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)

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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

Today a book of mine is published: Scarface Nation, which my publisher has subtitled “The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America.” You can buy it here. Yes, it’s primarily about the 1983 Al Pacino-Brian De Palma film (publication coincides with its 25th anniversary), but it’s also about Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface starring Paul Muni, and about the fascinating 1930 pulp novel that inspired the character, Armitage Trail’s Scarface, and about all things Scarface, from its effect on hiphop music to its pervasiveness in YouTube political videos. (One that didn’t make my book’s deadline: check out McCain-as-Scarface here.)
Sending a book out into the world is of course at once exhilarating and underwhelming. On the one hand: Yay! It’s done and can be found in Barnes & Noble. On the other: Oy! B&N is only stocking two copies of it at my suburban store?
But today I had a nice experience. After asking at the information desk where the devil I might find Scarface Nation (not on the New Books table—that’s the kind of placement a publisher has to pay for, and mine is thrifty), the cheerful B&N employee insists on escorting me to the movie-books section and we discover it together. We talk a bit, I show him my picture on the back to prove my authorship, he returns to his post, I move the two copies to the New Books table. Then I go poke around the magazines (a new issue of Black Belt featuring “Reality-Based Fighting”! a new issue Poetry with a section on “visual poems”! I snap up both to purchase).
As I’m walking to the cash register, the helpful employee brings along his manager, a smiling woman who says she’d be glad to have her store host a book-signing for me as a local author. She gives me her card; I tell her the name of the publisher’s p.r. person. She promises me I’ll sell “a lot of books.” This is very kind and optimistic. I remember the last time I published a book and did a reading at a Philadelphia Borders. Five people showed up: my wife, two friends, and two people who looked as though they needed to get in from the cold outside. Purchases that night: 0.
Did you know that Al Pacino went through nine suits to shoot the final, copiously bloody, “Say hello to my little friend!” machine-gun shoot-out in Scarface? Oh, this book is just full of fun facts like that…

From the fine De Palma A La Mod blog comes this information:
Snoop Dog is currently on tour, and the screens behind the stage are showing clips from “Scarface” edited with Snoop-reenacted versions of them.
Does Brian De Palma know about this? Does Universal? I say, more power to Snoop Dogg…

You can hear my “Fresh Air” review of TV On The Radio here.