They're the Top

Spending time with my grandparents this summer, I found myself taken with the show tunes and ballads of their youth. Written by men who captivated Broadway and Hollywood with their inventiveness—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin—and interpreted by midcentury’s best entertainers—Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald—the numbers of the Great American Songbook have been immortalized on vinyl and film.

I thought at first there was little to admire in my grandparents’ musical ken. Porter’s lyrical witticisms, dated though they are, were cause for mirth. The Gershwins, with their synthesis of jazz and the French classical style, clearly merited respect. Berlin’s compositions had a ritmo allegro that lent themselves to occasional listening.

But I had gripes with these composers. All, to one degree or another, had sold out to the movie industry, arranging for popular consumption works whose technical skill was outmatched only by their thematic banality. After “Porgy and Bess,” later to assume a central place in the canon, had flopped in its first Broadway run, Gershwin had moved out west, scoring sappy romances until his early death from brain cancer in 1938. “Shall We Dance,” the most renowned of these productions, stars Astaire and Rogers in a couple of the duo’s most arresting performances.

Watching the two pirouette on roller skates, I couldn’t help sneering at what was an unstinting display of decadence and mindlessness. Astaire and Rogers’s lines were as wooden as a log cabin, and they mouthed unsurpassably mawkish tropes about love and relationships. Berlin, and many associated with Tin Pan Alley, were guilty on the same charge. Porter was especially maddening, equating the romantic ideal with goods and services available for purchase—rendering explicit the link between capitalism and mass culture other musical theater mavens were content to insinuate.

A devotee of the folk movement, I hurled the heaviest brickbats at Berlin. Woody Guthrie had written “This Land Is Your Land” as a critique of “God Bless America,” which the rail-car troubadour thought ignored the plight of average Americans and glossed over the country’s Great Depression-era social ills: abject poverty and racial discrimination. The folkies were intensely political, and it reflects in their sheet music (or lack thereof). “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built,” Guthrie said on one recording.

Porter, Berlin, and the Gershwins, I believed, had created chaste, apolitical culture for the white middle class, to the exclusion of others, and sometimes themselves. (Porter was gay; Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, penned “White Christmas.”)

I have often implored my friends on the left to set aside politics as it relates to culture, at least when judging a piece’s artistic worth. Influenced by the New York intellectuals, I see the conflation of the two, usually entailing a view of culture mediated through political considerations, as a dangerous phenomenon. Demanding art be subject to such scrutiny is, if unconsciously, an outgrowth of a totalitarian mode of thinking, one the New York group, Dwight Macdonald above all, had seen and detested in Soviet Russia. An iconoclast of rare distinction, Macdonald had praised literary grandees for their decision to award the highest honor in American letters to Ezra Pound, who had thrown in with fascists and committed treason against the United States. (For the record, Macdonald likely would have castigated the composers in this discussion as midcult or masscult.)

Eventually, I followed my own advice. If Macdonald could overlook Pound’s fascism to appreciate the man’s literary talent, I could forgive Astaire and Rogers for being too lovey-dovey in the rink to praise their complex, dexterous moves. Berlin, Porter, the Gershwins, and their interpreters might have lacked in social conscience, but they had elevated contemporary pop culture.

And their works were not sexless, as I had once maintained. Porter was a master of implication, no small deed in our age of foam fingers and latex bikinis. “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love),” with its references to birds and bees, is highly suggestive, the effect heightened in Fitzgerald’s sultry rendition, the pauses between “let’s do it” and “let’s fall in love” allowing the first statement to linger unqualified.

Berlin was deserving of the same magnanimity. In fact, some of his work betrays a Promethean impulse to bring America to the uninitiated and outcast. “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” revised after the war, gives an outsider’s take on New York’s Park Avenue, satirizing and demystifying the tony precincts “where Rockefellers walk with sticks or umbrellas in their mitts.” Secularizing a Christian holiday through wintry, bucolic imagery, “White Christmas” can be thought of in a similar vein.

A conclusion that had taken me months to reach had always been apparent to my grandparents. My grandfather always spoke of Porter’s clever lyrics but was thrilled when I found The Weavers’ music on YouTube. My grandmother sang “If I Had a Hammer” and “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” with equal gusto. I joined in on both songs.

Daniel Solomon ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays. Follow him on Twitter @danieljsolomon.