Mark And Sarah Talk About Songs

This week's crop of actor-musician hyphenates got their thespian starts in films of the 1980s: Corey Feldman, Keanu Reeves (Dogstar), Kevin Bacon (the Bacon Brothers), and Kiefer Sutherland. Copyright-compliant Gin Blossoms tracks and workout-cooldown music prompted thoughts about perfectly good outdoor-restaurant entertainment, the artistic practice that capitalism tries to stifle, and whether pr...

Do you love to laugh? Then fall down the ha-ha hole that is Pop Goes The Actor's third episode! This week, we're looking at comedians who tested the pop waters, including a Blues Brother, Eddie Murphy, Tracey Ullman, and Jack Black. Acting range, the cult of mid-'70s SNL , finding unexpected IQ points in a song you've heard a dozen times, and which instrument is the creme fraiche of blues tracks -...

Oh yes it's ladies' night on the second episode of Pop Goes The Actor...but IS the feeling right? Sometimes! We wend our way through copyright-compliant bugle boys of Company Wonder Woman, the adorkable Zooey Deschanel, Shelley Fabares's evident terror, Marla Gibbs's appealing blood-thinner ad, and a track from Cybill Shepherd that puts the "no" back in "bossa nova." Throw that...

Pop Goes The Actor: a mini-season about thespians who tried (and sometimes succeeded at!) being pop musicians. In our premiere episode, we're talking about Jeff Conaway (Taxi), Donny Most (Happy Days), Esther Rolle (Good Times), Ted Knight (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and Lawrence Hilton Jacobs (Welcome Back, Kotter) -- as well as smorgasbords of grunting, when a stew has all the right ingredients...

1996's  Romeo + Juliet seemed like a slam-dunk ending to our soundtrack mini-season...but we have regrets! Epcot industrial music, lazy versions of Shakespeare, the psychotic hormonal jangling of youth, Scandinavian cultural crimes, and the returns of Teddy Ruxpin AND No Middle Ground with Paul Quinn accompany our struggling to remember the Wallflowers, and to decide whether it's possible for a so...

This episode is, we suppose, like a box of chocolates, because technically you don't know what you're going to get, but we can tell you we're talking about the ubiquitous Forrest Gump soundtrack. Remembering top-loader VCRs, #justiceforJenn, powering through overplay, how long sixties soul acts gave themselves to get drawers on the floor, and songs Muppets sing at you. What does it sound like when...

The '90s Soundtrack Flashback season is bustin' surfboards with  Pulp Fiction , 1994's omnipresent Quentin Tarantino joint. After talking about how the movie itself holds up (spoiler: really well!), we move on to fights with the Ventures, QT's trademark alternate timelines, how epic moments are inevitably punctuated by frump, at-the-bank audio wallpaper, and Peanuts-apron guy's moment of glory.  C...

Welcome to our '90s Soundtrack Flashback mini-season! We're ranking the soundtrack albums from four legendary 1990s movies, starting with grunge-adjacent rom-com  Singles . We waded into the great plaid middle of this disc to talk about the insouciance of Cameron Crowe stories, when it's okay for grunge gods to laugh, the conversation between this genre and punk (and Zep), and "hard rock for...

"Blurred Lines," the sound of the summer of 2013, is compared (unfavorably) with a cold sore in today's episode, which pits Robin Thicke, TI, and Pharrell against Weird Al's screed against bad grammar and usage errors. Despairing of Shazam, continuing to die on the hill of "irregardless," and the tyranny of younger siblings over the #oldladywalk playlist...we're working through...

Thirty years after the death of frontman Kurt Cobain, Nirvana and their music still feel very close. Does that have anything to do with Weird Al's equally "defining" parody, a track that let Al "sell out" again after the disastrous  UHF experience...with a band at the bleeding edge of the sell-out conversation? The shroud of tragedy, the performance of self, rebellious chaos, a...

It's an all-time training-montage banger vs. Weird Al's vision for  Rocky XIII in today's episode, as we drop Wiki factoids, contemplate an all-depressing-follow-up-hits season, digress at length on Live's legal battles, and wonder when in Reagan's presidency the Me Decade became sentient. Greetings from the Sly Stallone industrial complex; get that sammich to go and listen to an all-new episode!...

You can't always control what people do with your art once it's out in the world -- something Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits may have learned the hard way with both the original "Money For Nothing" AND Weird Al's re-imagining of the song via a dream sequence in  UHF . Essential references versus essential songs, 20th-century TV's preoccupation with yokels, and resting Don Henley face...th...

It's that Airbnb pasta-taxonomy poster in pop-song form: "Lasagna," Weird Al's take on Los Lobos's take on Ritchie Valens's take on the Mexican folk song Sarah and her classmates dutifully droned during first-period Spanish. Before we cast our votes (and yours!), we talk about the restaurant from  Big , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dr. Melfi's ex-husband, Sophia Petrillo, forgetting the word...

Late-sixties melodrama meets early-nineties blockbuster in today's episode, as we contemplate who left the Barney cake out in the rain while comparing Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" and Weird Al's "Jurassic Park." Claymation, foiled cantatae,  The Odyssey ,  Godspell , and songs for when the coffee's kickin' in, plus the YouTube-comments bingo card and an "un-preciation...

The unique legacy of Tommy James and the Shondells adds another chapter today, as Weird Al contends with Tiffany's smash cover of "I Think We're Alone Now." We're discussing Jersey-girl aspirational fashion, budge sound that's a feature and not a bug, and that person you could know becoming that person everyone  does know. Take a break from sewing patches on your jean jacket and have a l...

Can Weird Al inch ahead in the season standings with "I Lost On Jeopardy," his parody of the Greg Kihn Band's "Jeopardy"? We're talking early adopters, terrible album-title puns we admire, second careers, cheap-but-creepy videos, and how MB's personal  Jeopardy! journey deepens his appreciation of this Yankovic joint. Tell 'em what they've won, Don Pardo! (It's either an all-ne...

This week's match-up pits The Presidents of the United States of America's "Lump" against Weird Al's "Gump"...but is it really a face-off if the original is two thirds of the way towards being the parody? What is the age of Al-wakening? What's the difference between "unserious" and "unpretentious"? Are butt-adjacent references the Yankovic equivalent of a Hi...

"What if we just........didn't." That's one of the questions confronting us as WE confront an out-of-character entry in the Weird Al songbook: "Fat." The problems don't start there; there's the cheap-sounding and turgidly self-serious original, "Bad"; by problematic artist Michael Jackson; the risible video by MJ, and the shortcutsy cruelty from WA...there's even an i...

Grab a tube sock for your privates: it's time to pit the Red Hot Chili Peppers against Weird Al! Before Mark makes the pun that drives our listenership numbers off a cliff, we're discussing the omnipresent Chilis hits "Under The Bridge" and "Give It Away"; how many songs Weird Al might have tried to fit his Flintstones joke set into before settling on these; the five items '90s...

Welcome to the Weird Al vs. Everybody season of MASTAS! We're looking at a couple dozen Weird Al Yankovic songs and the originals that inspired him, and choosing a winner in each match-up -- starting with Coolio homage "Amish Paradise"! Before we get into self-serious videos for movies we think might be fake, cultural appropriation of pre-tech societies, and how Stevie Wonder feels about...

The competition is over, but the discussion of comeback songs isn't -- and today's is about comebacks in the answer/clapback sense. Seven "answer" songs come under the MASTAScope, as well as the frequency with which Neil Young is told to shut it, Bavaria's unexpected move to Ireland, the  Judy Cycle opera we need to see, and pop songs that have become microplastics in their ubiquity. Vas...

It's time to declare a winner -- the definitive pop-music comeback song -- but the road to the final result is a twisty one. "Believe" and "Walk This Way" each crystallize the concept of the comeback, but in different ways, so to help us choose, we're watching videos, discussing the synecdoche of Cher, rummaging through a bin of PhD-thesis topics, and resisting arithmetic. Is t...

The semifinal round is, while somewhat predictable, still full of ups and downs, including Spelling Bee's interest in our works and days, the way Adam Lambert takes and gives meaning, how far is far enough for a song we actively dislike, Latin-phrase drag names, scary puppets,  and reader comments! Sorry about the sweaty-Reagan reference; distract yourself with our penultimate DCIAC episode. Our i...

We're down to eight great comeback songs; which ones will join the Do Call It A Comeback season's Final Four? We're quoting  Wayne's World , we're putting things in plaid place out of eight, we're remembering upsetting Beatles gifts, we're adding salt to temp tracks, and we're wondering why it so often seemed like nobody cared about Laura Branigan's reputation. Transmitting live-to-tape from the f...

The Sweet 16 is here, along with the return to numbered rankings...and the unkindest cuts of all, plus another Auto-Tune justice conversation, myriad matrices, Tracy Chapman's post-nineties Flintstones car, 92.5% of Cher's butt, unpleasant flashbacks to the sophomore dance, and the long wait for a muffin basket from Nick Rhodes. Quick, before another  UHF quote-fight breaks out -- walk THIS   way...