20050822

Turntable turning tables

I went on a CD buying spree recently, and found a two-disc set of Fountains of Wayne material. Dutifully shoveling it into my player, I never got around to listening to it systematically---when it shuffles to the top, that's when I hear it, usually during afternoon sessions on the treadmill, when I'm not paying the best attention to it.

The song was halfway through when I realized it was their cover of Britney Spears's Baby One More Time. Likeable, clever.

Got me to thinking: another song I'd like to hear, that flat-out does not exist, is Shania Twain singing Led Zeppelin's Hot Dog. It wouldn't matter much to me whether she changed the lyrics so it would be a woman singing about being left by a man, rather than a woman abandoned by a woman; though the latter would be a hoot.

Maybe there's a term for this technique, of gender-changing the lyrics of a love song so the other sex can sing it without suggesting same-sex love? Who would know that term? David? Chaz?

And that reminds me also of a very sophisticated table-turning, where Bobby Vinton's Roses Are Red becomes Florraine Darlin's Long as the Rose is Red; definitely Chaz's territory, though to date myself, I used to have the 45's of both.

(Christina Aguilera's Will the Real Slim Shady Please Shut Up? does not count: it's satire.)

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