Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Preface To Venus: THAT SONG

(image from here.)

People have told me the classic song about Venus is this one, Frankie Avalon's Venus</â>. Written by Ed Marshall & Peter DeAngelis, the song was Avalon's first number one hit, & probably is most familiar to people my age & younger from its use in the TV show Dexter, as one season's serial killer's theme song.  I'm sure that's something Avalon hoped for when he recorded the tune in the late 1950s.

But for me, & people like me, who grew up in the 1980s, it's the Bananarama song that is most familiar.  This song was on MTV every hour of every day for what seemed like years.  It didn't hurt that the women in the band were super cute.  I might have watched the video for that very reason.  But it was a little freaky when, because I was barely out of my teens, I discovered the song was a cover of a song from the 1960s.  In the 1980s there were loads of covers.  Each one seemed to surprise me anew.

For someone doing a radio show, situations like this find one at a crossroads.  Play the original?  Play the famous cover?  Ignore?  Redefine?  Abort!

Maybe you don't feel this.  Certainly for some this is an easy solution.  Not this radio show!  In the collection of the person responsible for this mess (me), there are five or more covers of this song.  What to do?  What to do?

Luckily there are so many songs about both the goddess & the planet Venus that this will end up being no big deal.  But still - there's always more to agonize about, you know?

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