Monday, June 15, 2009

No, Greased Lightning!


Part of the reason for the time between posts is that I was involved in a whirlwind of family stuff, namely attending two weddings with the girlfriend over the course of a weekend. It was just like the start of Wedding Crashers only the complete opposite.

At one of the receptions, the DJ was just lazy, playing the same awful tracks that have annoyed me for years: "Electric Slide," "Celebration," and the Grease mega-mix. While commiserating with some folks at the bar, girlfriend's younger brother pointed out how much he hated Grease--that it hadn't aged well, that the songs were cheesy and overplayed.

And you know what? He's absolutely right, even if he is a Phillies fan.

Grease came out in 1978, which was, let's see--carry the 5, divide by Pi--31 years ago. If you're a DJ with an ounce of creative ambition, couldn't you collect songs from more universally loved movies? Or how about songs from movies that aren't approaching a quarter-life crisis?

In the roughly 5,000 weddings I have attended in my life (Reason? My mom's side is gigantic), how come I don't remember hearing anything from Dirty Dancing, Clueless, or Boogie Nights? Especially since people with fuzzy memories of those movies are getting married in droves. Has anyone created a mix of songs from movies of the 80s and 90s, like "Twist and Shout" goes right into "King of Wishful Thinking"? Movies have given us a rich musical legacy beyond "Greased Lightning." Can one of the cutting-edge geniuses on the DJ front work on that. Please.

Seriously, part of the reason why I go to weddings is to dance, and it's excruciating when some jerk in a rented tux and a trunk full of props refuses to show an ounce of originality. I'm willing to bet that if someone played The Commodores' "Machine Gun," the dance floor would be hopping.

And if everyone sprung into the choreographed dance from Boogie Nights, I could die right then and there. Screw Mt. Everest, that's something I want to see.

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