It has a triumphant, parade-like vibe, with a chorus of female backup singers praising Reagan. Nice try, D.O.A., Suicidal Tendencies, The Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Crucifucks and Reagan Youth! This 1969 album track is a bouncy satirical tribute to the then-governor of California. It’s sometimes said that bubblegum music was a forerunner of punk, and here is as impressive an example as one could wish for: When it comes to making fun of Ronald Reagan, the Kasenetz-Katz Super Circus were ahead of the game by twelve to fifteen years. I also found a review by Robert Christgau, who, perhaps unaware of the song’s true provenance, hailed “Up In the Air” as “the funniest (and archest) anti-Reagan song to date.” Tragically, Insaniacs version of the song isn’t available online, and all the used copies of their record are expensive. punk band called Tru Fax and the Insaniacs? I discovered this tidbit while flipping through Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth (although they misidentified the band as Tru Fax and the Insomniacs). So you remember the hilarious Ronald Reagan parody “ Up In the Air“? Did you know that there’s a cover version of it by an 80’s D.C. I award this song a radically indeterminite score of either 3 stars or 1 star, depending on whether the listener wants to hear Kasenetz-Katz Super Cirkus perform French chanson. “Embrassez-Moi” has a lot of musical features that aren’t typically heard in post-Elvis pop music, so it’s hard to evaluate it within a normal pop context. The first time I heard this song, I pronounced it “annoying” and left it off my CD of Bubblegum MF Volume 2 - that’s what you get for trying to do something different, bands! Now that I have listened to it all the way through, I guess it’s not that annoying. The song ends with Levine singing “embraaaaaseeeeez mooooooooiiii” on some kind of weird blue note. This is like the kind of music they’d have in a movie where people go to an old-timey nightclub and there are dancers in many layers of frilly petticoats doing a kickline, if you know what I mean. The song moves in long, carefully sculpted melodic phrases: “Like the colors of Van Gogh, you’ll always be/ A work of art to me/ That any man would give his heart and soul to own.” (Except for the title phrase, the lyrics are almost all in English, which is good, because Joey Levine’s French accent is terrible.) After the second verse a cling-clangy keyboard enters and the song starts to slow down, then speeds up again. There’s a concertina or something playing sprightly little runs strings and woodwinds enter playing romantic chords. Joey Levine sings the lyrics in a tone that’s more soft and breathy than his usual style. “Embrassez-Moi,” a 1969 single for Kasenetz-Katz Super Cirkus, opens with a herky-jerky, oompah kind of rhythm played on piano and bass. “Embrassez-Moi” is described in Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth as Joey Levine’s “experiment in French chanson” (72) the chanson genre encompasses the music of such singers as Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf, and, according to Wikipedia, “can be distinguished from the rest of French ‘pop’ music by following the rhythms of French language, rather than those of English and a higher standard for lyrics.” It’s like, cabaret music, I think.
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