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Marilyn Brings ‘Diamonds’ to Vinyl

Another compilation of Marilyn’s music is out now on vinyl. Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend is released by Bellevue Entertainment, and features 15 classic tracks. (The cover photo -with added sparkle – was taken by Bob Beerman in 1953.)

1. Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend
2. A Fine Romance
3. My Heart Belongs To Daddy
4. Running Wild
5. Some Like It Hot
6. I`m Gonna File My Claim
7. Two Little Girls From Little Rock
8. I Wanna Be Loved By You
9. Heat Wave
10. River Of No Return
11. One Silver Dollar
12. Do It Again
13. After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It
14. I’m Through With Love
15. Kiss

Thanks to A Passion for Marilyn

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Remembering Marni Nixon in ‘Yours Retro’

Hollywood’s voiceover artists are featured in the May issue of Yours Retro, including Marni Nixon who helped Marilyn hit the high notes on ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ in the soprano introduction and again near the end. For the most part, though, the voice you’ll hear on that classic track from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is Marilyn’s.

Thanks to Fraser Penney

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Marilyn’s ‘Diamonds’ Inspires NZCA Lines

A pink-suited Michael Lovett, aka ‘indietronica’ act NZCA Lines, becomes the latest pop star to channel Marilyn’s ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in the bizarre video for his latest single, ‘Pure Luxury’, Billboard reports.

“Lovett, who co-directed the video alongside Alina Rancier, notes that they drew both from American Psycho and a gender-reversed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (starring Marilyn Monroe) and specifically points to the line in the song ‘smile while we’re holding back tears’ as one of the underlying themes.

‘I think that embodies the approach we took: a superficial beauty hiding a grotesque underbelly,’ Lovett tells Billboard. ‘I always pictured this song as a go-go freakout, like those 1960s musical TV shows with dancers and a colorful stage set.’

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Sugar’s Sad Love Songs

While this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival has been cancelled, titles from the program will air on the US channel, including Some Like It Hot on April 17, Intallaght reports. Meanwhile at the Boston Herald, Stephen Schaefer extols the joys of rediscovering classic films at home.

“I was struck the other night how fantastically satisfying it was to be channel surfing and suddenly catch the end moments of a movie I’m seen many times, Some Like It Hot. As I watched Marilyn Monroe unhappily sing her sad love songs (‘I’m Through with Love’) with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators as Tony Curtis drops the drag to proclaim his love, as Jack Lemmon confesses to Joe E. Brown’s Osgood why they can’t marry (‘I’m a man!’), knowing every line, every musical cue, every camera angle was suddenly akin to the Proust madeleine, a flashback to when I saw Billy Wilder’s masterpiece the very first time.  To thinking how marvelous Monroe was/is/will always remain.  Wondering what the movie must have meant to me as a kid with its cross dressing, dancing (‘Cha-cha-cha’) and romantic black-and-white recreation of that fabled Roaring Twenties era. “

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Dylan ‘Plays It’ for Marilyn

“Guitar Slim going down slow
Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe …”

One of our true living legends, Bob Dylan has just released his first original song in eight years. ‘Murder Most Foul’ is a seventeen-minute ballad about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and its lingering impact on the American psyche. Among the many cultural references within this extraordinary work is our MM, whom Dylan has long admired (see here.)

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Camila Cabello’s Bombshell Homage

Back in 2018, Camila Cabello referenced ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ while performing her hit song, ‘Havana’, at the iHeart Radio Awards (see here.) Now in the video for her latest single, ‘My Oh My’, Camila plays a vintage movie star who ditches her studio bosses (and her Monroesque blonde bombshell image) to party with bad boy rapper DeBaby.

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Eminem References Marilyn, Hitchcock and Tate

Rapper Eminem’s surprise new ‘horrorcore’ album, Music to Be Murdered By, is supposedly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, but its violent, misogynistic themes are nothing new. In a post cataloguing the album’s cinematic references, Screen Rant‘s Q.V. Hough notes that among the new tracks, ‘Little Engine‘ includes a sampled intro from Hitch himself, plus a nod to murdered actress Sharon Tate and a drug-fuelled allusion to Marilyn (‘I’m losin’ control / Heroin and blow, Marilyn Monroe …’) Neither is very accurate, as Tate was stabbed to death, not shot as Eminem claims; and Marilyn never used heroin or cocaine (blow.) Both women deserve better.

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Normani Brings ‘Diamonds’ to Harley Quinn

Rappers Megan Thee Stallion & Normani collaborate on ‘Diamonds’, taken from the soundtrack to Birds of Prey, the new Harley Quinn movie due out in February. We have already seen Margot Robbie recreate Marilyn’s signature number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the upcoming film’s trailer.

Normani goes one step further in her video, though, reworking lyrics from the original song, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’, with a hip-hop twist, and vamping it up in pink. As Brooke Marine reports for W, this is the first time the song has been sampled – and we even hear Marilyn cooing ‘Tiffany … Cartier …’ at the fade-out.

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Marilyn Inspires ‘Summer Camp’ Romance

Marilyn’s iconic role as Sugar Kane is one of the inspirations behind ‘Women in Love’, the new single from British indie-pop duo Summer Camp‘s upcoming second album, Romantic Comedy. Singer Elizabeth Sankey has also directed a documentary of the same name, which you can read about here.

“‘Women In Love’ is about falling for a woman who is packed full of idiosyncrasies and complexity. Obviously the manic pixie dream girl trope of rom coms has been discussed in great detail, but for us this song is less about those more modern heroines, and more about the classic rom com queens who completely befuddle and complicate the lives of the men who are attracted to them. It’s Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, and Goldie Hawn in The Housesitter. It’s about how their love interests feel so lucky to be adored by such strange, complicated, and surprising women.'”

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