Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

Adam and Miranda Lambert

Revolution For Your Entertainment (bootleg/streaming on adamandmiranda.com)

4 stars

The husband-and-wife team has had quite a year. Having topped the country and pop charts with their respective solo albums (Miranda’s Revolution and Adam’s For Your Entertainment), they’ve rush-released a website stream, for the close of what the drawling Miranda has called “an Obama-lama-ding-dang year,” of a new album: Revolution For Your Entertainment, a gleefully bitter mash-up of their public and private concerns over the past 12 months.

The album leads off with “Poor Ol’ Simon Cowell,” in which Miranda playfully castigates Cowell as “The man who turned my lover-boy gay”:

“Well you said you liked your t-shirts tight

That you were straight and I was right

To stay in Nashville while you had your way

With my eye-liner honey, so horny, so fey…”

Of Miranda’s very public affair with her opening act, Blake Shelton (detailed with uncommon explicitness in her contribution here. “Shelton From The Storm”), Adam has written new lyrics to one of the songs he covered on American Idol, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”:

“I see a little silhouette of a man

Shelton-douche, Shelton-douche, will you do the fandango

Thunderbolts and Sugarland very, very frightening to me

Taylor Hicks-o (Taylor Hicks-o)

Taylor Hicks-o (Taylor Hicks-o)

Taylor Hicks-o Figaro… “

In addition to the passion and quality of the music, Revolution For Your Entertainment has had the added pop-cultural frisson of confounding country and Idol fans alike. Typical of the response within the industry is Carrie Underwood, ambushed last week by TMZ and asked about the new album, said, “Frankly, I don’t get it, but I love them both and they’re very fine artists and I hope to collaborate with them together and separately as soon as possible to help promote my new concept album, Carrie Underworld.”

Revolution For Your Entertainment (bootleg/streaming on adamandmiranda.com)

For the immediate future, all blogging will be done, guaranteed almost daily, from

Ken Tucker’s Watching TV

http://watching-tv.ew.com/

Also, for more Tucker writing on different subjects, go to my Best American Poetry blog :

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/ken_tucker/

And my Facebook page for links to my music reviews for NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.”

Thank you.

Ken

The biggest laugh Watchmen got at the sold-out, 9 A.M., IMAX suburban-theater show I went to on Saturday occurred when the Lee Iacocca-businessman-figure said, “Free is just another word for socialist.” It was the happily derisive laugh of a crowd that was totally into the movie, and which also seemed well aware of the recent effort to label the Obama stimulus package as “socialist”–and the audience clearly thought the use of that supposedly-inflammatory word was a joke. Of course, director Zack Snyder couldn’t have known that line would have that context when he was filming Watchmen however many months ago, but movies have a way of capturing what’s in the air at the moment of their release-date in uncanny ways.

In general, no matter what you may think are the flaws in director Zack Snyder’s version of Alan Moore’s book, it does one thing consistently and assiduously: It seizes upon Moore’s long-standing sympathy for ’60s-style politics, strips away much of Moore’s bluster (that’s one of the advantages of having to pare down the novel), and hammers at the idea that Nixonian politics don’t work.  Even the libertarian sentiments spouted by the movie’s Rorschach, positioned in the movie as its most interesting figure (thanks to a combo of his CGI mask and Jackie Earle Haley’s terrific performance) are viewed by Moore/Snyder as Walter Kovacs’s one crucial character flaw.

Watchmen is the most “political” movie in theaters now, and will be seen by many people who’d never dream of going to a Michael Moore documentary or of NetFlixing All The President’s Men (I caught at least two shout-outs to Woodward and Bernstein in Watchmen) or Three Days of the Condor. Pretty soon if not already, those who disagree with Alan Moore about the cleansing power of… what? liberalism? (Let the “masks” coexist with ordinary citizens!) anarchy? the nihilism some people (not me) believe is inherent in the movie’s violence and sex?… pretty soon those people may start inveighing against Watchmen. Me, I think it’s just more evidence that pop culture works in mysterious ways that even its creators can’t predict.

I radio-review Beyonce, David Archuleta, and Pink here.

Smoking Gun says this is the “best Scarface tribute ever.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the perp sure has a good handle…