Lately I've been on a Singin' in the Rain kick.

[mollyporter]

Embedding Disabled on Moses Supposes, but you should watch it anyway

A few weeks ago, I was watching movies at a friends house. We saved Singin' in the Rain for last-of-the-night and only got half-way through before we were too tired to finish. But we talked about it as we were watching, and during the Moses Supposes number linked above I mentioned that I really wish more modern movies had awesome dance breaks. She pointed out (to our mutual horror) that the closest thing contemporary Hollywood has to a Gene Kelly or a Donald O'Conner is the cast of High School Musical. And in the acting world, it's kind of true - the movie actors who CAN sing and dance (Neal Patrick Harris, Hugh Jackman, &c) are known for being Broadway crossover actors but tend to keep their singing and dancing to the stage and off the silver screen. The non-tween singing and dancing movies are more likely to cite Bollywood as their influence (see: Bride & Prejudice (2004)) than Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Interestingly, musical numbers do occasionally crop up on TV - in every episode of Glee, in that well-known episode of Buffy, twice this season on How I Met Your Mother. Delighted as I am by this, I feel it can be put down to added pressure on the writers to do something new for the show. And it tends to be more of a novelty item than anything else.

But then again - perhaps our storytelling through song and dance has just migrated to the short form, ie music videos. The boybands of the 90s were all known for their choreography as much as their music, as is Beyoncé, Chris Brown, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson. The dance style en vogue may not be tap any longer (though I would love to see it make a comeback!) but if we're desperate for a song-and-dance fix we don't need to watch a 90 minute film when there's a 4 minute music video readily available. It sort of makes me yearn for the longer form, though. There are a lot of bands I like who release albums where every single song would make a gorgeous music video. There are a lot of really interesting concept albums that are thematically strung together to tell an overall story. I would love to see a band turn their entire album into a music video - craft each song into a chapter in the overall story of the album. Muse's latest album The Resistance is a perfect example of this. The album is basically a space opera that I would love to see brought to life visually - and why not stage it as a musical with dance routines helping to tell the story? Perhaps not every moment, but at least in part. I feel like there's room for longer form musical storytelling in the mainstream, and maybe doing it through music rather than through drama is the way for the form to gain authenticity right now.