Glee - Vogue [Madonna Cover]

Another cover of a female pop artist was released yesterday and I feel compelled to talk about it. This video is a promo for the FOX musical television show Glee. In case you are you have been out of the loop, Glee is a new show about a struggling glee club in a small Midwestern town and it is one of the most watched shows in the United States.

After watched the first couple episodes of Glee, I said, "This show is too good to be on television. It will never make it through a season on FOX." I had good reasons to think Glee would get canceled:

1. Network television tends to prematurely cancel anything with a unique concept that don't fit the well established tv format (with the exception of Lost). Shows like Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Twin Peaks, and My So-Called Life get canceled but shows like Baywatch, The Nanny, Step by Step, Life According to Jim, and hundreds of pointless reality shows go on for five, ten, even fifteen season.

2. Television musicals never last. There have been only three television musicals.
Fame: The television version of the musical Fame, about a students at a performing arts magnet school. It was canceled in the middle of its second season, but went on to be a cult classic worldwide.
Cop Rock. A cop drama/musical from the 90s. Seriously, this show existed, check out the link. There are 11 episodes and all of the songs are original.
Viva Laughlin: A murder mystery/drama/musical set in a casino in the desert with Hugh Jackman and Melanie Griffith. What? Again not a joke. Character broke out into really bad cover songs. Really bad covers. Only two episodes aired before it was pulled. Check out this video to understand the suck that was Viva Laughlin.

3. Glee doesn't know what it wants to be. It has the cheesy and wholesome feel of High School Music with the quirky and controversial feel the film Election. Really, Glee is just a television version of Election with songs thrown in. It has some of the same characters, the same voice-overs, the same focus on student and faculty interactions. The creators of Election should really be suing, be I hope they don't because the reason I watch Glee is for its the Election-like qualities.

I couldn't have been more wrong about the failure of this show. Glee is everyone's new favorite show.

The video is a remake of Madonna's 1990 hit Vogue, which made vogueing cool for a second. (See the Malcolm McLaren post of the first vogueing video in the US) Its very close to the original video.

This video is excellent because it isn't a joke or parody, its an homage to Madonna, a well-done homage to one of the greatest pop singers in history.