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Shortly before the invitational screening of the new
Michael Mann film Public Enemies at the Powerplant Cinema in
Rockwell on Thursday night, the theater speakers blared old jazz
standards, many of which were, woefully, unfamiliar to my
pop-and-rock-saturated ears. They were played perhaps to get the
audience in the right frame of mind for the movie, which tells the
story of the slippery Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger
(played fantastically, as always, by Johnny Depp. My P15 review: go
see it). There was one song however that stirred a keen interest:
Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Gloomy Sunday.” For those who
have no idea, this evocative, haunting classic is widely regarded to
have inspired a rash of suicides across the globe, earning for it
the moniker “the suicide song.”
First off, a bit of history:
“Gloomy Sunday” was originally written in Hungarian by Rezso
Seress (music) and Laszlo Javor (lyrics) in 1933. It is said the
English translations (two versions penned separately by Sam Lewis
and Desmond Carter) lose much of the original despair and gloom of
the original, but in my humble opinion, I think the version we know
now is still the furthest from sunshine and rainbows as any song in
recorded history (save perhaps for Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will
Go On,” but that one is a tearjerker more for its unabashed kitsch
factor than for anything else).
The song pretty much stayed
low-key (as in “inconspicuous” and “unobtrusive” rather than
“on the bottom end of the musical pitch scale”) over the next
few years, until 1936, when its connection to suicide cases in
Hungary was first reported. The song achieved even more prominence
when it was covered by the great songstress Billie Holiday, whose
version is still the best known of the more than 60 (as of
Wikipedia’s last count) recorded through the years. Other notable
adaptations include those by Bjork, Sinead O’Connor, Sarah
Vaughan, Ray Charles, Sarah McLachlan, Heather Nova and Marianne
Faithfull.
So what exactly is it about the
song that makes it so controversial? I suppose we have to hear the
original Hungarian recording (sung by a guy named Pal Kalmar) to
determine that for ourselves. But for starters, the English lyrics
themselves are morbid and certainly not for the squeamish: Sunday is
gloomy, my hours are slumberless / Dearest the shadows I live with
are numberless / Little white flowers will never awaken you / Not
where the black coach of sorrow has taken you / Angels have no
thought of ever returning you / Would they be angry if I thought of
joining you? As if that wasn’t shudder-inducing enough, the second
stanza is even more chilling: Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend
it all / My heart and I have decided to end it all / Soon there’ll
be candles and prayers that are sad I know / Let them not weep let
them know that I’m glad to go / Death is no dream for in death
I’m caressing you / With the last breath of my soul I’ll be
blessing you.
Urban legends debunking sites (snopes.com
is my favorite) have largely ruled that the idea that “Gloomy
Sunday” is responsible for the rash of suicides in Hungary and
elsewhere strays more closely to urban legend than unquestionable
fact, but that hasn’t stopped people from referring to it as
“the overture of death” or some such clever moniker. I
personally think it’s one of the more evocative and saddest songs
I’ve ever heard (the Holiday version at least), but I’m not
exactly overcome with a desire to slash my wrists every time I hear
it. (Oh by the way, you should know that Seress, the song’s
composer, threw himself off the window of his apartment in Bucharest
shortly after his 69th birthday, but one thing absolutely has no
connection whatsoever to the other. Right?)
Local music fans have been
buzzing with anticipation over Nine Inch Nails’ (NIN)on August 5
gig at the Araneta Coliseum. Fans have been lining up to snag the
much-coveted front row tickets as soon as local promoter Splintr
opened tickets sales in May. A box-office employee was reportedly
puzzled over the amount of tickets being bought not weeks, but
months in advance. Those in the know predict that interest in the
tour, which may be NIN’s last, would only increase as the show
looms closer. So yes Trent Reznor fans, stop dilly-dallying: the
time is now if you want to see NIN live in August.
E-mail pjcana@gmail.com
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