No glory for Big Eyes
Our resident Kiss92 DJ/journo thinks Lana Del Rey's Big Eyes should have smoked John Legend's Glory at the Golden Globes
COMMENTARY
I guess you know by now that John Legend and Common won this year's Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.
Kudos to them.
The tune is called Glory, and it was written for the Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma, which tells the story of King's fight for black voting rights in 1965.
King is a stupendously inspiring figure and the film apparently manages to do him justice.
All that said, Glory is definitely not the best movie song of 2014.
It's more of a political statement than a piece of music.
Common's rap is thuddingly literal, with references to civil rights hero Rosa Parks, as well as the more recent protests in Ferguson.
Legend's chorus is ham-fisted, with his repeated calls for glory sounding obvious rather than evocative.
It's totally understandable that these guys would try to make an important-sounding song about a civil rights hero.
That's fine. Go for it, dudes.
Trouble is, important-sounding music is a drag.
I turn to music in order to escape politics and other everyday concerns.
Music is my fairyland.
With that it mind, I would much rather have seen Lana Del Rey's Big Eyes, written for the Tim Burton flick of the same name, take home the Golden Globe.
It's not her best song, but it's certainly the best song among the nominees, which also includes Lorde's Yellow Flicker Beat, Sia's Opportunity and Patti Smith's Mercy Is.
The best of Del Rey's tunes unfold in a darkly-glittering shadow dimension filled with beauty, sin and doom.
NO EXCEPTION
Big Eyes is no exception.
"I saw you creeping around the garden / What are you hiding? / I beg your pardon / Don't tell me 'nothing'"
Her world is thick with mystery and reverberates with emotion.
She takes us beyond quotidian concerns and connects us with our deeper, dirtier humanity.
It's the exact opposite of Glory, which makes promises about peace, victory and mountain tops that can't possibly be kept.
Sadly, music can't really accomplish anything in the real world.
It exists to offer a reprieve from this rotten place.
That's why I'm almost always there.
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