Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen) whose talking it?

Biggirl · December 20, 2003, 7:17pm

The song is supposedly by Baz Luhrmann. Did he write it? That’s not him talking is it? Doesn’t he have a thick Australian accent?

Jonathan_Chance · December 20, 2003, 7:19pm

No, it’s some other guy.

And the words are originally from a column by a Chicago-based writer who’s name I forget but it was NOT Kurt Vonnegut.

Jonathan_Chance · December 20, 2003, 7:23pm

Ah. From Amazon.com:

One of the most surreal singles in memory, “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” has an even stranger story than you’d imagine: in 1998, a student lifted the text of an article columnist Mary Schmich had written for the Chicago Tribune and started sending it around the world, crediting it as a commencement speech given at MIT by Kurt Vonnegut. Film director Baz Luhrmann (who had taken a big part in designing the soundscapes of his films Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) got his hands on it just as he was working on a remix of Rozalla’s 1992 dance hit “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good).” Within a day, Luhrmann had hired a local actor to read the text, and a single was born. It’s a wonderfully surreal pop-cultural moment on an album that strives for such things. Luhrmann’s modus operandi involves the remixing and customizing of tracks until they have a fabulous sheen, and it owes a lot to the equally media-attuned Malcolm McLaren (and especially to McLaren’s 1989 album Waltz Darling). Though he throws in a handful of time-tested songs (Doris Day’s “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps,” La Bohème’s “Che Gelide Manina”), Something for Everybody is very much of a specific moment–and though the moment may pass, fans will enjoy revisiting it time and again. --Randy Silver

And the actor is credited as Quindon Tarver

Biggirl · December 20, 2003, 7:28pm

Why thank you Mr. Chance. Do you by chance have the scoop on the young boy who sounds like a grown woman that sings the chorus?