; ‘post-truth’ has been declared ‘word of the year.’ In Washington, the White House shamelessly defends its ‘alternative facts.’ At the beginning, American journalists were taken off-guard: they had been trained to confirm individual pieces of information, not to confront a brazen untethering from empirical reality. The New Yorker captured the desperation with a satire about the fact-checker who passed out from exhaustion after the Republican debate. He had to be hospitalized; apparently no one replaced him…
Postmodernism was conceived largely by the Left as a safeguard against totalizing ideologies. Yet today, it has been appropriated on behalf of an encroaching neo-totalitarianism of the Right. Is French literary theory to blame? And can a philosophy of dissent developed in communist eastern Europe offer an antidote?…
(Some of) the ironic roots of the situation that we’re in: “A pre-history of post-truth, East and West.”
* Karl Marx
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As we consult the Wayback Machine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955, at J & M Studio in New Orleans, that Richard Wayne Penniman– better known as Little Richard– recorded the song (that he co-wrote with Dorothy LaBostrie) that became his first hit: “Tutti Frutti.”
A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom!
Gross!…
Michael Gross, the art director of the National Lampoon in its 70s heyday and creator of the (in)famous work above, also created a parody issue of Print.
Read all about it in “The Cutting Humor of Michael Gross” in ImPrint…
[TotH to J.J. Sedelmaier]
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As we reach for the rubber cement, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that Richard Wayne Penniman– better known as Little Richard– recorded Tutti Frutti.” As History.com reports,
“Tutti frutti, good booty…” was the way the version went that Little Richard was accustomed to performing in his club act, and from there it got into lyrical territory that would demand censorship even by today’s standards. It was during a lunch break from his first-ever recording session that Little Richard went to the piano and banged that filthy tune out for producer Bumps Blackwell, who was extremely unhappy with the results of the session so far. As Blackwell would later tell it, “He hits that piano, dididididididididi…and starts to sing, ‘Awop-bop-a-Loo-Mop a-good Goddam…’ and I said ‘Wow! That’s what I want from you Richard. That’s a hit!'” But first, the song’s racy lyrics had to be reworked for there to be any chance of the song being deemed acceptable by the conservative American audience of the 1950s.
An aspiring local songwriter by the name of Dorothy La Bostrie was quickly summoned to the Dew Drop Inn [in New Orleans] to come up with new lyrics for the un-recordable original, and by the time they all returned from lunch, the “Tutti frutti, all rooty” with which we are now familiar was written down alongside lyrics about two gals named Sue and Daisy. In the last 15 minutes of that historic recording session on September 14, 1955, “Tutti Frutti” was recorded, and Little Richard’s claim to have been present at the birth of rock and roll was secured.
Plat du morte…
Readers can compare actual last meals (e.g., Adolf Eichmann declined a special meal, preferring a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine, of which he drank about half) with those depicted in novels and movies (e.g., John Coffey in The Green Mile: cornbread, meat loaf, mashed potatoes with gravy, okra, and peach cobbler)…
As we contemplate our own final orders, we might consider adding a little tutti frutti, as it was on this date in 1990 that the glorious Little Richard was honored with a start on the Hollywood Walk of fame…
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