7
Pity the mother who cannot sing to her children.
Mine certainly did. She sang to me in my high chair after lunch while she cleared up, to make me go to sleep. Nursery rhymes, jingles, “Zadok the Priest”—that sort of thing. By her own account she was no kind of singer at all—“The relationship between the key I started in and the one in which I finished was seldom close”—but she knew how to bust a classic. Croon “Baa-Baa Black Sheep” to me now while rattling the cutlery drawer and I go out like a light.
It’s potent stuff, crooning. And it does not require of the crooner very much in the way of extravagant technique, nor great exhibitions of soul—although your crooner will never agree on either of these points. Crooners are nothing if not sensitive and they give the appearance of enjoying very high levels of self-esteem predicated on a keenly developed perception of their own emotional and stylistic refinement. They are feathered with sensitivity. Summon a crooner to your imagination and you are calling to mind a bird of paradise.
Standard wisdom has it that “crooning” begins in the late 1920s/early 1930s, with the invention of electrical amplification to make the human voice audible in large spaces in front of mighty instrumental ensembles, and of course for broadcast. But really, what this means is that “crooners” began then: “crooner,” the marketable heartthrob type of singer who makes love to the microphone and is self-conscious about his tailoring and smell. “Crooners” are always preoccupied with style, sometimes interestingly.
But I am not interested for the moment in “crooners,” the type of singer. I am interested in crooning, the type of singing.
As an activity, crooning goes way back beyond the 1920s. Of course it does. It goes almost as far back as you can go. It is difficult to offer supporting evidence for this, but we can be confident that parents have pretty much always sung soothingly to their children, as a comfort and as a seduction into the warm embrace of sleep. (I cannot have been alone, I imagine, in spending hours of my life as a younger parent sighing “There’s on-ly one Den-nis Bergkamp” to my eldest in a vanishingly soft voice, while the fiercely sleepless tot roiled in his cot and demanded “Now the Vieira one!”) And centuries of culture, if not actual experience, tell us that would-be lovers have always sung softly to the objects of their admiration, as a stimulus and as a seduction into the warm embrace of themselves.
Crooning is ancient, universal, atavistic, and variable only in the variety of ways that expressions of intimacy can get a point across: points such as “go to sleep!” and “sleep with me!” One internet dictionary informs the curious that to croon is to “sing softly in a sentimentally contemplative manner,” which is a pretty good definition. But it doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t convey the key crooning dynamic of persuasion. (The same dictionary also implies that there may be an etymological linkage between the words “croon” and “crone”—but let’s not get drawn into that.) Crooners are persuaders. And the unassailable truth of it is that crooning is everywhere to be found, in one form or another, even among those who yell. Iggy Pop has always been a good crooner.
For to croon is to manipulate. Much as it is manipulative to deliberately speak to others in a voice too quiet for its surroundings, crooning requires that the listener draw closer, alter his stance, bend his ear, hunch his back; demands that attentiveness be redoubled. Iggy croons when he wants either to engender a peculiarly alienated form of anxiety in the listener, or when he is looking to overlay his music with a sense of closeted oppressiveness or brooding irony. His basso incantations on 1977’s The Idiot do not speak of emotional intimacy or physical proximity or authentic personal revelation—and they do not replicate the sound of any mother I have ever heard—but they do share the crooner’s appetite for close manipulation: the manipulation of space, the manipulation of temperature, the manipulation of mood . . .
And so it would make sense that post-rock ’n’ roll pop music has had crooning in it pretty much from the start. Which is to say that rock ’n’ roll embraced crooning out of pure expediency once it had got over its initial impulse, which was to yell. Elvis Presley’s early croon was merely the obverse of his yell: it was the sound of the would-be-genteel, mother-loving Presley seeking to persuade the listener of his sincerity and/or sensitivity and/or remorse. He meant it, too. No, really. Until Roy Orbison came along and changed the channel, rock ’n’ roll crooning was the outcome of the absolute need in life for good manners: it was the sound of teenagers learning how to say “please.”
But R ’n’ R crooning could not remain an irony-free zone forever, as nothing can. Let us leap forward a couple of decades to consider briefly the utterances of such differently beloved postmodernist pop crooners as David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, and then Green Gartside (of Scritti Politti), Paddy McAloon (of Prefab Sprout), Chris Isaak, Marc Almond, David Sylvian, Stuart Staples (of Tindersticks), Richard Hawley, even the gory, melodramatic Nick Cave, whose crooning is always to be understood in its relationship to his screams. They are all men, yes (more on that later). They want your attention like they want their next breath. Furthermore, they most assuredly crave your identification—they want you the listener to consider, in the most heartfelt terms possible, what it must be like to be them. And so their crooning is complex, layered, knowing, playful; it flirts with your expectations of what crooning is and what it does and how you ought to respond to it. It invites you to join in with what appears to be going on, whatever it is (let’s call it “the construct”); it proposes that somehow there already exists between you—between the crooner and the croonee—an intimacy, an understanding, a feeling of absolute mutuality that is predicated on a presumed shared sensibility. You cannot listen with enjoyment to any one of those voices—from Ferry to Cave—and not feel those shared sensibilities seething in your flesh and bones like mercury.
For the contemporary pop crooner’s art is nearly always a referential one. It refers to many things, such as earlier crooning styles and earlier ideas of what crooning is for and how it works and for whom; it refers to the relative positions of crooner and croonee; it refers to the mirror upon which the crooner fixes his gaze to sing, as if his reflected selfhood were, in essence, the very deepest subject of his croon. The croon might sometimes sound like pastiche; it may make use of the instruments of parody; it is nearly always theatrical somewhere in its heart. But the idea persists with quite wonderful dedication that the appreciative listener must, at some level, play along: connect with the artifice, share that mirror-gazing trajectory, identify. The act of crooning in our postmodernist, individualist world is nearly always a dogged act of self-regard.
But it doesn’t have to be, does it? Why should that necessarily be so? There is no rule written down anywhere that I’m aware of which stipulates that crooning has to be knowing, ironic, and narcissistic.
* * *
For men of my temper and vintage, born in and around 1960, an instinctual aversion to both crooning and crooners runs deep. In my case, it’s akin to the aversion I have to the taste of pineapple: it’s intractable, inexplicable, ineradicable. It’s kind of eye-watering. I don’t want to listen to the crooners of my childhood for ironic purposes, thank you, let alone to Bing Crosby, the forebear of all homely crooners, either for sentimental or for nostalgic purposes. There are no guilty pleasures to be had there. And I really don’t want to hear today’s crooners channeling yesterday’s crooners for effect or for style or for a clever idea’s sake, let alone to make me identify. I have no use for Michael Bublé—not when I already have Frank Sinatra. In fact I only want to hear crooning if there is no other way for a song to be sung. This is important to me.
We grew up, my generation, with crooning as a cultural norm. It was mainstream. It was on telly. It was everywhere, softening the landscape, hushing things down, plumping things up. It was on The Val Doonican Show, on comedy and variety shows, on anything that might involve the deployment of Perry Como or Matt Monro or Johnny Mathis in the context of “Light Entertainment.” It was almost as everywhere then as Taylor Swift is now—although mediated by different means, obviously.
I suppose this aversion can be partially explained by noting the simple evolutions of musical fashion. By the 1960s, the decade of my childhood, the very idea of crooning had lost its prewar lustre, novelty, and sensualism, as well as the sense implied by the original crooners that intimacy ought to be, at the very least, rawly stimulating. Raw stimulation came by other means in the 1960s. Intimacy’s terms had changed. Instead, the mainstream pop and “Easy Listening” crooner of the period proposed that intimacy is above all a matter of safety and circumscription, blandness and sanitization. His chief objective appeared to be to persuade listeners to leave things just as they are: your heels on the pouffe, the cosy on the teapot. Sixties crooning no longer toyed with the neural zizz of forbidden proximity, nor suggested the whispers into eternity of lost souls sitting alone at the existentialist bar. Your TV crooner’s narcissism was neutered and trimmed with modest self-deprecation; he no longer hovered, preening, spotlit in front of a dinner-plate microphone, nor moved to slip a hesitant hand about your waist just long enough to justify bringing his lips a few centimeters closer to the trembling flesh of your earlobes. Where he smirked, your sixties crooner smirked contentedly.
As a televisual experience, crooning helped to blur the line between “chat” and “performance” (chat is, after all, conversation in its most passively contented form). The crooner sat in a comfy chair or on a sofa or a low dais, one leg jauntily out, the other tucked decorously under, or stood next to a Christmas tree or in front of a picture window disclosing either a beautiful landscape or the outskirts of Birmingham. Crooners held pencil-thin microphones lightly between fingertips. They almost certainly smelled of freshly laundered cashmere and aftershave, and rejoiced above all things in soft furnishings, and to hell with sharp tailoring. In its new dispensation to soothe, quell, and mollify, crooning seemed to be about keeping everything in its place and just so. And so I grew up contemptuous of anything that remotely resembled a croon. Even Sinatra’s.
* * *
The unrelenting clangor of punk changed all that, and in 1977 I developed a ravenous taste for one of the greatest crooners ever to draw breath in tiny sips.
I did it, I suppose, because I needed respite from all the punky shouting; I needed to feel that a sense of intimacy still belonged in my relationship with music: I wanted to be seduced for a change, not upbraided. And of course, being seventeen at the time, it was a basic requirement that I get these things from an impeccably cool source, one totally free of sophistication and irony. The willing hipster could not, in all conscience, buy James Taylor records as a seventeen year old in 1977, so I got stuck into the Cool Ruler.
Gregory Isaacs may or may not have been a nice man. He may or may not have been piously observant of the Rastafarian faith that provided the esoteric cladding for many of the songs he sang; he may have paid only lip service to it. It mattered not. But when he sang, Gregory appeared to mean what he said, even if he said it quietly and with motives that, while plain, were not always easy to digest, even for a seventeen year old who had as yet not grappled properly with the cardinal tenets of feminism. Isaacs was endowed with a strange, slightly alien, wholly unique persuasiveness. For all his patriarchal hauteur (“If you wa-a-ant to be my number one . . .”—I beg your pardon?), Gregory was at least gentle in the way he addressed you and your girlfriend, if she existed. He was courtly. It did not sound as if unpleasantness would be the inevitable consequence of you (or your girlfriend) not responding positively to his suit.
There was plenty of contextual texture to this. Jamaican roots music had just entered its most stridently political phase in 1977, raised on a platform built by the international hit-making of Bob Marley, by increasing sensitivity regarding racism, and by hobbled financial conditions in the Western economies, and yet further buttressed in the UK at least by the onset of punk, which made common cause with reggae on the grounds that both punk and Rasta shared a common “Babylonian” enemy, in addition to some of those untoward social conditions. Patriarchal religious liberation cult met anarcho-nihilism and agreed to agree on the issues arising from the social conditions at least.
Roots-rockers were obliged to “chant down Babylon,” just as punks were expected to bellow at it. But Gregory Isaacs did very little in the way of chanting and no bellowing whatsoever. He seldom troubled to raise his voice above a papery whisper. Indeed he murmured, and wailed when he wasn’t murmuring, in a brittle, light, supplicant tenor like wind sighing through reeds. That was his “sufferah’s” voice. Sometimes he found a middle way between the two, between the murmur and the supplicant wail. But that third voice—a more singerly, melodically strenuous kind of utterance—contained elements of both of the others, so there was never any doubt as to whose voice it was or that it was coming for one thing or the other: either for your sense of righteousness or for your girlfriend, and quite often both. It remained unmistakably a croon.
His spheres of persuasion were several and interlocked with one another most satisfactorily. But chiefly, Isaacs was a lover. That was the first thing he wanted you to know about him. It was his starting position. He was tender, he was achingly humble, he was impoverished, he was alone in the world, he had an abundance of love to give. These simple propositions—rooted authentically enough in the extremely severe experience of his childhood—supported an entire musical persona that was as thematically flexible as it was possible to be, given the strident inflexibility of so much Rasta business. He could go anywhere with it, so long as that place was “rootsical”: into testy social observation via dry Rasta reasoning, apocalyptic biblical exegesis and corny aphorism, not to mention the mysterious discourses of Jamaican folklore. He was wont to personify Babylonian consciousness with names and titles—“Mr. Brown,” “Mr. Cop,” and all the rest. He could go anywhere, yes, but, like a bluesman he always came back to love—as if love were the universal elixir, the transcendent lotion. The final, settling issue. No voice has ever drifted in reverberant sonic space with quite so much leafy lightness and dryness, yet carried such earnest freight.
His masterpiece? Well, it depends of course upon your vulnerabilities, I suppose. But, if one were to overlook his great, echo-drenched epics of asperity and hope, “Mr. Know It All” (on the DEB label) and “The Border” (GG), you are left perhaps only with his version of Dobby Dobson’s wistful 1960s rock steady lament, “Loving Pauper,” which Isaacs cut in the mid-seventies. The song found multiple release over the decades in a variety of production guises, some dry as a bone, some with augmented instrumentation, one weirdly split into two completely separated stereo channels (voice one side, rhythm the other), and another, my favorite, a twelve-inch Gussie Clarke discomix, which arrived unheralded on this side of the Atlantic in 1977 with a muggy thud, jointed to an even muggier, heavier dub version. (For readers interested in tracking it down, it was finally digitized in the 1990s by the British label Greensleeves.)
It’s a miraculous thing, a sort of quantum paradox among reggae records in that it contrives to be both heavy and light at the same time, as if challenging the human imagination to conceive of love as the ultimate reconciliation of incompatible conditions. To make it sing, Isaacs deploys his papery whisper, just about hitting the high notes of the melody, but only just—he’s reaching that jar on the top shelf with the very tips of his fingers—and absolutely never sounding anything other than delicately hesitant; not exactly apologetic but certainly not pushy or, heaven forbid, overweening. Just persuasive. Meanwhile Clarke’s almighty rhythm submits to the laws of gravity as readily as a sack of sand on a mattress, yet remains somehow mobile, moving slowly forward like a galleon through fog, pennanted with a simple counter-melody fingered on a cheap organ and by silk-soft falsetto vocal backups that sound like the Mighty Diamonds.
“Ca-a-an’t take you out to fancy places / Like other fellas that I know can do . . .”
“Whoo-ooo oo-ooo!”
“Loving Pauper” is a strange, otherworldly but simultaneously earthy utterance and it takes the listener on a journey directly into the heart of Isaacs’s psychic world of croon, his transactional world, his world of earnest persuasion, a world quite untouched by irony or secondary inflection and, least of all, by self-revelation: it’s a mendicant world of misunderstood expediency and virtuous poverty, in which the put-upon Rasta projects his goodness on to his presumed lover through his very quietness, his delicacy, his impecuniousness, and the humbleness of his place in society: the world of the “poor and clean” and of the “lonely lover”; a world in which low social status allied to good intentions, torn raiment, and absolutely no purchasing power whatsoever amount to the perfect engine of sleepy desire.
* * *
Though sleep can be frightening too. We dream when we sleep and sometimes we have nightmares. Moreover, when we are asleep we are oblivious of the material, knowable world around us and are therefore vulnerable to it. We might be murdered in our sleep. We might, quite simply, never wake up from it. We might drown in sleep. When I was a small boy I used to wonder quite often about the possibility of not waking up from sleep and it caused me sometimes to lie awake for long stretches, stimulated.
What if . . . ? What if I went to sleep and everything just stopped? My heart. My brain. What if I just ceased to be? Or the world? What if it just ceased to be? What about my mum and dad, who must be nearly as susceptible to the perils of sleep as I am? After all, they are old. They might just cease to be and where would that leave me? Crumbs. Where do we go when we sleep? Sleep is so close to extinction, after all. It looks like extinction from the outside. It feels a little like extinction on the inside. Nothingness, dreams, more nothingness . . . Well, you’re no longer you, are you? You’re no longer leaving a mark on the world (unless you sleepwalk or snore or habitually fall out of bed, and what kind of marks are they?). I used to murmur to myself sometimes in the dark, just to hear the sound of my own voice, real in the world and alive—“Nick . . . Nick . . . Nick!”—a concrete, crooning affirmation of my actual presence here, now and in my bed, neither asleep, nor dead.
* * *
And here is Kate Bush, neither asleep nor dead, face up to the Moon, drifting alone and helpless in a horizonless sea at nightfall, murmuring; borne up in the water by the spread of her clothing and by the last flattened cubic inches of air remaining in her life jacket, alone and drifting.
And drifting . . .
* * *
In 1985, Bush released the Hounds of Love album, her fifth, to a chorus of rapturous sighs plus the occasional American raspberry. By most, though, the album was hailed as a work of originality and inspirational reach, a sort of fluted pop hypnodrome composed of carefully deployed artificial/organic instrumental textures and expressive voices, serving to extend both the scope and the profundity of Bush’s storytelling gestalt and to soften her musical palette somewhat; possibly to bring her indoors, psychologically speaking, from the outhouse where she’d been tinkering the past few seasons, oblivious of the frost forming on the inside of the glass. Her previous album, the cold, clattery, uncozy The Dreaming, had not done well commercially.
I liked Hounds a lot at the time, which was unexpected. It was unexpected because in 1985 I was busy with a sulky middle-twenties renunciation of all that white commercial pop had to offer. Pop no longer spoke to me of things I cared to hear about. The vast majority of it, or so it seemed to me, was dull and formulaic, not even pretending to creativity for creativity’s sake any more, too often mistaking artful retrospection for reach, new technology (and trousers) for new ideas. And a lot of it was just plain lumpen in its listless pseudo-danceability. So I was through with it. I was certainly unimpressed by the make-up, props, glamour, and “attitude” which together seemed to constitute the only calibration of value in an aspirational pop world that was every bit as bankrupt, to my scourging mind, as the morality of the banking world and its great sponsor, the current Tory government. Call me a prig if you like. I certainly was one. Actually, looking back, it’s a miracle I even bothered to listen to Hounds of Love.
But somehow I managed it and was very smitten. I was smitten not with the music’s textural novelties or its generous thematic surprises (Wilhelm Reich!), nor with the technological wonder of Bush’s Fairlight CMI programming and its not-quite-frigid atmospheric temperature, nor even with Hounds’s conceptual structure—impressive though all of these things were. It was the singing that thrilled me. And it thrills me still. Hounds of Love has singing on it that fills the sky like weather.
What we might describe now with fingered quote marks as “side two” of the album is devoted to the exploration of a kind of thought-into-music experiment, which goes like this: What would it be like to be cast adrift and alone on open sea with only a life jacket to keep you afloat? What would pass through your mind? What would you hear in the dull slap of water against your cheeks and neck? Would you sink or soar? What feelings would visit you as you lay there, spread out like a picnic on the surface of the brine, wholly passive, awaiting rescue or death?
Or sleep.
Strangely enough, the very first song of “The Ninth Wave,” the suite of songs that constitutes “side two” of Hounds of Love, is entitled “And Dream of Sheep.” It is a slow piano song, a pillow-soft wallow in the exposed harmonies that slow piano songs do best, its melody cleaving to the underpinning instrumental frame like wet fabric to sodden limbs, ridged, bubbled, and clinging flush. As the song begins, Bush is already adrift, bobbing and pitching in the dark, quite alone, her boat (or plane) now lost, her mind already wishing to submit to the pull of sleep . . .
She begins to fantasize, first of rescue—the rescue which is inevitable, surely. No?
Yes!
Yes. They must come. They will come and see the tiny light on her life vest, bobbing in the dark. She will be stirred soon enough by the sound of engines. She will be safe . . .
She drifts some more.
Then slowly, irresistibly, her unmoored consciousness fills up with the downy sensations of her bed at home—her pillows, her sheets, her radio on low, her comforts. Her mind becomes an envelope containing only the soft stuff of incipient sleep.
“I’d tune into some friendly voices . . .”
And she begins to be drawn into it, unable to resist her drowsing as she sinks deeper and deeper, like a stone.
The final verse of “And Dream of Sheep” is in effect a coda and, as it settles quietly on the ear, the song’s tempo appears to attenuate, thinning and lengthening like sleepy breathing, while Bush’s voice, now accompanied by pipes in tiny harmonized bubbles, draws nearer still, impossibly soft, close, and warm, intimate to the point of touchability, to the point where nothing exists for the listener but its intoxicating beauty as it describes the jostling arrival in the drifter’s mind of the sheep that will escort her to her repose. They too are soft and warm “and they smell like sheep.” And they speak. They tell her what she wants to hear—that soon they’ll be bringing her home . . . And with that intrusion into the song-text of the olfactory sense, the sense of smell, a new feeling suffuses the mind of the listener with a terrible perfume.
Terror.
“And Dream of Sheep” is oblivious of the terror it stimulates: it is a lullaby. It is sleepy. It is above all a croon. It is a quiet, contemplative description of a mind afloat, adrift and then letting go, finding beauty in that drift, as well as hope and comfort. It embraces disorientation and passivity as if they were friends—it is sung to them as a welcome song. The voice means what it says; it is persuasive of its own truth. There is no irony in it. The only irony to be found anywhere near it is Aristotle’s dramatic irony, which is located in the mind of the listener who knows what is going to happen next while the sodden protagonist adrift in the song has not a clue.
It is the croon of a sacrificial lamb.
* * *
And what of Frank, the least innocent of all crooners? What of the great bronze bell of twentieth-century popular music?
To me, Frank Sinatra has always been something of a sacred cow as well as a bell; the totem of an alien faith—worthy of respect, no doubt, admirable in very many remarkable ways; fascinating to behold when encountered in the right context and under suitable lighting; always sharp, stylish, economical, usually swingin’; all of these things, yes, but somehow not connected to my own species, as if he were built on different principles and finessed by a different book of rules.
This non-connection is, in great part, a function of my musical age and upbringing. As a small child I was raised on the gentle percolations of A. A. Milne and church music and the less grandiose early, baroque, and classical forms, as if together they constituted the basis of all aesthetic value in music. And later on, rock music—the music that defined my adolescent arousal—had very little time for Frank. Well, the feeling was mutual; Frank didn’t have much time for rock ’n’ roll either. He and his courtiers stood well back and held their noses while they waited for rock’s moment to pass, with the result that the shadow Sinatra cast over the new form was neither long nor inky. His direct influence was virtually nil, in fact, except in a few very exceptional cases. Indeed until the 1980s at least, rock and Frank agreed, like good fellows, to ignore one another on the street and just get on with their own business. Yes, you can hear slow Sinatra in the esoteric boom of Scott Walker, and you can see traces of him in the poise, tailoring, and cultivated references of the British glam icons, Messrs Ferry and Bowie, who were nothing if not fascinated by the way the future is readable in the residue of the recent past. But it did not go deep. Sinatra was never in rock’s grain.
Indeed, it is only after rock had concluded its serious business and was feebly attempting to cauterize its own hemorrhaging vitality and relevance in the 1980s that you began to hear Frank again, in rock, pop, and R&B. Marvin Gaye had always aspired to the condition of the black Sinatra without actually being prepared to do the kind of work required to get him there—something for which, in many ways and for all kinds of reasons, we should be grateful. Instead it was one of Gaye’s spiritual successors, the late, great, and often sadly misunderstood Luther Vandross, who actually came closest to fulfilling that aspiration: his melancholy professionalism and attention to detail certainly took him into Sinatra-like spaces atmospherically, even if his orchestrations and singing bore no resemblance musicologically. Like Frank, Luther combined bravura displays of technical excellence with lush intimacy, and he made songs really sing. He came very close indeed.
And then, in the late 1980s, a small regiment of grim-faced Scots in hats and suits identified Sinatra as the active ingredient at the core of their masculine display, as if Frank and not the Beatles/Stones/Kinks/Who were the most valuable relic of their juvenile years—the prevailing music of their 1960s childhoods repurposed for a whole new post-rock ’n’ roll world. Who now remembers The Blue Nile, Danny Wilson, and Hue and Cry? Well, of course you do. There are plenty of good reasons to. And let us not forget the Associates. Billy Mackenzie was Frank Sinatra on steroids and laughing gas. And Edwyn Collins? What is “A Girl Like You” if not Sinatra’s croon assimilated into Iggy Pop’s, then welded with a blowtorch to a gigantic nineties retrobeat?
So Sinatra arched pretty much unheeded over more than thirty years of rocking rebellion, barely making contact at all apart from, briefly and toward the end, in Scotland. Rebellion was just not his style. And it remains the case that he has never persuaded me of anything at all other than his genius. Between Frank and me there lies only an expanse of dead water.
This is not a rational thing. Yes, I did manage to overcome some of my conditioned aversion to the great bronze bell in those selfsame 1980s, while embracing the then forty-years-old modern-jazz aesthetic as if it were the only musical game in town now worth playing. Sinatra was by no means a jazz singer but you could not, in conscience, devote yourself to the exploration of the modern-jazz canon without including him in your calculations, at least as part of the furniture in the modern-jazz room. He swung like the clappers, after all. He accorded Time the slide-rule treatment. And he wore a suit and hat. So I listened to both Songs for Swingin’ Lovers and In the Wee Small Hours with a serious face on, and I admired them. I felt as if I were learning something. And I admired myself for at least doing that. But Frank himself never moved me, in the sense that he never got inside me and held me from within, my heart pinioned, my mind pinging. And he does not, even now, thirty years on from that earnest moment, transfix the middle-aged, slightly melancholy, hat-wearing man that I have since become in order that we might share a moment’s manly identification. Hell, no. It just doesn’t happen. I am simply not one of the guys.
But why am I not one of the guys? What is my deficiency?
Indulge me briefly while I listen now to my favorite upbeat Sinatra tune, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” one of the two great Cole Porter songs that adorn the justly famed Songs for Swingin’ Lovers album of 1956. Let me embrace it like an old friend, without bothering to put my serious face on.
Yes, it’s a joy. “Under My Skin” opens side two of Songs with a bump. Nelson Riddle’s fabulous, dinging arrangement trips along in its early stages like a scene-setting dance number in an MGM musical, diligently prompting the voice and its comely burden, the tune, with bobbing confraternities of baritone sax and trombone, exhibiting cool restraint and snap as a matter of policy while offering to break out into full chorus at every turn—if only it were the done thing. But it isn’t done. It just isn’t. In the world of 1950s show business, abandonment to anything other than an acceptable norm is an abomination. Nevertheless, the riffage is intoxicating: it’s the sound of guys bantering as they head for the bar, blood up, ties askew, all joy and clipped relaxation; and Sinatra’s voice is in there somewhere. Yes, he’s definitely a participant, if only serving to peg out the melody and hold his own space open—a sort of auditory gap, a Polo-Mint hole for the ears without flavor or texture or grip; a cipher, in fact, defying the logic which says that the voice is the sole reason for the existence of this magnificent affair . . .
Then, for a brief season, the orchestra breaks discipline and goes mad. The sung melody drops out to allow strings to surge and trombones to cock-fight for a whole chorus while the rest of the orchestra gathers round to cheer, and pretty soon the soloing trombone is tearing itself into strips just to be heard . . . It’s a vulgar moment, but it’s a thrilling one, too. And afterward, the returning Frank is obliged to turn his own brightness up to the point where he is no longer crooning but ringing that great bronze bell, not quite for all he’s worth but certainly with intense commitment to the upped ante—kind of going for it, though naturally never threatening to lose his cool. Heavens, no.
Pung! . . . Pung a-pung . . . a-punnng! ringing right up flush against the beat for a change.
And for a chorus repetition or so I find myself actually listening to him with attention, and not the arrangement, as if the voice and the song were the main thing; as if the hole in the middle of the mint has suddenly become the whole point of the mint and the orchestral arrangement is, just for a change, nothing but an encircling form . . .
Then there’s slow Frank. The Frank who reveals not only his genius but himself, or so the theory goes.
The handful of albums Sinatra made in the fifties dedicated exclusively to the more introspective aspects of the American songbook—In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, Where Are You?, No One Cares are the ones I’ve heard—are gorgeous artifacts that ought to be high on the listening agenda of every soul that harbors a care for nuance and the diligent excavation of emotion with the tools of art. This is the motherlode, the seam that exposes Sinatra’s ore to the light. Or so it is often said.
I am partial to “Angel Eyes” on Only the Lonely. It’s a peculiar song, which never resolves itself into clear thinking or coherent imagery but, rather, describes in period language a fetid hell of sexual jealousy and self-loathing at a tempo so low, thick, and elastic it might be a sleepy anaconda. It makes its first representations sardonically enough, with the voice offering to stand everyone in the bar to a gargle: “The drink and the laugh’s on me.” But it then rolls slowly over and over down a slope spiked with Gothic pentatonic intervals into a swamp of resentful longing and graceless resignation, where it does not drown but keeps on rolling, gathering algae.
Melodically, it’s a Bond song. Emotionally, it’s had one bourbon too many. And Sinatra, with a touch of reverb, drives deep into his most resonant baritone range to make the great bell ring like a knell. Punnnnng! Pu-u-unnnnnng! He cleaves the air. He peals with immaculate clarity. In fact, now that I am listening to it properly like this, he is more articulate than a wordless bell. “Angel Eyes” is a speech from late Shakespeare rung out by a talented old ham. You hear in it mortality and magic and bitterness and retrieval and the uncertain passage of Time, and the very air is shaken. For he—the singer—is poised on the edge of Prospero’s cliffs, contemplating the surf and the jagged rocks below, oblivious of the wind that tugs at his loosened tie, enjoying the rain that stings his face. Glad to be unhappy.
So, no, he won’t chuck himself off. He won’t chuck himself off because he knows that it is a man’s obligation to contain this sort of feeling safely: contain it with main strength and with the strength of philosophy and not let its unsightliness disfigure the landscape. Besides, he is circled all about with iron bands and firmly planted in concrete. The wind may blow and crack its cheeks. He can hold the posture. He is not in danger, and neither is the landscape; and nor are we. Sadness is great and beautiful and the bullshit that is neurosis has no business here.
And I feel nothing. Or at least I feel only awe and admiration. I can hear what he’s getting at, but what he’s getting into me is not the crisis of his existence but the sureness of his touch and the certainty of his eventual return from the edge, once the music stops. It’s a beautiful act, to my ear—in itself a real and hugely impressive thing, but not for me an emotionally moving one. It brooks no frailty.
It speaks only of its own strength.
* * *
The cultured elegance and rigor of the Sinatra canon is not in question—I genuinely believe the fifties and sixties recordings for Capitol to be one of the century’s great bodies of work—and yet I am quite unaffected by it, as I am unaffected, emotionally, by the changing price of oil. I can see that Frank Sinatra has mattered immensely and matters still, as a relic of his time as well as a voice so magnificent that it lingers alive into our own time; and I can imagine only too well how he matters to others, too. So why can’t I feel anything myself?
What is wrong with me?
* * *
Music is a pleasure. This we know. We wouldn’t have music otherwise.
It is a stimulus to both the mind and the body. The feeling of exaltation brought on by a surge of the neurotransmitters dopamine and oxytocin is potent and is sufficient for some neurologists to explicate the connection between music and pleasure, as if the relationship were essentially a biochemical one. We get pleasure from music, the argument goes, because music stimulates our hormones. Ba-doom! There it is. That’s all it is. Music, like sex (and eating pineapple), is just a biological action, which may or may not stimulate a reaction. It is mere fodder for the pattern-seeking propensities of the human brain, a stimulus requiring a binary response: off or on, pleasant or unpleasant, mmm or yuck. Like/don’t like. The binary that makes life into a procedure.
But we all know it’s more complicated than that, don’t we? We know that music cannot be properly understood in isolation from the needs of the listening mind and body, and that it is the listening mind and body that discover meaning in music, irrespective of the intentions of the musician.
Music is music, of course. It is what it is: an arrangement of tuned sounds organized by one or more creative souls into a schematized pattern expressed in the dimension of Time, sometimes involving the deployment of verbal language, sometimes not. In itself, it is only itself; it is nothing else. In isolation from the listening ear, music does not mean anything. It’s a pattern. But music, in its relationship with the mindfully listening organism, is rather more meaningful. We all know this and feel it, even if we don’t trouble ourselves to explore that knowledge very often—if at all. It’s not that we’re lazy. It’s just that music is a pleasure and we are not inclined, as a rule, to question our pleasures. We just enjoy them.
But pleasure in music is complicated. It is arguably the most complicated pleasure there is, depending as it does on the engagement of the full range of our most deeply felt emotions. There is nothing responsible about music—it will do what it’s going to do, with or without your permission. Some music goes straight for the headline emotions; some skirts the headlines and flirts with your emotional small print—the important stuff you hadn’t bothered to read earlier and rather wish you had. Some music doesn’t touch us at all. Its impact depends on who we are and what the music is, and even where it is. But all of it depends to some degree or another on what we, as selfhoods, bring to the engagement. And that is complicated. It’s as complex in structure and hard to elucidate as a brain. We don’t want pleasure to be complicated, but sometimes it just is. And this is never made more evident than when you’re addressed nose to nose by a crooner.
It’s the intimacy that is troubling. The presumption. The sense that a not-so-subtle invasion is taking place, an invasion of your personal space by an insurgent armed with his (and sometimes her) own agenda, with a view to persuading you to see things his (or her) way, maybe for a moment, maybe for a stretch. Oh, and by the way, you’ll both get on so much better together in the tiny space afforded by this nose-to-nose engagement if, beyond merely seeing eye to eye, you actually take the trouble to identify with your invader. Be him for a moment. Be her. Assume the mantle. Discover the truth of your own scrappy selfhood in his (or hers).
And this is why Frank Sinatra and I can never occupy the same space without diffidence and/or embarrassment and/or suspicion on my part. I can admire his technical assurance. I can be awed by his éclat. I can even put on a serious face and learn something from the experience of being eyeballed like that. But I can’t identify. It just isn’t in me to be that man, even for a moment. I could never be that kind of guy, even if I put on a suit and tie and yanked the tie down two notches and hooded my eyes and drank shots on a high stool at a dimpled bar with a hat on the back of my head. I just don’t have the masculinity for it, the sort that gleams quietly like bronze and is concerned above all things with projecting the reserve and grandeur and sophistication of its own strength. No, really not. Not even if I wanted to. Not even if it were good for me to do so—as it might well be. By and large, I’d much rather be Judy Garland.
GRACE NOTES
GEORGE JONES: “THINGS HAVE GONE TO PIECES”
Musicor Records, 1965
Just as it is possible to croon without irony, you can also do it with soul—and still be quietly, intently persuasive. Of course you can. Here’s George Jones contemplating a shopping list of besetting woes, from the tap dripping in the kitchen (the kitchen is an empty, reverberant shell since she left) to the imminent repossession of George’s goods by “the man,” not to mention the loss of his job, the arm falling off his favorite chair (again), and the light bulb going phut in the hall. Damn. Where to start with that lot? Things have certainly gone to pieces since the little lady hitched her skirts and ran.
Leon Payne’s song is funny, pathetic, and heartbreaking in equal measure, although it would not be anything like as heartbreaking without Jones’s particular treatment of it. On the evidence provided by other versions of the song, it would just be funny and pathetic.
But then that was Jones’s métier, bringing the heft of real feeling to bear in the robust emotional environment of the honky-tonk, through a combination of horn-like vocal tone and phrasing, unstinting conviction and obvious personal vulnerability. It was as if his voice—a curiously heady and throaty instrument that was capable of controlling the tiniest variations in tone and timbre—had special tenderizing properties. Jones would stand rooted at the microphone and look out through widening, terrified eyes as he sifted the gamiest country lyric into a new state of refinement and flow. George really could have sung tragic life into a bag of flour.
“Things Have Gone to Pieces” is a slight song making fun of masculine self-pity and incompetence, ferruled with the pathetic conviction that things’ll turn out fine if you just let them. That’s “conviction” in its special drinker’s meaning, signifying “vain hope.” It’s a gag over a beer in a bar, basically. But sung by George Jones, the gag is transformed into a touching hymn of self-reproach—and when, at the end, he clings on to “the pieces of my dreams,” it is not in a spirit of ironic hope but with the grinding force of necessity. He really thinks that if he clutches at those pieces steadfastly enough then she’ll come back and change the light bulb. That is self-persuasion of a very high order indeed.
THE CARPENTERS: “GOODBYE TO LOVE”
A&M Records, 1972
The Carpenters resided, like ABBA, in a strange bubble of pop serenity, possibly because life outside the bubble for constituent members of the group was far from serene. But let us not dwell on that. The facts are that these two close siblings, Richard and Karen Carpenter, were endowed with sumptuous talent which they chose to apply to the creation of what many of us are pleased, somewhat sniffily, to call Easy Listening—soft, unchallenging, appealingly melodic pop music that was wholly magnetic to anyone in the 1960s and ’70s vulnerable to an old-fashioned croon.
And what a voice Karen had. It was as warm, open, and inclusive as a kindled hearth on a dank afternoon. It traveled effortlessly from deep contralto through mezzo to touch the soprano range, but settled most expressively in her area of greatest cogency: the middle-to-low regions. She had extraordinary natural control. She could spin out a melody with flowing legato phrasing and then leave it hanging, as if finished, for you to contemplate at leisure in memory. She was what you might call a lapidary singer: she engraved her phrases on your sensibilities for all time. She saw herself as a drummer, really.
There was very little audible affect in that voice. No Gladys Knight, she. The pain of a difficult life was not for externalizing but for containing within the bounds of all that loveliness, so as not to contaminate the perfect world of which Karen and her brother dreamed so tenaciously. Which meant that, also like ABBA, the Carpenters were utterly formalist in their approach. Leakage into the music of any kind of psychological waste matter would be taken as a failure of personal discipline but also as an exhibition of poor taste. “This isn’t about us,” was the tacit assertion, expressed as silently as sunshine. “It’s about the music.”
“Goodbye to Love” is one of the most heartbreaking pop singles ever made because of the earnest perfection of that formalism and because it contains not a moment, not a nanosecond, of emotional leakage throughout its four-minute length. The emotions implicit in the song pulsate beneath a perfect surface that has been polished to allow the reflection of the enquiring gaze but no penetration. Agony? Not in here, matey. You’ll have to go elsewhere for that. Self-scrutiny? Well, it depends on what you mean . . .
In fact “Goodbye to Love” is self-scrutiny as executed by a broken woman who will not give in to the effects of the breakage, preferring to hold her own gaze, steady and stoical, as it reflects her own surface back from the surface of her bedroom mirror. She is saying goodbye to love, and here’s why; oh, and here’s why she won’t be caving in to her feelings any time soon, either, no sir, no matter how great the pressure from within . . . This is all about inner fortitude and outer control, as is life, when you boil it down. It is another song of self-persuasion.
Richard Carpenter’s long melody is beautiful almost beyond words, and Karen phrases it as if breathing were not actually necessary. The combination of melodic and harmonic flow plus implied spiritual resolution brings to mind the feel and tone of a resolute Bach cantata—an impression not diminished by the contribution of Tony Peluso, whose famous guitar solo dares to express all the histrionic feeling eschewed by the voice and then takes off at the end, over chorale-ing Karens and Richards, for a descant that runs the harmonic substitutions down as if this were a Lutheran church in eighteenth-century Leipzig and not Radio 1 in 1972. It is that rarest of phenomena, a breathtaking Easy Listening pop record. And it stands, four decades on, as nobly as a neoclassical statue embodying an allegory of self-effacement through self-affirmation, shining and impermeable as polished marble.
PRINCE: “IF I WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND”
Paisley Park Records, 1987
Prince died the day before yesterday. It appears that he died of an overdose of prescription drugs at his Minneapolitan HQ, Paisley Park. He was fifty-seven. He breathed his last breath in a lift, all on his own—a tiny man in a sealed mechanical box, falling silent too soon. A musical box suffering a terminal breakdown.
But then it was apt for him to depart in such a location. How inappropriate would it have been for Prince to die in a ploughed field or on a rocky outcrop, or in a meadow by a stream while enjoying a picnic? Prince belonged in small, confined, virtually airless spaces, as Aaron Copland belonged in wide-open, rangy ones. And he lived and died by his taste for intimacy: all he ever wanted, or so it seemed, was to be shut in somewhere private, unobserved and with no possibility of outside intrusion—and no prospect of escape into the world either. Confinement, closeness, exclusion, control: that was Prince.
Compare and contrast with his opposite number in the four-cornered fight for the high, central ground of 1980s American pop: Bruce Springsteen (and let’s leave the other two corners, Madonna and Michael Jackson, right out of this). Springsteen was—is—unambiguous, open, unconfined, muscular, masculine, political, epic, bossy: he has the American landscape at his command and its people in his backyard. His backyard is America. Prince’s backyard was where the bins were kept and he never went anywhere near it. Springsteen would be only too happy to die in a ploughed field or on a rocky outcrop. He would feel nothing but horror at the prospect of expiring in a lift.
But only one of them could really croon.
Prince’s croon was the most salacious ever heard. It was a croon for the ages, in the sense that every age has had inexpressible things to say about sex—but for our age for the obvious reason that we are not, in our age, half so shackled by tasteful and/or uptight restraint as our forebears. Prince’s croon had nothing in common with Perry Como’s. It was suggestive, close, silken, indecent, persuasive. It knew coziness only as a fix for post-coital tristesse. It was a continuation in sound of the trajectory of his blinking, calf-like gaze, coyly looped to ensnare listeners in the coils of his narcissism. Prince always kept his listeners close, even when dancing.
“If I Was Your Girlfriend” is a semi-croon off the Sign O’ the Times album, delivered in large part in a constricted, genderless whisper-squeal. It is by no means his greatest song, nor does it contain his most affecting singing, but it is a song only he could have written and sung like that, so indecently closely. Its protagonist—let’s call him Prince—is addressing an ex-girlfriend and enjoining her to think of him now not as an ex, but as a current friend who happens to be a girl, free in his girlishness to be intimate, attentive, and insightful as only a best friend can. It is many things, but it is persuasive above all. It says, look how close we can be: we can be so close that it would be difficult to tell us apart. Let us at least try this on for size—and I have a feeling the rewards for both of us will be even greater than before.
The programmed rhythm that supports it is completely airless.