Song Look Alike

[Breogan Heflin]

LyricsFirst verse

Talk about a coon a having trouble, think I have enough of ma own, Its all about ma Lucy Janey Stubbles, and shee has caused my heart to mourn, Thar's another coon barber from Virginia, In soci'ty he's the leader of the day, And now ma honey gal is gwine to quit me, Yes shes gona nad drove this coon away, She'd no excuse, to turn me loose, I've been abused, I'm all confused, Cause these words she did say.

Chorus

All coons look a like to me, I've got another beau, you see, And he's just as good to me as you, nig! ever to be, He spends his money free, I know we cant agree, So I don't like you no how, All coons look alike to me, me.

Second verse

Never said a word to hurt her feelings, always bou't her presents by the score, And now my brain with sorrow am a reeling, Cause she won't accept them any more, If I treated her wrong she may have loved me, Like all the rets she's gone and let me down, If I'm lucky I'm a gwinw to catch my policy, And win my sweet thing way from town, For I'm worried, Yes, I'm desp'rate, I've been Jonahed, And I'll get dang'rous, If these words she says to me. (Chorus)

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In the early 1890s he changed his name to Hogan to capitalize on the popularity of Irish performers, and over the next decade he formed his own minstrel troupes, began publishing songs, appeared with the famed Black Patti's Troubadours, and starred in the trailblazing Clorindy; or, the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), which was the first African American musical to appear on Broadway. In the early 1900s he settled in Harlem in New York City and continued to appear in vaudeville and in Broadway musicals. He died of tuberculosis in 1909.

In "All Coons Look Alike to Me" Hogan, in character, laments that his lover will sleep with any Black man because, as she says, "all coons look alike to me." This portrayal situates the song in the minstrel tradition of stereotyping Blacks as sexually promiscuous. Due to the offensiveness of the "coon" stereotype, the song was somewhat controversial when it appeared, and some Black performers voiced their dislike. Nevertheless, the song generated a flurry of interest in "coon" songs, a new genre in the popular ragtime (syncopated) style. Due to their popularity, many white and black composers and performers (including J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole) wrote in and performed the genre.

"All Coons Look Alike to Me" includes the basic characteristics of the "coon" song: dialect, a comedic story containing demeaning stereotypes of African Americans, a lively tempo, and syncopation. At this time syncopation (found in abundance in the "Black" genres of ragtime and "coon" song) was considered a characteristic of African American music.

I think everyone in life has that one person that they just fall so hard for, and so in love with, but no matter who you like afterwards, and no matter who you fall in love with from then on, you always kinda look for little pieces of them, in them, do they look like them, do they act like them, do they talk like them. This is a song named Lookalike.

A popular belief in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, holds that Willson wrote the song while staying in Yarmouth's Grand Hotel.[1] The song refers to a "tree in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well..."; the park being Frost Park, directly across the road from the Grand Hotel, which still operates in a newer building on the same site as the old hotel.[2]It also makes mention of the five and ten which was a store operating in Yarmouth at the time.

It is also possible that the "Grand Hotel" Willson mentions in the song was inspired by the Historic Park Inn Hotel in his hometown of Mason City, Iowa. The Park Inn Hotel is the last remaining hotel in the world designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and is situated in downtown Mason City overlooking Central Park.

Johnny Mathis recorded the song for his 1986 album Christmas Eve with Johnny Mathis; this version gained popularity after its inclusion in the film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Gradually, Mathis's recording began to receive wide radio airplay, and in later years this version became a Top 10 Christmas hit.

Perry Como and The Fontane Sisters with Mitchell Ayres & His Orchestra released their cover of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" on September 18, 1951. Their edition became one of the most successful versions of the song, which is still widely played today, with over 382 million streams on Spotify as of May 1, 2024. The song was used in the 2004 film The Polar Express.

Again, you may not write or record pop music. You may even despise the stuff. But knowing why a band would choose to re-use a formula like this will help you make better decisions about your own song arrangements (even if only to avoid having your music compared to Linkin Park.)

Why not even compare the blocks of super compressed audio that modern club music is? Wont they all look like a big block the whole song? I know this was posted back in 2007. But you should go ahead and compare that to records from the 70 or 80s also! WHY not?

This is an old article and those songs are from older albums where they mixed screaming with rap in between. For me it seems mostly like a genre thing. They changed it up with their later work. I actually like the evolution they did with their next albums and I think it shows versatility in their sound.

In case you had no childhood and don't know, Brenda Song is a 33-year-old actress known for playing early prototypes of the manic pixie dream girl on kid's shows like Nickelodeon's 100Deeds for Eddie McDowd and Disney Channel's The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.

Brenda Song is NOT, however, a 42-year-old racist banshee who screeches at her co-hosts on the talk show The Real: That's Jeannie Mai. In 2019, Twitter did not compute the difference between these two Asian women, despite their different ethnic backgrounds.

For a strange moment in 2019, Brenda Song became a trending topic with over 20k tweets shortly after rapper Young Jeezy confirmed long-standing rumors that he was dating Jeannie Mai on Instagram (as of March 2021 the couple is now married). Why? Because Mai has a history of fetishizing black men and was formerly married to a white, racist Trump supporter. And Jeannie Mae has said that the one celebrity she hates to be commonly mistaken for is Brenda Song.

So, after Jeezy confirmed he was dating Mai, a disgruntled fan called out Mai's history of racist comments by posting, "Here's Brenda Song's racist ass saying she only f**ks Black men but married white. I wish her and Young Jeezy all the best."

The commenter attached a clip of Mai declaring her love of Black men on The Real, with the bizarrely tone deaf caveat: "For me, dark meat on the side, white keeps me mean and lean. You know, that's why I married a white man."

While she attempted to smooth over her comment later, she only piled on more cringe-worthy statements: "I like a good brother, I do! I think they're cute!" She acknowledged the comment sounded "horrible," but after hearing her attempt to back-pedal, her co-host advised her she was only making it "sound worse, don't explain it!"

Hordes of commenters quickly pointed out the hypocrisy of calling out Mai's racist rhetoric while confusing her for another Asian female. Without knowing the joke that Jeannie Mai hates being confused for Song, the comment reads as another drop of ignorance in the bucket of Twitter vitriol.

But plenty of commenters defended the mix-up, even without knowing the context or being in on the joke. In the initial wave of over 20k tweets, those comments boiled down to: "Yeah, but they do look the same... Don't they?"

It's mystifying that so many could disagree on the facial similarities of two Asian women. But then again, maybe it's not. Yes, Song's parentage is Thai-American and Hmong while Mai's is Vietnamese and Chinese. Those are distinct, unique cultures, and Asians do not present a monolithic face.

But in America, where Asians only comprise about 5% of the population, representation of Asian faces in the media are still scant. Only 1% of Hollywood's leading roles are given to Asian actors, and even after Crazy Rich Asians' box office success, disparities in mainstream representation (and even pay) still continue.

As a result, while "they all look alike to me" is still a form of coded anti-Asian racism, that confusion is based in systemic erasure and underrepresentation of Asian faces in America. It's also eerily grounded in the science of how our brains perceive differences when we're simply not exposed to faces unlike our own.

Simply put: When your face is unlike 95% of the population, people are more likely to confuse you with someone else, because being marginalized in your own country, left out of your country's textbooks, and reduced to a "model minority" myth means that you're barely noticed in the first place.

Of course, the confusion hits very differently in 2021 amidst widely publicized spikes in hate crimes against Asian Americans, following a year of anti-Asian rhetoric from the former President of the United States. And none of this is to say enough about Mai's comments highlighting the history of racist, anti-Black sentiments woven into Asian communities (because fetishizing Black men as "dark meat on the side" while white men kept her "mean and lean" is just another form of anti-Black racism).

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