The Atrocious Music Collection: #34 in a series
Artist: Ethel Merman
Album Title: The Ethel Merman Disco Album
Category: Professional Musician - Subcategory: Disco Years: 1979
Cover art style: Bizarre pre-Photoshop superimposition. (What's with the hand with the cowboy hat?)
Audio:
- There's No Business Like Show Business
- Everything's Coming Up Roses
- I Got Rhythm
- I Get a Kick Out of You
Click on picture for full-sized image
In the middle of the last century, the French composer Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible of the classical scene, made this proclamation: "Any musician who has not experienced the necessity of 12-tone system is useless." Pity the established neo-tonal composer who saw Boulez and his young allies as the future, and this statement as the manifesto of that future. Was it a fear of irrelevance, of being left behind, that pushed composers such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky to change their style, and to begin, instead, to compose serial works?
I bring this up because I wonder if a similar motivation led so many talented singers to the ill-fated decision to try their voice at disco in the 1970s.
It isn't everyday that one album can cause such greats like Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Stephen Sondheim to spin in their graves. Especially since Sondheim is still alive.