>best selling female artist ever in the US>only remembered for being a litigious cuntlol
>>129589028I can't even name a single song? I vaguely remember some movies my parents watched. And it's not that I don't like 60s-70s stuff, whatever genre. I just blocked her out of it, I guess.
>>129589028Slop music.The 60s equivalent of all the modern pop chicks that will be forgotten in 20 years despite their massive sales.
>>129589183>>129589244hi zoomers you are not really understanding her legacy https://youtu.be/9cEAnPUsQl8one of the most famous women in Hollywood history. where the melfi character comes from in the sopranos.
>>129589329Melfi is an Italian though. Lorraine Bracco was hotter too. I mean, at least once. Especially in Good Fellas.
>>129589329>investigate supposed legacy>it's all disposable music, disposable films and disposable musical films
>MECHA>BARBOORA>STREISANDAAAA
>>129589362daily streams:The Cure 3.7mBarbra Streisand 0.4m
>>129589375
>>129589028>>best selling female artist ever in the US1. Celine Dion 2. Taylor Swift (soon to pass Dion)3. Madonna4. Mariah Carey5. Shania Twain6. Whitney Houston6. Barbara Streisand7. Rihanna8. Britney Spears9. Adele10. Beyonce
>By conventional standards--that is, by Streisand's own standards--this cannot be the case. Her record has to be superior merely because she possesses the better instrument. Mary's soprano is lissome enough but almost devoid of color or dramatic range, and for Barbra that is what vocal music is all about. Even more than her predecessors, she is not so much a singer as an actress, turning each song into a little playlet--or rather, since hitting the notes is important to her, a little operetta. Every song is a new role, and her natural mode is the tour de force.>It is this very conceit that rock has striven to destroy from its inception. The rock singer may play-act, but never so frankly or variously: His concern is image rather than role. Like the blues and country artists who were his forebears, his aim is always to appear that he is singing his own life--not just recalling his own experience in order to enrich a song, in the matter of Frank Sinatra, but singing his own life and preferably his own composition. To a sensibility accustomed to this conceit, the histrionics of Broadway nightclub pop seem absurdly corny, no matter how "sophisticated" the approach, and the audience for such transparent dramatics seems positively innocent in its eager suspension of disbelie
>>129589648chatgpt lied to you, album sales:Barbra Streisand 89mMariah Carey 73mMadonna 71mCeline Dion 61mWhitney Houston 60mTaylor Swift 57mReba McEntire 56mLinda Ronstadt 46mShania Twain 46mJanet Jackson 41mwith streaming Taylor Swift is #1
I'm old and even back in the 70s when I was a kid Streisand always mystified me. She was the same age as Dylan, McCartney, and lots of other of our rock heroes yet seemed like a different generation altogether and someone who made music for people's parents.
As someone else said she was a product of her time in some ways and if you weren't there you'd probably never get the context.
>>129591817She was the last major singer who specialized in what they used to call "beautiful music" ie. orchestral MOR gush before that eventually gave way in the 80s to Baker Street saxophones and keybs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLWDZSVWCcIOne of Barbra's shots at conventional pop, from '67. This came out after the new Clive Davis management at Columbia pushed her to sound more hip/contemporary and put some of the wannabe Eydie Gorme bullshit aside.
Simply Streisand was her first album to miss the Top 10--and she hadn't been out of the Top 5 since the debut peaked at #9--but still it reached #12 on the Billboard chart, selling 250,000 in its first week out and eventually receiving a gold record. Pretty good for a set of standards in late '67 at a time when that style was very rapidly becoming a museum artifact, and actually sold about as well as a number of her '70s albums that were supposed to bring her up to date with the times. Ironically, her first real sales flop was What About Today? in 1969, which peaked at #31 and evidently hasn't received a sales certification in any country.
>>129591959the album Davis thought was supposed to make her seem more cool because although she was young, her audience was not. at least he got Stoney End out the door.
Guilty was the best Bee Gees album they never sang on. Analog supremacy. That aside Streisand also resisted digital recording until probably the Clinton years.
>>129591959Barbra was a consummate born in the rong generashun person much like Pat Boone, it always seemed obvious that she would have liked to have been born in 1922 instead of 1942 and felt out of place with what all of her peers were doing. Her attempts at contemporary pop always felt a bit calculated and done for money rather than artistry, she never seemed to have the same feel for that material that she did for showtune/croonerslop.
>>129589028>Early life
she's best in pop form like on Guilty, i can do without the aimless orchestral ballads that were her stock-in-trade
>>129589028>>129591817She's a natural for showtunes and standards. Her pop endeavors have some high peaks but some lows as well. I'm not big on her covers of singer/songwriter artists. Those types of songs are usually just not fitting for her stylistically.
Goodwill bin -core
Also the less said about her political views the better.
>>129589028Say what you want about her singing, but that's not her most annoying quirk. It's her almost compulsive need to insert some kind of contrived spoken word part in her songs. She evidently thinks this is funny and endearing when it actually just wants to make the listener turn the song the fuck off.
>On those rare occasions when I look back at my recording career, the album covers and songs remind me of the eras in which I made them. When I first started out in the early ’60s, by necessity and circumstance, we worked fast. We didn’t have the time, budget or technology to record an infinite number of tracks. As a result of these so-called “limitations,” we had fewer decisions to make about the best takes or mixes.>I suppose this is how between concerts, TV appearances, Broadway musicals, making movies, raising a child, devoting time to social causes, antique hunting, and shopping for one-of-a-kind vintage clothes, I was able to record two albums a year for two decades! The boundless energy of youth is quite remarkable!>For me, the studio is a combination musical playground and laboratory…a private sanctuary, where the possibility of catching lightning in a bottle always exists. Whenever that kind of magic happens, it’s extremely satisfying. Sometimes though, when the arrangement doesn’t quite gel or the song no longer fits the tone of the album it was meant for, the tapes go into the vault for safekeeping.>Working on this 2nd volume of Release Me has been a lovely walk down memory lane…a chance to revisit, and in some cases, add a finishing instrumental touch to songs that still resonate for me in meaningful ways. I’m particularly struck by the ongoing relevance of “Be Aware” and “One Day,” which still speak to our collective sense of humanity.
>My brilliant friend, Leonard Bernstein, once said, “Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.” I think that’s true, because the songs I’ve recorded have provided me ways of expressing thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be difficult to convey. With that in mind, I hope this collection of tracks that have been quietly resting in their tape boxes, waiting to be released, will stir your emotions or simply make you smile.>As always, I'm grateful you've taken the time to listen.
>>129595785>When I first started out in the early ’60s, by necessity and circumstance, we worked fast. We didn’t have the time, budget or technology to record an infinite number of tracks. As a result of these so-called “limitations,” we had fewer decisions to make about the best takes or mixes.and somehow they made classics anyway even with those limitations. today you have studio tech that would have been science fiction in the '60s and all we got out of it was a Taylor Swift album.
>>129592043her three favorite singers as a kid were Peggy Lee, Joni James, and Johnny Mathis, so that should be a clue
>>129595785Barbra seems to be one of those people who retains a highly detailed memory of recording her albums despite how many decades passed. Some boomers seem to forget a lot of stuff.
>>129589183She was a huge movie star in the 60's and 70's, People forget how big 'movie musicals' used to be.
Ok, buddy, you didn't need to go there. Seriously.
As I think even Cuckgau acknowledged she was best in the 60s when she was an unapologetic showtune singer, her later rock/pop crossovers are more questionable and don't feel as natural.
>>129595995To be fair even putting Streisand's political beliefs aside she always seemed fairly harmless to me, there are girl singers I consider far more hateable. She's just kind of there and I don't have many strong opinions on her.
>>129596012opinions are like assholes as they say. i mean, 60s Babs was obviously her at her youngest and freshest but i just can't get behind all that showtune goop even if she was clever enough to record more obscure standards instead of the usual overdone ones everyone's heard before (nobody needed another "The Things We Did Last Summer", no thanks). her pop crossover in the 70s is more digestible and her voice sounded more adult and not as girly. her attempts at rock covers were pretty bad, though she didn't do many of those, fortunately.she was still in fine form in the 80s but as you'd expect those albums have very dated 80s cheese production. by the 90s she's passing the age of 50 and sounds increasingly old and complacent with very little variance in her delivery or choice of material. while even the later albums usually have a decent cut or two she inevitably lost her youthful spunkiness which really happens to everyone at that point in their life.
CBS rejected this cover art...
...and replaced it with this instead. No one knows who thought this was a funny idea but I sure hope they were fired for that blunder.
>>129596224if i had to guess, the original cover was probably seen as too late 60s and a bit outdated for 1974. i mean, the flower power days were over by then.
>>129596204>>129596224I think the "rejected" cover art was actually used as the back cover for that record, according to my memory
>>129589028>calling jews litigious How dare you spread antisemitism when there has never been a greater danger faced by the Jews? You have just committed blood libel
Her memoir "My Name Is Barbra"...wow, damn. Anon is right that she has a very comprehensive memory of the fine details of making albums and movies that were multiple decades ago, and she has something to say about all of them but you can clearly tell what she liked and what she preferred to forget existed. Emotion was one album she brushes past in like 2 pages while she basically breaks down the entire The Way We Were movie frame by frame. She also seems singularly unforgiving of anyone who ever got on her bad side no matter who they happen to be and regardless of whether they're still alive or not.
Not even kidding. After reading through that thing you almost believe you were actually on the set of Yentl.
