Download The Real Dream Girl Movie In Mp4
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With three Golden Globe awards and eight Academy Award nominations, Dreamgirls has renewed interest in the girl groups of the 1960s as well as Motown Records, the Detroit-based company that became one of the most influential labels of the time. The movie, based on the 1981 Broadway play, tells the story of a small black record label and its star singers whose success crosses over to the pop charts. Although loosely based on The Supremes, the movie is a work of fiction. The real story of the 1960s girl groups, however, changed American music forever.
The girl group phenomenon reached its height between 1960 and 1963, though many scholars recognize The Chantel's 1958 song "Maybe" as the beginning of girl groups' commercial success. In 1961, The Shirelles reached number one on the pop charts with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" That same year, Motown got its first pop hit with The Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman." A black-owned recording company having such a hit was, at that time, revolutionary.
Hundreds of girl groups recorded songs during the sixties, but hardly any of them were seasoned musicians. The groups, usually made up of three to five singers, often formed through glee clubs and high schools, with many having backgrounds in church gospel music. Their songs employed a lead voice with backup harmonies, and the music was a hybrid of soul, rhythm and blues, pop and 1950's doo-wop.
The success of girl groups had much to do with the market. The post-war baby boom had produced more teenagers than ever before, and the 1950s brought the explosion of a new teen culture with its own music, clothes, movies and dancing. Teenage life became synonymous with pop culture, and with many of these teenagers having money to spend, the record market flourished.
Teenagers listening to popular music during this time heard songs with voices that sounded like their own. They watched performers on stage who were their age. For American girls to see female groups was something new. "That really had never happened before and it really hasn't happened since," says Warwick. "We get young teenage girls at front and center in mainstream pop culture."
Crossing Color Lines
Yet before girl groups, it was easier for a song to cross over than for artists themselves to do, says Warwick. And, of course, white artists also re-recorded songs done by black artists. "We listen to Pat Boone covering Little Richard songs now and it's just laughable," she says, "but at the time that was a real phenomenon. Little Richard's song 'Tutti Frutti' [could] access that white suburban middle-class audience, but Little Richard himself [couldn't] do that. With girl groups, that becomes more possible."
That isn't to say teenagers weren't also listening to the original Little Richard. But in Motown, Berry Gordy knew he could achieve both the musical and social aspect of crossover with well-groomed, sweet young girls.
Girl groups subject matter articulated a common teenage experience, regardless of race, even as the culture around them was slow to catch up. They sang to mixed audiences about courtship, boys, parties, parents and parents not letting them go to parties to court boys. But they also sang about love and crushes, mostly from the position of a patiently waiting, yearning girl. This seemingly passive attitude and general lack of depth in song subject matter makes it easy to dismiss girl groups music as trivial and, in contemporary terms, less than radical.
But the songs were sometimes closer to real life than expected. For instance, "Please Mr. Postman" is in some ways a classic girl group song, with a girl waiting for a letter from a boy. But this song inevitably gained meaning from the times in which it was heard.
Schaffner of The Marvelettes talks about the song's political significance in Marc Taylor's book The Original Marvelettes: Motown's Mystery Girl Group. "We were all surprised when 'Postman' hit so big," she says. "The most surprised was Motown. But then again, hindsight is that there was a lot going on when 'Postman' was released. We were into, or going into the Vietnam War. We had a lot of young men that were leaving home for the first time going into the military, and, of course, some never returned. The timing of 'Postman' was excellent. When my brother went into the military, I know how anxious I or my mother or sister would be looking for a letter or something like that from him."
Even when girl groups didn't set out make political statements or songs, the politically charged times came to them. In 1967, Martha and The Vandellas were singing in Detriot when the riots broke out. From the stage, they told the audience what was happening outside. Everywhere they went on tour that summer, there were riots. Soon people started talking about how the group's hit song "Dancing in the Streets" was about social uprising. This was not what Martha Reeves thought of when she sang the song. In Women of Motown, she says, "What I related the song to was my experience in Rio at Carnival time, and in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. It was a time for people to forget who they are and just get with each other to be happy and loving and dance and rejoice."
In Motown, Berry Gordy had a specific formula for making a hit song. He gathered a stellar group of area jazz musicians (all men), known collectively as The Funk Brothers. He stuck with a select group of songwriters who were told to write songs in first person and present tense. The Motown sound was characterized by a straight-forward, grounded beat (bass and drums) and melodic hook. It also employed call-and-response vocals and heavy use of tambourine. In New York, Phil Spector produced girl group songs using his famous "wall of sound," a production technique that employed a huge amount of instruments and layered track after track on top of each other. He created a thick, roaring, echoing sound, like The Ronettes' recording of "Be My Baby."
The girls rarely wrote their own songs, but neither did the male groups of the time. Instead, says Whitall, it was more of a movie studio system. "This is not a singer-songwriter thing, where they were coming in with their own material," she says.
Outside Motown, The Shangri-Las were singing songs about good girls loving bad boys, such as "Leader of the Pack." In the mid-to-late 1960s, they took on more of a tough girl image, wearing spike heels and tight leather pants to match their delinquent themes. The Ronettes, who were biracial, also became famous for their bad-girl short skirts, high-piled hair and thick eyeliner.
Male promoters did have ultimate control over the groups, and in what is arguably a tradition in the recording industry, some musicians were exploited: they didn't get credit for their work, it was released under a different name or they didn't get royalties.
The girl group boom began to fizzle in the late 1960s, in part because of the British Invasion. But The Beatles themselves were obsessed with American girl groups and even sang girl group songs, including "Please Mr. Postman," The Shirelles' "Baby It's You" and The Cookies' "Chains."
The only girl group able to compete with The Beatles on the American charts was The Supremes, who maintained popularity into the early 1970s, even though Diana Ross had left the group. Yet The Supremes aren't necessarily representative of the rest of girl group culture. Says Warwick, "Even from the very beginning, their songs are a little more adult in the themes," such as in the songs "Where Did Our love Go" and "Stop in the Name of Love." These grown-up themes contrast with The Shangri-Las singing healsongs about teenage drama. "At Motown, The Marvelettes, The Velvelettes, groups like that, are much more clearly identified as teenagers," she says, "and arguably that's why The Supremes had more longevity. They were able to transition into becoming adults with greater ease."
Manic Pixies, like other female archetypes, crop up in real life partly because fiction creates real life, particularly for those of us who grow up immersed in it. Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing.
Inspired by a true story, this picture book is about a girl who refused to allow societal rules to stop her from her musical dreams. In Cuba, girls were not drummers, but one girl dreamed of pounding drums big and small and making amazing music. Everyone said that only boys could be drummers though, so she kept quiet about her dreams.Everywhere she went though she could hear drumbeats that were all her own. Finally the girl dared to start drumming on real drums and she joined her sister in an all-girl band. Her father did not approve of her drumming but eventually allowed her to play for a teacher to see if she could really drum. And she could!
Engle, known for her gorgeous poetic books for older readers, has created a marvelous picture book here. Reading like poetry, the book looks deeply at a girl who refused to give up her dream to play the drums, even as she hid the dream deep inside herself. It is a book that celebrates artistic gifts even as it works to dismantle gender stereotypes and show that girls have the same artistic skills as boys do. The build up in the book is done with real skill, allowing readers to thrill at her accomplishments as her hard works comes to fruition.
Lopez gives us a bright-colored glimpse of Cuba in this picture book. Filled with lush plants, starlight, water and birds, the illustrations shine on the page. Done in acrylic paint on wood board, they have a great texture to them as well as an organic quality that adds to their depth on the page. The result is a picture book that is vibrant and rich.
Both stood speechless. Unlike the rabble he found littering the streets, here was a beauty worth admiring. After months of chiseling, carving, and crafting, there she stood: his idol, his beauty, his beloved.
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