Song Of The Day 12/9/2014: Diana Ross & Bill Cosby - "Love Story"


Song Of The Day Outtakes 2014: Uh... well, this is awkward.

This was cut from Motown Week back in June because in the end I felt it was just too odd. It's from the 1971 TV special Diana!, and was the B-side of a single that featured the Jackson 5 doing a fairly decent cover of Traffic's "Feelin' Alright" on the A-side from the same show. But this piece is weird from the moment of conception: It's Ross and Cosby covering "Love Story" by Randy Newman, then still a cult favorite singer-songwriter, as a springboard for some kind of sketch in which Cosby mugs and hesitates while Ross, dressed up as a caricature of a little girl with an uncomfortably oversized dress and acutely curlicued pigtails, tries to keep herself from cracking up. Visuals, you say? Yes, we have some.

I mean, I didn't even know what I was going to say about this in June, let alone now. At the time, in 1971 that is, I suppose it was adorable how children played with adult conventions their elders parlayed in front of them, so maybe some very cordial but stern homemakers found this adorable from the comforts of their plastic-covered furniture. Of course many of the people who saw this special are now dead, and in such recumbency do not keep with with current, sordid events. We with tiny strands of memory still attached to the Play-Doh of our infancy, though, are feeling the creeps for two now.

Yeah, I'm just going to casually walk away from this. I got some papers to take care of. God.

(On a related note, Google image searches for "Bill Cosby 1971" no longer bring up many images of Bill Cosby from 1971. I get lots of pictures of him from the present looking surly and enervated, but nothing from 1971.)

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