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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1TCPOuV:
This song is completely lyrically nonsensical.
But it’s Oscar again, and I’m weirdly a sucker for the falsetto. (I also really enjoy the way the camera lens is fogged so you can’t really see him in the halo from the light behind him. It’s an aesthetic.) It’s just the high range of a tenor voice like that, the transition from the head-voice to the chest-voice, you don’t get a ton of that in pop music. But girls’ parts are always written so you have to do that transition all the time, and it’s, I dunno. The aesthetic. I keep deleting personal rants about my life as a folksinger in these posts, and this is another one of those, so I’ll stop here.
Anyway. That aesthetic is why I’ve watched this video like twenty-five times, and so it’s really sunk in. And so one of the songs Poe sings has taken on a lot of the aesthetic of this song, melodically (none of the idiosyncratic pauses or odd structure, just some of the cresting melodic elements and a bit of the meditative sweetness). So, the imaginary song, is just a pop song about an unfaithful lover, a little over-sentimental but very popular.
At one point, Poe is in a noisy room full of frightened people, so he starts singing a trite patriotic song about the now-basically-defunct New Republic, to kind of kick off an unofficial performance they’re doing to kind of calm the volatile morale of the suddenly-overcrowded base. The room quiets down, and by the end of the patriotic song people are paying attention to him, and it’s a little more poignant than it ought to have been; this trite song is, after all, about a defeated government that most of the people in the room had served.
Now, this popular ballad that’s going around the holo exchanges, about the unfaithful lover– coincidentally, its chorus transitions beautifully straight into the chorus of the trite patriotic song. Poe and the other musicians he plays with have often done that transition, to humorous effect– everyone knows the song, it’s popular, everyone cries about their lost loves, then bam! suddenly it’s this stodgy patriotic song, everyone laughs.
Spontaneously, with everyone staring at him and the trite patriotic song a little too relevant, Poe transitions the other direction, into the popular ballad. Straight from “For The Republic” right into, more or less, “my baby done me wrong”. And sort of inadvertently, sort of serendipitously, he makes a powerful point about how the New Republic’s inaction betrayed them all.
So, anyway. (Later, Rey hears the recording BB-8 made of this performance, which got popular on the holo exchanges too, and the popular ballad is popular enough that even she’s heard it, and she realizes then that what Poe does in the Resistance is not “just” piloting.)
This song is completely lyrically nonsensical.
But it’s Oscar again, and I’m weirdly a sucker for the falsetto. (I also really enjoy the way the camera lens is fogged so you can’t really see him in the halo from the light behind him. It’s an aesthetic.) It’s just the high range of a tenor voice like that, the transition from the head-voice to the chest-voice, you don’t get a ton of that in pop music. But girls’ parts are always written so you have to do that transition all the time, and it’s, I dunno. The aesthetic. I keep deleting personal rants about my life as a folksinger in these posts, and this is another one of those, so I’ll stop here.
Anyway. That aesthetic is why I’ve watched this video like twenty-five times, and so it’s really sunk in. And so one of the songs Poe sings has taken on a lot of the aesthetic of this song, melodically (none of the idiosyncratic pauses or odd structure, just some of the cresting melodic elements and a bit of the meditative sweetness). So, the imaginary song, is just a pop song about an unfaithful lover, a little over-sentimental but very popular.
At one point, Poe is in a noisy room full of frightened people, so he starts singing a trite patriotic song about the now-basically-defunct New Republic, to kind of kick off an unofficial performance they’re doing to kind of calm the volatile morale of the suddenly-overcrowded base. The room quiets down, and by the end of the patriotic song people are paying attention to him, and it’s a little more poignant than it ought to have been; this trite song is, after all, about a defeated government that most of the people in the room had served.
Now, this popular ballad that’s going around the holo exchanges, about the unfaithful lover– coincidentally, its chorus transitions beautifully straight into the chorus of the trite patriotic song. Poe and the other musicians he plays with have often done that transition, to humorous effect– everyone knows the song, it’s popular, everyone cries about their lost loves, then bam! suddenly it’s this stodgy patriotic song, everyone laughs.
Spontaneously, with everyone staring at him and the trite patriotic song a little too relevant, Poe transitions the other direction, into the popular ballad. Straight from “For The Republic” right into, more or less, “my baby done me wrong”. And sort of inadvertently, sort of serendipitously, he makes a powerful point about how the New Republic’s inaction betrayed them all.
So, anyway. (Later, Rey hears the recording BB-8 made of this performance, which got popular on the holo exchanges too, and the popular ballad is popular enough that even she’s heard it, and she realizes then that what Poe does in the Resistance is not “just” piloting.)
