Come Here Girl, Hand Me That Kazoo

In contrast to that last post highlighting the “dare you to define it” music I have in heavy rotation this week, Tom Service points to the good in the stuff of blatant genre crossing, awarding an A for effort in an era when the “genres of ‘pop’ and ‘classical’ now demand such different things from singers that the days of meaningful genre-hopping–when Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza ruled the charts, the stage and the screen–may be over.”

Though it doesn’t do it for me–the fact that they went there in the first place seems to me to be too large a part of why anyone would care about the exercises–maybe I’m underselling the experience. The whole thing just makes me cover-my-eyes nervous and squirmy, particularly for the kids. The Aston ensemble, also offering their take on classical filtering pop, notes that “it’s a classical musician’s job to play other people’s music. We have just decided to play someone a little bit different.” Hard to argue with that sentiment, of course, though, this kind of thing lives on a two-way street.

I personally have my own weakness for a certain style of creative cover song, though I’m not sure where in the contemporary compendium of such work you’d shelve it. “Studied disaffected split-screen crossover”? It’s been a tough week technology-wise here for the AJ crew, so I thought we’d just go light on the analysis and finish up with a little fun. If your heart doesn’t melt a little when he sets up his portable theremin, well, we should probably not listen to records together anymore.

[via]