![]() The first inklings of this story came from fans of Ms.Parton’s earlier hit single ‘Jolene’. Pretender (based on ‘The Great Pretender’ written by Buck Ram) features the opportunity for a dramatic gender change, suggesting a hypothesis concerning the singer, Ms.Parton, perhaps worthy of headlines in the National Enquirer. This is from Oswald’s liner notes on the Plunderphonics EP: Track 2 of the Plunderphonics EP is “Pretender,” in which Dolly Parton’s rendition of “The Great Pretender” is manipulated to sound more like a man’s voice. ![]() Tracks 1, 3, and 4 mess with Igor Stravinsky, Count Basie, and Elvis Presley, respectively. The Plunderphonics EP has four tracks, each of which aggressively reworks a famous bit of music. (Oswald generally avoided charging money for his reconstituted works in the hopes of avoiding copyright infringement suits, but also withdrew and destroyed existing stock in the face of legal challenges.) In 1989 he distributed the Plunderphonics EP with four tracks to media outlets and radio stations. Oswald was a self-proclaimed “Plunderphonic” who argued for the necessity of (basically) fucking with famous pieces of music. It’s unclear whether “goodlittlebuddy” knew this or not, but either way Oswald deserves some of the credit here. Not a lot of people discussing “Slow Ass Jolene” took the opportunity to credit John Oswald for the insight about “Jolene”-but Oswald realized the exact same thing as early as 1988 (to be fair, a sprinkling of YouTube users did make the connection). The main YouTube video, originally uploaded by YouTube user “goodlittlebuddy” in April 2012, has now been viewed 1.75 million times. Many, many listeners expressed astonishment that Dolly’s phrasing and even vibrato were so finely expressed that hardly any flaws showed up, even at such a slow speed. The premise was that if you played that single not at the correct 45-rpm speed but at the 33-rpm speed, a reduction of about 25%, the resultant version was quite startling, as if “a soulful male ballad singer” ( The New Yorker) were covering it (and, incidentally, fucking with the gender dynamics of the song). Last month a slowed-down video of Dolly Parton’s classic song “Jolene” made the rounds on the Internet.
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