Cottie – Get You There
There are a lot of emotions that popular music can cover. It’s the reason, perhaps, why, in spite of falling off the charts, rock music is still the soundtrack of choice for the majority of film productions.
However, in the honesty of fairness, the two feelings that rock does best to describe are joy and emotional turmoil. In their purest forms, neither of these are easy to tackle. Sure, the audience is likely to want songs that talk about these two, but the artists that reach for the public’s cash, usually end up missing their hearts.
Malaysia’s Cottie, on the other hand, does a great job at sonically representing emotional upheavals on the song Get you there. A compound of beautiful arpeggios and jagged guitar lines, this is a single that scores highly on the Soul Chart.
Frally – Girls Just Want To Have Fun (feat. Rufus Wainwright)
Few other songs have enjoyed quite the bounteous and varied shelf life of Girls Just Want To Have Fun. Written by Robert Hazard as a punk-garage number, by far the best version, the tune would end up becoming a staple of 1980s MTV after Cyndi Lauper’s bouncy and colourful performance.
This is where it’s stayed in the eyes of millions, although some artists, like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, have covered it in its original style. We live in a world where pop music has been here long enough to be treated as an artefact. In much the same manner that Shakespeare gets reinterpreted in all sorts of strange ways in a bid to keep the Great Bard relevant, so too pop songs get reassembled. It’s happened to Back to black and Everybody wants to rule the world as the songs found a new audience through their use in soundtracks.
A formula for success in the music world cannot be ignored, of course. Frally creates a great, soulful, slowed-down version of Girls Just Want To Have Fun that has already found fame through soundtrack use. It’s a beautiful performance, that has little in common with either the pop or punk versions of the tune. It even has Rufus Wainwright murmuring melancholically towards the latter stages of the song. In short, it’s a big-budget reboot.
