That time a yodeler saved the planet from an alien invasion

Plus, Ann Powers sits down with PJ Harvey to unpack a brilliant creative legacy.

View this email online July 8, 2023 by Stephen Thompson We look back at the legacy, and unlikely revival, of a long-faded best-seller; plus, Ann Powers sits down with PJ Harvey to unpack a brilliant creative journey. Edward Miller/Getty Images It’s become tradition for my family to spend the Fourth of July watching a vaguely patriotic movie in which things are blown up in pursuit of a common good. Independence Day, both National Treasure movies, Team America: World Police … you get the idea. This year, we chose the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!, in which an overstuffed cast must fend off an army of killer Martians. Released in late 1996, the film drew on the legacy of cheesy alien-invasion and disaster movies, and culminated in a couple of major musical reveals. [This missive contains several Mars Attacks! spoilers. Stop reading now if you wish to remain in the dark about this 27-year-old film and the fate of its bloodthirsty villains.] Given that parts of Mars Attacks! take place in Las Vegas, it wasn’t a huge surprise that Tom Jones, already an established presence in three decades of movies and TV, would pop up in several scenes — first performing “It’s Not Unusual” and later as part of a small band of heroes who make their escape from a city under siege. The bigger surprise was the identity of the musician whose voice, when blared through a loudspeaker, vibrated at a frequency that caused Martian heads to explode. His name was Slim Whitman, and he was one of the best-selling musicians of the 20th century. As we watched the film, we quickly realized that I was the only person in the room who’d heard of him. Whitman, who died 10 years ago last month, had his centennial earlier this year. But both anniversaries passed almost entirely without notice, and it’s been fascinating to read up on the man and think about his place in pop-cultural history. I knew about Whitman’s gargantuan album sales because, as a kid, I’d seen the commercials for Whitman compilations, which breathlessly declared his success to be greater than that of The Beatles or Elvis Presley. (Though he only officially surpassed those artists in one specific metric, Whitman did sell tens of millions of records, and Elvis did tour as one of his openers in the 1950s.) By the late ’70s and early ’80s, as a snotty TV-obsessed kid, I’d fully processed Slim Whitman as a joke. A yodeler with an operatic streak, he leaned hard on his falsetto, which along with those TV ads’ grandiose claims of massive stardom — most of it taking place in other countries, two or three decades earlier — made him seem like an SNL sketch come to life. The thing is, Slim Whitman actually did have a massive cultural footprint. His 1955 hit “Rose Marie,” a cover from a 1920s operetta, topped the U.K. singles charts for 11 weeks, setting a record that stood until the early ’90s. (Take that, The Beatles and Elvis Presley!) He recorded many hundreds of songs in a stretch spanning from the 1940s to 2010. Those as-seen-on-TV mail-order compilations sold millions — and clearly imprinted themselves on the mind of one Tim Burton, enough that he made Whitman’s voice central to a blockbuster plot. The 20th century is littered with massive stars whose works, for various reasons, are barely remembered today. Vaughn Meader, an actor and comedian who won the 1963 album of the year Grammy, was a superstar until his act — a spot-on JFK impersonation — suddenly had no place in the national dialogue. Countless silent-film stars faded to oblivion upon the arrival of talking pictures; video killed the radio star; and on and on. In his own way, Whitman fell victim to a similar seismic shift, albeit a slower-moving one. A frictionless relic, he fell between genres at a time of musical revolution: too country for pop, too operatic and cosmopolitan for country. Like Lawrence Welk, Whitman found major success with audiences who embraced him as an avatar of a more genteel past — a nice way to make a living, but a hard path to cultural immortality. And yet! A couple of Whitman’s songs pop up on the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s new film Asteroid City, where they fit beautifully amid that hyper-specific Andersonian retro vibe. His presence in the film suggests that he’ll find a few new listeners, and that Whitman’s echoes will continue to reverberate at least in movie re-creations of his era. If nothing else, I’m gonna do my part — and confuse my Spotify algorithm — by listening to Whitman for the rest of the day. “Rose Marie” is legitimately awesome, and I don’t care if my 10-year-old self hears me say it. Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and hear There’s no one on earth better suited to interview PJ Harvey than our own Ann Powers, who’s spent decades reveling in and untangling the singer’s wonderfully challenging discography. In an interview for All Songs Considered, on the occasion of Harvey’s new album I Inside the Old Year Dying, the two go deep for 40 minutes. Whether you prefer to listen or read, we’ve got you covered. Speaking of Ann Powers and PJ Harvey, they’re both part of the latest installment of New Music Friday, for which I guest-hosted a discussion of new albums by Aluna, Dominic Fike, ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Little Dragon and, yes, PJ Harvey. CBS Mornings just profiled the Tiny Desk, calling our series “a cultural phenomenon bringing out the best in music.” (Tag yourself: I’m chuckling softly next to Bob Boilen in the archival clip introducing Laura Gibson.) Reanna Cruz reviewed Kim Petras’ new album Feed the Beast, in the process wrangling with a tricky paradox: “The bigger her celebrity becomes, the more unremarkable her music gets.” It’s a complicated story, and Reanna tackles it from every angle. Chloe Veltman wrote an obituary for the singer-songwriter CoCo Lee, who died Wednesday. Lee’s voice appeared in Disney’s animated Mulan, as well as the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Nate Chinen covered the opening of the Louis Armstrong Center, which brings the artist’s dazzling archive home to the humble block in Queens where he lived out his later years. Lara Downes profiled the endlessly inventive multidisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes. Tiny Desk Elizabeth Gillis/NPR Between the CBS profile and last week’s Juvenile blowout, the Tiny Desk has been having a moment — and that’s saying nothing of the set we just recorded with GWAR. This week, we’ve added more discoveries and delights to the series’ magnificent archives. First up: Omar Sosa (on piano), Seckou Keita (on a double-necked kora) and Gustavo Ovalles (on percussion) form a trio whose music, Felix Contreras writes, “sounded as if it was dropped directly from the heavens.” He’s not wrong. Also this week: Felix gets a two-fer, as he writes about a set by the eccentric Colombian space-age cumbia band The Meridian Brothers. One More Thing Don Walser, the man they called “the Pavarotti of the Plains,” covered “Rose Marie” in 2001. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! 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