WTF: The Ethel Merman Disco Album

Before you ask: we DO NOT have this monstrosity for sale in the vinyl section. The best I can do is offer you this link to the CD version of the Ethel Merman Disco Album.  Some have listened to this–and you can hear a sample below–and claim that it’s proof that there is no God. Others, like me, believe this record is a prime example of the worst cocaine-Stoli-quaalude cocktail fueled excesses of the disco generation. Ethel Merman herself supposedly hated disco and word on the street is that she recorded her vocals separately from the rest of the album.

Merman–for those of you mercifully too young to remember, was famous for show tunes. “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and that sort of thing. The modern day equivalent would be, I suppose, Josh Groban doing a gangsta rap single. Equally hideous on all fronts.

Have a listen and decide for yourself if this is the most ill-advised thing since The Star Wars Holiday Special or if it’s just another minor blip on the radar of bad taste. The music itself sounds like a rejected outtake from an Isaac Hayes Movement recording session done late at night after one too many lines of coke or a half liter of vodka chased with a bag of grass and a few sniffs off a gasoline-soaked rag.