Published on Mar 23, 2004
Wow. Talk about not knowing where to start…
First off, let’s define song-poems. From the back of the DVD:
“In this little known sub-culture, ‘ordinary’ people send in their
heartfelt, but often bizarre, poems to companies that — for a fee
— turn them into full-fledged musical productions. Advertising in
the back of magazines, these companies lure the would-be
songwriters with promises of fame and fortune.” It goes without
saying, but we’ll say it anyway — fame and fortune rarely
materializes, and in fact many song-poem publishers are
pyramid-scheme snake oil salesmen, adding new costs on the basic
recording fee like Chico Marx gone haywire.
So why make a DVD about it? Well, there’s a couple of reasons.
First off, many of these songs are damned funny — whether funny in
their odd combination of ineptness and earnestness or in their
utter lack of reference to reality. Second, some of the song-poem
artists interviewed in
Off The Charts, the debut documentary from Jamie Meltzer,
are…um…unique individuals?
We have Caglar Juan Singletary, the author of “Nonviolent Tae
Kwon Do Troopers”, and his loving grandmother. We have the unique
song stylings of Nilson V. Ortiz. We have Gene Merlino, the fastest
vocalist in the West, who once (or so he says) recorded 80 songs in
four hours. We have a touching tribute to Rodd Keith, the man whose
contemporaries called him the greatest song-poem artist of all
time.
In short, ladies and gents, we have a veritable cornucopia of
Americana weirdness, all set to the some of the most gawd-awful
atrocious — yet strangely fascinating — music you’ve ever heard.
Meltzer makes the trivial seem utterly important, yet still
maintains a light touch with his direction; you end up caring about
this stuff, and go from laughing at it to laughing with it. Rarely
does crass, money-grubbing mercantilism turn into an art form. Off
The Charts documents the process with an unblinking eye, and you
end up having fun watching it.
Is this for everyone? Well, maybe not; one of the folks who
watched it with me actually thought it was a Christopher Guest
movie for the first fifteen minutes, and by the end we decided it
should be a Christopher Guest movie. But if Mitch and Mickey
can appear at the Oscars, why not care about song-poems?
Off The Charts is a funny, funny DVD.