Barbra Streisand’s Favorite Duet: With Herself!

 


Thanks to mmontana.
 

[Hit this link, for incredible highlights from Just for the Record, including entire recordings.]
 

I know, I know. Why am I re-posting a Barbra Streisand music video? Because it’s a Barbra Streisand video.

Granted, she’s the most obnoxious person in Hollywood, a town filled to bursting with insufferables.

Granted, I hate her as a witless, yet opinionated hag, I hate her as an embarrassment to America, as an embarrassment to world Jewry, as an embarrassment to motherhood.

Hell, even her leftwing friends in Hollywood hate her!

How much do they hate her? In 1991, she should have won the Oscar for best director for The Prince of Tides, a masterpiece.

 

 

And yet, the Motion Picture Academy refused to so much as nominate her for best director! Instead, they nominated black supremacist propagandist John Singleton, for the amateurish, blaxploitation pic, Boyz 'n the Hood.

And in 1968, an equal number of voters chose Katharine Hepburn as Best Actress for a glorified supporting role in the treacly Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as chose Streisand for her bravura performance as Fanny Brice in the dramatic musical, Funny Girl.

And she ain’t what she used to be as a singer. At 69, she sounds like Lena Horne. [Not that there’s anything wrong with that.] But for about 30 years, she was God’s gift to music.

In 1955, a then-13-year-old Barbra Streisand made a demo tape of “You’ll Never Know,” one of the most popular and best songs of World War II, when she was a baby in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I’ve never heard another 13-year-old who could sing like that.

In the late 1980s, she dug up the old demo’s master and re-mastered it, with all of the bells-and-whistles invented since 1955. She made the well-preserved tape sound like a scratchy old record, and sang the same song, as a middle-aged women, lamenting the loss of her childhood innocence, and overlaid the one sound on the other. She laid the track for her 1992 album, Just for the Record.

In the video, she can be seen directing the assembled studio orchestra while singing.

I know—Barbra Streisand loving and lamenting her lost, younger self involves narcissism and self-caricature on steroids. If you think about it, it leads to endless levels of pornographic irony.

For the next four minutes, put aside your justified hostility towards Barbra Streisand the person, and enjoy one of the last great performances of Barbra Streisand, the greatest singer of her generation.

Don’t think about her. Just listen.