A postscript to the GLEE post
Internet rumor around NEXT week’s GLEE would have it believe it’s an amazing episode – and I hope they’re right, I hope it reaches that meld of music and plot that had its absolute pinnacle during the Lea Michele/Idina Menzel Les Miserables’ inspired GLEEgasm – but I am not heartened by the song choices.
So far we know about (and, SPOILERS!):
“One of Us”
“I Want to Hold Your Hand”
“Only the Good Die Young”
“Papa Can You Hear Me”
“Losing My Religion” (You can hear Cory Monteith doing massive injustice to this song here. )
None of these songs are bad. Some of them (R.E.M.) are epic. But GLEE often falls into a trap that makes them seem as though they chose their songfest by typing the theme of that week’s show into an iTunes search box. We need GOD songs! We need something with RELIGION in the title!
If GLEE was really “finding religion” as the ads would have you believe, where are the actually contemporary religious tracks? Not that I’m such a fan of them or can pick them out of a dusty heap – I can’t – but isn’t it a little shortsighted to skip over this HUGE sect of the music industry featuring songs that might actually lend weight to theme and emotion rather than offer a thin-strand-at-best connection to religion? Losing My Religion is not about religion. Only the Good Die Young was probably chosen for that line about the confirmation.
That would be fine if they managed to reimagine the song enough visually that the words took on new meanings, that they weren’t just convenient karaoke numbers – but that has never been the rule with GLEE and I am not sure it will be so this time, either.
The only real nod to religion I see here, and it’s tenuous, is One of Us (“What if God was one of us / just a slob like one of us / just a stranger on the bus / trying to make his way home.”) Appropriately light on the heavy religio-drama and raising questions high school teens might find themselves conflicted over here… at least it’s relevant.
So, I’m cautiously pessimistic that this episode will capture something with the music it performs rather than despite the music it performs. That’s not to say the episode can’t be awesome and moving through its script and acting but GLEE’s outright best nonmusical moments don’t come close to other shows’ middling ones. GLEE is at its best when music and plot rise together and meet – when what they’re singing about is as important to the plot as the plot itself. This is starting to feel as though they really want to do a religious episode but don’t want to risk turning off an audience with actually religious songs.
We’ll see.
PS – there had HOT DAMN better be a blowout Mercedes gospel number. It SEEMS like there will be in the promos. All bets are off if there isn’t. Jesus himself could appear in the episode and it will have been a failure.
Blasphemously yours.
