Titles and Honorifics: Doctor My Eyes

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A number of my co-workers include their honorifics as part of their email signatures (PhD, MA English ...). De rigueur.

I once considered including mine: BA English  ... and then it seemed ... I don't know... fake ... un-called for. And then I earned a CNA "degree". (That's Certified Network Administrator) after 2 years of rather grueling courses and tests  - and it was no joke back then. Today ... Novell is on the junk pile of IT history (but the background knowledge I learned is not.). I thought to include it in my email signature, but opted against. (TWE) To What End?

In and between all this time, the world went from monikers such as "Master so-and-so", which was relegated to the dust-pile of history, and then we more or less trashed the use of "Miss so-and-so" in place of Ms... But it is location specific still. In Turkey, we still adhere to relatively formal appelations (with multiple honorifics, like the Germans (see below)

Honorific titles are in a state of transition. How about the business letter that used to start: "Dear Sir..."? How do you reformat that for this day and age? Is "Sir" an honorific of another past generation?

In Europe, some of the honorifics extend to several, back-to-back, such that we get both Prof.and  Dr. so-and-so: Prof. Dr. Jones.

Doctor. One of the most venerated honorifics you can achieve. So....Doctor My Eyes it is.



Lest it be forgotten:

70s Motown: Doctor My Eyes

Purchase The Jackson 5's Doctor My Eyes

Jackson Brown’s “Doctor My Eyes” is a staple: it’s his sound, one of his biggest hits, part of every live set he’s released. It’s a strange song, in a way: it’s about a world-weary, tired out soul, but the music is so upbeat—with that coursing piano line and the overdrive-tinged guitar—one can easily miss the point. Though, it’s more about accepting a certain numbness from seeing too much, the song evokes almost the exact opposite sensation.

Now, put little MJ—Michael Jackson—in front of the Jackson Five, and you’ve got an even stranger dichotomy: nothing the Jackson’s did in the ‘70s could ever sound downbeat. And their cover of Jackson Brown’s classic is one of my favorite cuts from their catalog.  Off their 1972 Looking Through the Windows, their take on the song is classic Motown to me.

Starting off with a chirping bird choir of doowoops, their take on the song churns through a great Motown styled strings and bashing drums soundtrack, while MJ trades off vocal duties with Jermaine, but providing his inimitable vocal harmony as a backing track

. This is Motown in the best way that Motown sound was its own unique entity, so self-evident of its perfection, vibrant and church choir worthy. I’ve always thought of that sound as something akin to the spiritual, rendered so perfectly and a part of nothing other than its own mythos and origins. A good cover, done on the Motown label, seems to do what a good cover should: reinvent and create anew from what we thought we knew.

70s Motown: I Want You Back

Graham Parker & The Rumour: I Want You Back (Alive)
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“I Want You Back” was recorded by the Jackson 5 as the first single the band released on Motown, on October 7, 1969, so I’m kind of pushing the theme a bit. But it became a Billboard No. 1 single for the week ending January 31, 1970, so there’s that.

By the time that Michael Jackson died in 2009, he had gotten pretty strange, what with the skin lightening, the nose, the glove, the monkey, the Neverland ranch and the sexual molestation allegations. But as a child myself when “I Want You Back” was released (MJ was born three years before me), it never struck me how strange it was that the Jackson Five songs about love and loss were being sung by an 11 year old child.

And yet, it is hard to deny that “IWYB” is a great song, with an incredible riff. It was ranked 121 on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and the notoriously picky Pitchfork listed it as the second best song of the 1960s (sorry, theme maker). Apparently, the Daily Telegraph said that it was “arguably the greatest pop record of all time.” As a lawyer in my non-blogging time, I’m always wary when someone uses the word “arguably,” but it is certainly in the conversation.

Not surprisingly, it has been covered many, many times. My favorite version is by Graham Parker & The Rumour, who regularly began performing the song on their 1979 tour supporting Squeezing Out Sparks, the album that briefly catapulted them to fame. It was originally released as a single, with “Mercury Poisoning,” one of the great record company “fuck you” records of all time, and later as part of the Live Sparks radio station promo disc (ultimately released to the public as a bonus CD with Squeezing Out Sparks). Parker’s version is, predictably, intense. That it is being sung by an angry adult seems way more appropriate than the pre-teen fronted original. But who says rock ‘n’ roll needs to be appropriate?

Proof that “I Want You Back” is a great song is demonstrated by the fact that it works in pretty much any genre. My friend Patrick wrote about Five Good Covers of the song, including the Parker version, here, and it also is successful in jazz instrumental and vocal versions, Brazilian versions, performed by a steel drum band (hey--that fits the last theme!), as an emo song, in Japanese, by former Michael Jackson backup singer Sheryl Crow (here, inaccurately, but more theme-appropriately, introduced by Jamie Foxx as a “1973 hit”) and, predictably, if excellently, by Bruno Mars.. Although, I’m not liking this version.

But if you want to see something incredible, again, thanks to Patrick, here’s a version with just Michael Jackson’s vocals.

Three Minute Pop Songs: I Want You Back

The Jackson 5: I Want You Back

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The thing about the perfect pop song is how infectious it is, how even if you want to not like it, it will find a way into your veins and make your toe tap without you realizing it, or have you humming it on the car on the way home from work. There is perhaps nothing as saccharine and infectious as the hits the Jackson 5 were putting out in the 1960's and 70's on the Motown label.

"I Want You Back" was released in 1969 with lead vocals by a preteen Michael Jackson and was one of their biggest hits. It is a perfect three minutes of toe-tapping, head bopping joy.