The Rose is the song my brother specified that he wished to have performed at his funeral. An atypical choice for him – he was mainly a hard rock kinda guy.
Anyway, it’s now on a short list of songs that is guaranteed to fuck me up completely if I listen to it. Especially that line, “It’s the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.” It makes me incredibly angry and sad. Poor dumb fucker – he knew how he was going to go, and he thought he was living. Damn it. (Yeah, O.D.)
So there’s no dichotomy for me.
I suspect that it’s as trite as anything ever recorded – but it’s totally emotionally devastating to me.
It’s pretty easy to dismiss this song, but just because it’s not particularly profound doesn’t mean it’s not a decent lyric. It certainly has some staying power and it’s less treacly-sweet than plenty of other songs.
I didn’t mention that I dug the film in a big way. That ouvre meant something to me, and I didn’t really piece it together until years later. It’s the same reason I went to see All That Jazz three times in two weeks at the local theatre.
The whole behind-the-scenes deconstructing performance pain behind the glitz thing. Got to me bigtime.
No surprise I went into the film business, where deconstructing a script happens a page at a time, a shot at a time.
It’s not German, but I believe our phrase is simply “empathetic embarrassment”. Simple enough.
As for the song, I do like it, but in the same way I like any Air Supply song, or maybe Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself”. Great songs, yes, and with the right circumstances they’ll make you bawl, but if you’re in a good mood there’s a chance they might just hit you as silly.
I just can’t write it off as sentimental schlock, not after observing every person in a video store fall silent as it played in Napoleon Dynamite. They slowly started to chuckle at the scene, but there was a genuine moment of beauty right there, if only for a second.
Just as a point of interest, the song was written by Amanda McBroom who, among other things, had a recurring role as Police Officer Sandi Welles in “Hawaii Five-O”.
I love it. I’ll admit it’s overplayed (and I’ve heard it sung at no less than half-a-dozen weddings), but it’s because it’s a beautiful song. My favorite versions are Bette, of course, and Johnny Cash (I don’t know if he ever recorded it, but I heard him sing it on a bootleg of a concert).
Of course I like Seal’s Kiss From a Rose even better. And Rose’s Turn from Gypsy is my favorite Broadway showstopper. Maybe it’s just a thing about songs with rose in the title.
I like the song all right, not only cause I think Midler sings it luffily but because it’s one of the few songs I can sing on key every single time because it stays in one octave.
Can we open up a thread about songs we have a love/hate relationship with? My most recent one is “Hallenback (sp?) Girls” by Gwen Stefani? It’s kinda catchy, but then it’s hard for me to like a song with the following lyrics: “Do you spell bananas ‘b-a-n-a-n-a-s’?”
I cannot stand that song, ever since I worked the spotlight for these guys. Nothing like listening to this guy impersonating Bette Midler night after night to make you NEVER WANT TO HEAR IT EVER AGAIN. ever.
Hi, Larry! You mentioned this post in the other thread, and I was inspired to check it out. FTR, I don’t think it’s an overshare. And I am sorry for your loss.
My take on it: I also have a memory attached to this song. Now, I haven’t seen Napoleon Dynamite, so I don’t know if this story in any way coincides with the scene you guys are talking about (Happy Hands Club?). But when I was in elementary school, the speech teacher taught us all sign language, and anyone who wanted to, could be part of the act in the spring variety show where we would sign the words to various songs.
Among our repertoire was “Here Comes the Sun”, “Morning Has Broken”, “Tiny Dancer”, and some others I don’t remember. (Yes, it was the late '70s. And early '80s.) But the one that really brought the house down was “The Rose.”
My mom told me that she’d cried through the whole thing, and of course my reaction was :rolleyes: But years later, my dad unearthed the home video he’d taken of our performance (we had one of the prototypical, shoulder-breaking camcorders), and I started tearing up almost immediately. I’d never realized what a compelling sight it was: forty or so kids, all signing in unison, to that song. (Well, all the songs, really. Signing is an amazing thing, almost an art in itself. But especially that song.)
Now, what’s the deal with that scene in ND? Can anyone summarize it in a spoiler box?
But it’s just about the one “serious” Bette Midler song about which I can say that. Maybe y because I was exposed to it as an impressionable teenager and it grabbed some then-still-unformed corner of my psyche. But it did, so there.
A gorgeous song. One of the first I ever learned by ear on the piano. By the time I was 17 I had played it so many times I got sick of it and I haven’t played it or listened to it voluntarily for the last 20 years. It did mean a lot to me as I was growing up, though. I wonder how I would react if I listened to it now. Hmm.
