'Crazy if you love it'

'Crazy if you love it'

I'm appalled to hear that Norah Jones will be doing a cover version of the old Dolly Parton hit, 'Nine to Five'. The movie from which the song derives is one of my all-time favourites. Apparently, when I was four, it and Star Wars were all that I'd watch. The acerbic Lily Tomlin, amiable Dolly Parton and demure wallflower Jane Fonda find themselves kidnapping their sexist boss, Dabne Coleman, after they think they've accidentally poisoned him. (Lily, for the record, was always my favourite actress in this film.) Though I hardly realized it when I was four, this is a quintessential second-wave feminist movie, and the strident piano bass riff that opens the film, as Jane Fonda stumbles along the streets at peak hour on her way to work for the first time since her husband dumped her -- it's as though she's having trouble keeping up with the piano beat and not the traffic -- is a classic.

The soporific, shopping-mall friendly Norah Jones is totally inappropriate for this song. If it has to be redone, it should be performed by a trio of black divas. Not a la Moulin Rouge, where the singers performing 'Lady Marmalade' tried to outwarble each other. It has to be a group whose members are happy to sing with each other, and so preserve the message of feminist solidarity that lays at the film's core. Maybe Destiny's Child, with a rap interlude by Queen Latifah.

I've thought about this too much.