Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as ‘sexy stewardess.’”
So begins the non-fiction book that’s the basis of one of my favorite film trilogies, Pitch Perfect!
I do like this type of non-fiction, and I’ve read several similar titles (Pledged - Secret Life Of Sororities and The Class are two recent books that come to mind), but for me, quite a lot of the charm of the book Pitch Perfect is picking out all the little references that show up in the film Pitch Perfect. I already knew (Thank you, Dr. Google!) that all the competitions were real competitions, but it was super cute to see that Divisi, the female a cappella group from the University of Oregon, IS the Barden Bellas! The movie picked up so many Divisi details, from their “sexy stewardess” outfits with “unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves” to the attrition in numbers that led to their desperation early one fall semester to pick up new recruits, ANY recruits… and then in walks a plucky new girl. When I found their album, Undivided, on Spotify and played it?
It was like the Barden Bellas were singing to me! In later parts of the book, there’s a very node-like tonsillectomy! There’s a weirdly mean rival group! Even Divisi's much-touted performance of “Yeah,” when I found it on YouTube, had some similar choreography to the Bellas’ show-stopping number at the end of Pitch Perfect.
For a fun comparison, here's the Bellas' Pitch Perfect performance:
The chapters on the male a cappella groups didn’t excite me nearly as much, although I still found them interesting to read. Yes, the album Code Red by the Tufts Beelzebubs is impressive--
--and it was interesting to read about the controversy, but… then there’s another whole discussion of their next album, Shedding, and how IT was made, and a list of all the awards that IT won, and we’ve just really gotten into the weeds of collegiate a cappella album creation here.
The chapters on the Hullabahoos were more compelling, probably because Rapkin depicted them as being a LOT more fun… or a lot more of a hot mess. Whichever. Like, a Hullabahoo member literally peed on the Beelzebubs’ car?!? A Hullabahoo knocked into the CEO of the major company they’d been flown out to perform for. The Hullabahoos were invited to sing the national anthem at a Lakers game--and then piddled around their hotel for so long that when they finally left they got caught in a traffic jam and THEY MISSED IT. Just, OMG you guys.
I had a lot of fun ready referencing the groups and performances throughout the book, and I’d totally have paid for an accompanying CD/DVD, even though many of the performances that I found were so impossibly corny that I couldn’t actually watch them. Is there a word for someone singing and performing so earnestly that you high-key want to die while you watch them? But the ready-reference was important research, because some groups were so awesome that I didn’t want to die watching them! “Yeah” is fun and adorable, and the Hullabahoos’ “Royals” is well-sung and surprisingly understated, considering the singers are all wearing voluminous robes in cartoonish prints.
While I enjoyed what I read, I really wished we could have dug deeper into the inner workings of some of these musicians, something that I totally get possibly wasn’t an option, because, you know, they’re real humans and we don’t necessarily get to own their thoughts. But some of these singers clearly had a LOT going on that impacted and was impacted by their a cappella passion, and I’d love to hear more about how an obsessive passion like that affected them. Lisa Forkish turned down her dream school for YEARS to sing with Divisi, but then later… she finally went to that dream school! What helped her decide to move on? Ben Appel was the music director of the Beelzebubs, and then all of a sudden, he had to leave the entire school to get help with his mental health. Surely, his all-consuming a cappella commitments did NOT help with his struggles… or did they? I’m very interested in the world of extreme hobbies, and I would LOVE to know.
The only real problem with Pitch Perfect, and the reason why it’s a three-star book instead of a five-star one for me, is Rapkin’s use of offensive language regarding gender expression and sexual identity. There's a whole "funny" story that hinges on a homophobic slur that Rapkin himself writes--he's not even quoting anyone!--and Rapkin really needs to say that he’s sorry. Just because of that, I was stoked to see that in chapter eight, he makes fun of a poster that a Divisi member makes by hand, in which “a cappella” is spelled incorrectly--and then in chapter twelve, who is it who writes the word “a capella” in his very own book? Why, none other than Rapkin himself! Check your spelling AND your homophobic language, Mister!
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