Two extremely attractive women continued to flog their latest albums across Europe today, both performing on separate international editions of the hit talent show/soap opera the X Factor. Shakira went a little crazy on the German edition of the show, performing her hit “Loca”, while Rihanna gave Italy some love with a rendition of her smash “Only Girl (In The World)”.
Shockingly, RiRi’s performances was actually very good. For once in her life, the Bajan beauty didn’t walk around the stage like a lethargic zombie, occasionally picking up the pace of her usual lazy stroll until it was a skip or a brisk march. RiRi also enthusiastically took part in some of the choreography, twirling around the stage and interacting with her backup dancers. Vocally she was bearable, and even adequate during certain moments — not to mention that she looked absolutely gorgeous. It was easily the best “Only Girl” performance of the Loud era thus far, and if she keeps all her performances at this level then she should be able to shake off some of her critics that often point out her poor skills onstage.
Shakira, of course, was absolutely amazing, but she always is so there’s no surprises there.
Check out both performances below. Warning: Rihanna’s is slightly out of sync.
Rihanna-Diva.com // Rihanna performs “Only Girl” on X Factor Italia !
Throughout the years there have been certain love songs that have melted our hearts and made it into the list of greatest love songs of all time.
Love songs melt our hearts and make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. For the best love songs of all time, the website “Love to Know” has narrowed down the top 10 love songs and what makes them so special. For those who are getting married or just looking to create a CD of romantic songs, why not add some of the best to your list.
Top Love Songs
The top love songs of all time were song by some of the most cherished singers of all time, including the Beatles and Elvis Presley. These will forever be popular loves songs and will make a great addition to a romantic CD or wedding reception music.
God Only Knows by The Beach Boys: This song was labeled the greatest love song of all time by Entertainment Weekly. Additionally it was also ranked on the top 25 list by the Rolling stones.
Love Me Tender by Elvis Presley: This man had the perfect combination of looks and romance. He also sang some of the most romantic love songs of all time and this is one that stands out above many. The lyrics are very intimate and simply beautiful.
Let’s Stay Together by Al Green: This song is cherished so much for the simple fact that it speaks the truth about the ups and downs that relationships bring, but expresses that overall it’s love that keeps two people together. It’s a beautiful love song for a wedding, anniversary or romantic CD.
Natural Women by Aretha Franklin: Natural Women’s lyrics express the power of love and how beautifully natural it is. It’s great for those women looking to create a love song CD for a man or to play for their husband at a wedding or anniversary party.
Something by The Beatles: This is one of many Beatle’s best loves songs, as it expresses the feelings that a person in love feels, as to how it’s impossible for individuals to live without their soul-mates.
In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel: This song was recognized as one of the top best love songs of all time when it played in the move Say Anything. The move that plays this love song speaks truth about fighting to be with the one you love.
All I Want is You by U2: Although this song is somewhat sad and heartbreaking, it’s also one of the best love songs of all time due to the lyrics which speak about not wanting to allow anything to get in the way of being with the one you love.
Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers: This is one of the best old-fashioned love songs of all time. So, for those who like the most romantic songs that are classics, this is definitely one for individuals to add to their list.
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston: The title of this love song speaks for itself as one of the best love songs of all time. Anyone who has ever heard this song has most likely added it to their top 100 love songs list.
You’re the First, the Last, My Everything by Barry White: There is no doubt that this is one of the top greatest love songs of all time. It’s simply beautiful and tearfully romantic.
Don’t ask me to describe ringbang. The drummer of the group in the nightclub put it this way: “Take cadence and merengue, take soca and raggasoca, put them all together and, man, you get real Bajun ringbang.” All I can tell you is it rings and it bangs and it makes everybody jump and wave their arms. Modern Barbados is in its music, while old Barbados, British Barbados, is in its buildings. Nelson’s column in Bridgetown’s Trafalgar Square was there before the one in London and Anglican churches are everywhere.
The Landship and the Tuk Tuk band, half Bajun and half British, are a miracle of both.
TUK TUK
On a weekend afternoon in Speightstown I saw and heard the bizarre sights and sounds of the Landship. On a small piece of parkland were men in replica uniforms of the British navy and women dressed as British nurses, complete with Florence Nightingale hats. Something of a cross between friendly societies and dance clubs, they have existed on the island for 130 years and today one of the groups was performing at a music festival in front of a small group of locals and visitors.
They were founded by a returning Bajun who had served in the Royal Navy and who was nostalgic for its fellowship and discipline. The members do dance movements distantly related to sailor’s hornpipes and country dancing but any connection with the Petronella or the Dashing White Sergeant is mutated into fast arm-waving, hip-gyrating Caribbean action. They all have naval “ranks” and the instructions are called out by the Captain and his Lieutenants. There are no “Figure of Eights” here, but the lung-bursting frenzy of “Man Overboard,” “Full Steam Ahead” and “Clear the Decks”.
The Tuk Tuk band accompanies, with a bass drum and a kettledrum, supposedly reminiscent of the ship’s engine. The melody comes from a penny whistle, apparently a memory of being piped aboard, except that the whistler along with the drummers leaps and cavorts like a dervish on fire. Then the mood changes as a man holds up a maypole with trailing ribbons and, as an altogether loveable absurdity, they each take a ribbon and dance round the maypole to English airs played on the penny whistle, accompanied by the Tuk Tuk drums.
UNIQUE
“That,” said Errol, “is unique. That,” he emphasised, “you will find nowhere else on the planet.” I needed no convincing; it couldn’t be anything but true. We had previously met Errol on the beach at the hotel. “Hello, big tall-up man,” he had greeted me. “You just breezin’, I just breezin’ myself, just coolin’ out and thing. It’s well hot today.” He really spoke perfect English, but he could put on Bajun-speak to draw attention to himself, as a kind of party-piece. “Barbadian, ‘Badian, Bajun, it start right there,” he would explain.
The west coast beach was all the clichés you could call to mind rolled together – white sand, palms, ultramarine water, holidaymakers lazing in the hot sun. Errol came and went to no known pattern. “Mind if we just interfere a while?” he smiled, “If you don’t mind me axing the question. I like we talk up some.” He was no layabout or cadger, no “spreeboy” or “fingersmith” as he said, but a self-employed driver and island guide. After a few casual meetings, he succeeded in fixing to take us here and there now and again. “Let’s break fives on it,” he said, holding out to shake hands.
BRITISHNESS
Britishness shows most in the mornings. Full English breakfast is everywhere and the sausages are traditional industrial-style bangers. Shops open at 9 and not before, and small boys walk to school with combed hair, shiny shoes and stockings pulled up to the knee. Cars still have boots and bonnets, not trunks and hoods.
It shows especially on Sunday. “We are going to grandma’s to fire a few,” was a typical remark among the groups crowding the pavements of Bridgetown. Dressed in their finest Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes – the men in suits and ties, the women in their best frocks and hats – they were coming out of church in droves and almost all going for a big lunch with their families. They would fire a few drumsticks on the barbecue. Sunday church, Sunday best, Sunday lunch are all but abandoned in Britain but kept alive in Barbados.
There are others, like school discipline, the cane, one hundred percent literacy, prayers, manners, saying Grace, which are becoming distant memories in the so-called mother country. There’s village cricket everywhere, cars driving on the left (most of the time!) and zebra crossings with flashing orange globes which people call “Belisha beacons”.
Bajuns don’t turn corners, they swing corners, so we swung left at the Sir Garfield Sobers Roundabout and swung right of the Clyde Walcott Roundabout to get to Bridgetown’s Broad Street and its sophisticated (and expensive) boutiques and department stores. The Kensington Oval is near the city centre and it is such a shrine that it is open every day for visitors like me to walk across the sward trodden by the great Barbadians like Gary Sobers.
“There are two religions in our country,” said Errol in his best tour-guide manner. “One is Anglican and the other is cricket.”
MUSIC
Music is everywhere; from the west coast across the mountains of the Scotland district to the winds and breakers of the Atlantic east you hear it from passing cars and portable radios. Steel bands play in the market. It rings out from modest wooden homes with yellow alamander and red hibiscus. People walking along paths or standing on corners call to the rhythms and slap their thighs to it.
It does not tell of its verdant countryside ablaze with wild flowers, it is part of it. It doesn’t talk, like the Scots, of heather and mountains, or like the English, of a green and pleasant land. The music paints it from a palette of rhythmic colours.
The island’s steamy heat is not in its lyrics, but in the reggae, the calypso, the salsa and the ska. It goes with miles of sugar cane and accompanies tropical fruits and humming birds in mahogany trees.
RUM
At the end of a day’s touring, a visit to the Mount Gay rum factory in Bridgetown was a good introduction to another Bajun evening. In mid-tour we got to distinguish among many rums by smelling them – light, dark, clear, weak and strong. At the 86% alcohol stuff (1720 US proof) you inhale deeply and the glass of normal strength you are given at the end is as of nothing.
Evening evokes the real Caribbean. The music goes with jug jug (peas, soft meat minced with cornmeal) and cou cou (couscous with sweet potato and breadfruit) which cook in thousands of ovens, while coal pots and barbecues smoke in porches and backyards.
The dark is filled with the screech of crickets and the calls of night birds. There is nothing large enough or small enough to worry you with their bites, like snakes or mosquitoes, but land crabs scuttle drunkenly sideways and toads leap athletically away from your footsteps, while small lizards run vertically up coconut palms.
But mostly the dark is filled with heat and music, especially music. It burgeons out of the open doors and windows of the rum shops.
This small island is graced by one thousand six hundred rum shops, or one for every 200 people. They are everywhere, small and shack-like with wooden floors, walls, tables and chairs, and the sounds of human disputation and hilarity ring out with the music. Most of them are open all day and all night and the clientele, mostly male, sitting under ceiling fans come to smoke, to argue, to solve life’s problems and to buy rum by the bottle.
The music doesn’t suggest you tap your feet, it demands you sway your body, swing your hips, gyrate your elbows.
The clash of steel, the blast of brass and drum celebrate raw, elemental feelings – release and relief, mental, physical, sexual. They restate the human need to dance. People in rum shops get drunk to it. (Oistins, the fishing village, resonates to it as flying fish are barbecued in the street.) After midnight Baxter Road, the street that never sleeps, resounds to it.
Music doesn’t tell the story of the island, it is the story. It stretches from the old hymns of the Anglican church to all-out Caribbean ringbang. And, in between, the exquisite, sublime confusion of the Landship and the Tuk Tuk band.
In February, I picked ‘The Music Man’ for an installment of “Shelf Life” specifically because I wanted to see how much I would (or could) enjoy a musical, particularly one I hadn’t seen. As I admitted then, I’m not an aficionado nor even particularly a fan of the genre, and neither that film nor anything else I’ve seen since then has convinced me to throw out my list of existing favorites and fill in empty spots with stuff involving show tunes. That said, I do respect folks who like the form (as I do fans of any genre, regardless how much I like or dislike it), and keep in my home video collection a small cache of musicals and music-themed movies that I can frequently re-watch and fully enjoy.
One of these films is ‘The Sound of Music,’ which was a staple of my childhood, although I hadn’t seen it in a while until Fox Home Entertainment put out their spanking-new, extras-packed Blu-ray, which features absolutely stunning presentation. Beyond my own sense of nostalgia for the film, I was curious to see whether it still held together as a film that audiences could relate to, especially in an era in which its theatricality – much less its epic structure – seems perfectly foreign. As such, this week’s “Shelf Life” asks the question: are the hills indeed still alive with ‘The Sound of Music?’
The Facts: ‘The Sound of Music’ was released on March 2, 1965 by Twentieth Century Fox, and it became an immediate commercial and critical success. Costing only $8 million to produce, the film earned almost $160 million in the U.S. and Canada alone, and by adjusted dollars the film has earned $1.046 billion, putting it third on the all-time top grossing films (after ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Star Wars’). Meanwhile, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning five, including for Best Picture, Best Director for Robert Wise, Best Sound, Best Adapted Score, and Best Film Editing. ‘The Sound of Music’ still maintains an 82 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is widely considered a benchmark of the musical genre.
What Still Works: At 176 minutes, it would be easy to suggest that the film cannot sustain its running time, particularly for contemporary audiences, but the film’s slow-crescendo opening that slowly advances to the mountaintop where Maria (Julie Andrews) is singing the title song sucks you in, and ‘The Sound of Music’ doesn’t let go until the very last frame. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman (‘The Sweet Smell of Success’) manages to juggle both the film’s romanticism and its undercurrent of political conflict without sacrificing either, offering a tale that admittedly reassures audiences with a sort of wish-fulfillment happiness, but it’s also one that features details and subtleties that cannot simply be considered Pollyanna-style, empty-headed cheerfulness.
Director Robert Wise made many movies in many different genres, and looking at later work like ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture,’ it’s easy to dismiss his style as a prototypical but seldom profound, operatic sort of storytelling. But in ‘The Sound of Music,’ his camera captures everything, and communicates far more non-verbally than one might expect in a musical. For example, in the scene in which Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) sings “Edelweiss” for the first time, the initial perspective objectively captures the geography of the characters in the room, including the locations of Maria and Baroness Schraeder (Eleanor Parker); during von Trapp’s performance, we see from the Baroness’ point of view that Maria has clearly fallen in love with the Captain – simply via a small gesture from Andrews – and it sets in motion a chain of events that drives the film towards its third act.
Additionally, during the party Captain von Trapp throws for the Baroness, the first shots of the sequence are of Hans Zeller, a partygoer with German sympathies, who notices the conspicuous absence of German flags hanging in the home. Not only does the ensuing conversation establish (or re-establish) von Trapp’s nationalist tendencies towards his native Austria, it creates the character dynamic between Zeller and von Trapp that will eventually lead to the film’s finale. And as perhaps the film’s most effective use of cinematic technique to communicate story and combine the film’s thematic ideas, the church bells that ring at Maria and Georg’s wedding dissolve subtly into the austere, repetitious tones signaling the occupation of the Third Reich.
Notwithstanding the technique, the performances are all pretty incredible, even if some are slightly more melodramatic than others. But Andrews and Plummer are simply stunning in their respective roles, her communicating warmth and unquenchable passion, while he exudes a quiet authority that belies a desperate sort of romanticism, and the two of them do a really wonderful job creating a believable romance between these two seeming opposite personalities. The children are all terrific as well, and in particular what I really enjoyed was the variety of their voices; rather than enlisting a group of young singers who would provide a chorus for Maria and von Trapp, each of their singing voices has an individual personality that comes out in each song performed, even as a group.
And finally, the music and lyrics themselves are indisputably gorgeous, evocative and catchy as hell. It seems almost impossible to imagine not having at least three or four of the songs stuck in your head after watching the film, because their melodies are clean and beautiful, while the lyrics are poetic without being overly complicated. Further, they beautifully communicate character and story, such as with the aforementioned “Edelweiss,” which becomes almost a eulogy for von Trapp’s recognition that he and his family must flee the country that he loves so dearly.
What Doesn’t Work: Although as a whole the film works beautifully and probably doesn’t need to lose any fat, much less meat, I’ve always found many of the Abbey scenes to be either boring or distracting, and if ‘The Sound of Music’ was made today it seems likely that this is where the filmmakers would pare the film down. The main reason these scenes feel so superfluous is because we truly care so much about Maria and the von Trapp family that we want to see them sooner (especially if you’ve seen the film before) and then later don’t want to waste time listening to the nuns proselytize when we could be watching the romance bloom and the main relationships deepen.
What’s The Verdict: ‘The Sound of Music’ deserves the reputation it has earned as one of the all-time greatest movie musicals, not just because it appeals to non-musical doofuses like me, but because it exemplifies the absolute best of what a classic musical can be – intelligent, poetic, cinematic, and emotionally involving. In fact, it feels almost like a gateway drug for potential musical fans, because it’s so good that it makes the viewer want to watch more films that happen to feature people who fail to express themselves through song. Ultimately, as an admitted non-expert, there may be better examples of classic Hollywood musicals, but it seems like there are few others that work quite as well as a film as a musical, and there are few that quite frankly non-musical fans can – and inevitably will – like as much as ‘the Sound of Music.
