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Something For Everybody: Baz Luhrmann
Audio CD ~ Music |
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$14.99 at Amazon
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| Artists: | Various Artists |
| Label: | Capitol |
| Categories: | Club/Dance; Dance; Dance Music; Pop; Popular Music |
| Media: | Audio CD |
| Release date: | 31 March, 1998 |
| Amazon rating: | 4.0 |
| Tracks: |
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| One of the most surreal singles in memory, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" has an even stranger story than you'd imagine: in 1998, a student lifted the text of an article columnist Mary Schmich had written for the Chicago Tribune and started sending it around the world, crediting it as a commencement speech given at MIT by Kurt Vonnegut. Film director Baz Luhrmann (who had taken a big part in designing the soundscapes of his films Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) got his hands on it just as he was working on a remix of Rozalla's 1992 dance hit "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)." Within a day, Luhrmann had hired a local actor to read the text, and a single was born. It's a wonderfully surreal pop-cultural moment on an album that strives for such things. Luhrmann's modus operandi involves the remixing and customizing of tracks until they have a fabulous sheen, and it owes a lot to the equally media-attuned Malcolm McLaren (and especially to McLaren's 1989 album Waltz Darling). Though he throws in a handful of time-tested songs (Doris Day's "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps," La Bohème's "Che Gelide Manina"), Something for Everybody is very much of a specific moment--and though the moment may pass, fans will enjoy revisiting it time and again. --Randy Silver |