"Love Me Like You Do" by Boyce Avenue (Cover of Ellie Goulding's song from the Fifty Shades of Grey Original Soundtrack), Friday, January 15, 2021
This is one of the most cringe-worthy stories from my teaching experience. And of course all names have been changed. Five years ago the first grade middle school students put on a program. In Korea, first grade middle school equates to seventh grade. The show consisted of presentations for special English classes the student did that semester. Then the English singing class came to stage. A student started playing some stiff piano music and five students started singing in unison. The song was "Love Me Like You Do." Two girls took turns singing the verses and three boys awkwardly joined in the chorus. When they all sang, it reminded me of when the Peanuts kids sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" at the end of Charlie Brown Christmas and of Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny putting on a highly inappropriate South Park style musical. As Tina* (not real English name or Korean name) sang "I'll let you set the pace, 'cause I'm not thinking straight" my foreign English teacher coworker put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. She turned to me and said, "This is so inappropriate. I feel like I'm going to get questioned by the police for just sitting here." I glanced up at the class's teacher, a pretty middle aged Korean church lady. Her English was pretty good. She was sitting in the front row moving her hand to rhythm, mouthing the words to her students, as would any teacher would do for a normal song.
EVERY INCH OF YOUR SKIN. Ellie Goulding's album, Delirium is one of my favorite pop albums of the last decade. This song is only partially ruined from this experience. It is best to divorce it from that awful movie whose actors act as if they they are completely aware that middle schoolers would be singing the songs from the movie. Fifty Shades of Grey troubles me for several reasons. First of all it's a love story and BDSM is merely a plot device known as the lover's test. It's kind of like in Pride and Prejudice how Mr. Darcy says something rude about Elizabeth within her hearing. Elizabeth then spends the novel trying to change Darcy and they eventually fall madly in love (I'm not actually sure if that's the story because I've never been able to keep my mind engaged when reading watching the movie). However, by putting BDSM as the that jerkish thing, we add layers of abuse. The soundtrack to the movie adds more layers onto this to cement an emotional entanglement as Anastasia finds pieces of Christian's soul when he beats her in his dungeon. You'd expect to hear Nine Inch Nails or something freaky, but no, it's Ellie Goulding or The Weeknd or Ed Sheeran. The result is it's got housewives all hot and bothered and kinksters all bothered and not hot and nobody wins.
UNDER COVERS. I chose this song by Boyce Avenue. Some of their covers are better than the originals. Some of their covers would use a stylistic change. This one's pretty good. It's simple. Just piano and voice. Listen to it and don't think about middle schoolers singing it.
The original:
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