Sitting in a movie house, watching TV, listening to today's hits, I sometimes get to feeling old.
Like Tony Soprano suspiciously appraising his alien son A.J., I start muttering rhetorical accusations at the American entertainment industry. How did it survive so long without fart jokes? Was there once melody in hit songs? Who outlawed the rapier of subtle wit as if it were a handgun? When did young men aspire to be Junior Achievers and not jackasses? Is Howard Stern on the E! Channel 24 hours a day? Does all of pop culture have to wear a smirk? Was the lowest common denominator ever this low? Did Darwin have it all wrong?
And another question, directed inward: Am I a crank? A wise man (I'm old, I forget who) said that each generation believes it is smarter than the one that came before and wiser than the one coming after. I could be suffering the common delusion that the film or music or TV culture I grew up with was better when I was young — instead of realizing that it only seemed better because I was young. As a critic, I'm paid to calibrate the distinctions, not just between good and bad, but between what's good and what fits into my aesthetic preconceptions. I also have to be careful not to rag on everything new because I've seen it before in countless, numbing variations. Here it comes, I think as I endure another gross-out comedy: the millionth tribute to the Three Stooges.
All right: For any adult, today is likely to be less gleaming than a yesterday that our mind rouges up as artfully as the Disney Imagineers create a clean and beckoning Main Street not of the past but of the never-was. The present involves too many fruitless struggles and drab compromises to let anyone believe he is living in a Golden Age. And, as Randall Jarrell wrote, "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks."
All right, I whisper to my inner crank. You're a journalist, not an archivist. Get with the program. The past is passé. "New" is a synonym for "improved." So be nice to the kids. They're in power. Everyone loves them, takes their style cues from them (note to self: get tattooed), courts them like that plutocrat lusting for Anna Nicole Smith. Wait a minute: She was already in her 20s when she married C. Montgomery Burns. The prime meat market skews even younger these days, as networks, movie studios and magazines aspire to be cultural day-care centers. The entire media mob will soon be rushing to appeal to that all-important prenatal demographic.
But, I realize with a kind of defeatist pride, I can't join in. I can't help being what I've been: a child of the '50s, raised on Little Richard and the Everly Brothers and Ray Charles, Ingmar Bergman and Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder, the comedy of Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs and Harvey Kurtzman. If I were older, I might have thought these artists pretentious or inane; if younger, pretentious and primitive. (And at my age, I would have thought that calling them artists was just plain pretentious.) Finding them at exactly the moment when my sensibility was ripe for shaping is my blessing and my curse. Without doing much but enjoying them then, and without hardly thinking about it since, I let them set the bar for my critical standards. Those standards must still apply, for when I replay "Long Tall Sally" or see "Some Like It Hot" for the dozenth time or flip through a precious old Mad comic, I am still enthralled — and convinced that, when I was a kid, I had excellent taste, and surer of my enthusiasms then than I am now.
I was a few years older, but still malleable, when the '60s tossed new lightning bolts my way. Naïve rock grew up, movies got bolder. More important to its staying power, popular culture became accepted as the official culture. TIME magazine, which until the mid-'60s ran stories about rock under the Show Business logo, finally considered it Music. Thus the era of serious frivol began. Low art replaced high art as a chic passion; it began to sustain both an industry and its own scholarship. (I know: I got a Master's degree in movies at Columbia.) In 1966, on his longhair CBS lecture program, Leonard Bernstein reverently deconstructed Paul McCartney's "Good Day Sunshine." He might as easily have chosen the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows," with its polyphonic harmonies and angelic rapture.
Thursday night, at Radio City Music Hall, I heard Elton John sing that song as its composer, Brian Wilson, sat at his keyboard still and oddly expressionless, like a stricken statue. It was part of a Wilson tribute, taped for a July airing on TNT, attended by many eminences of decades past: Paul Simon, David Crosby, Billy Joel, all of them resembling their iconic early selves less than the uncles you haven't seen in decades, now shrunken and paunchy. ("I was there in the '60s too," Crosby said after flubbing the "Sloop John B" lyrics, "and I've got about 18 brain cells left.") But, lord, that music sounded fine. When Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Metropolitan Opera baritone Jubilant Sykes and the Boys Choir of Harlem lit into "Good Vibrations," I could feel a dizzying surge of pleasure that was not remembered ecstasy but the real, immediate thing. This stuff was, IS, fabulous.
II: That Old Feeling
The last 20 years has seen the rise of a new generation of culture consumers: one that has instant access to the glories of the past. The sprawl of video and web technology puts almost anything you want at your fingertips or on your cassette shelf. You don't just see a movie, and trust your memory that it was good; you can tape it, refer to it, own it. Thanks to the Discman you needn't be at home to hear your favorite music; you can drive or fly with it, jog to it, fall asleep on the beach to it. Care to read a sheaf of reviews by your favorite critic? Go to the "Search" box at the top of this page and type in... whatever name comes to mind.
These functions are democratic; they allow the consumer to scavenge through various formats, genres, decades. They can summon not just the latest releases but classic pop songs and movies. New science revives old popular art. So, for the young, there may not be the narrow fascination with current fashions. Kids can listen to some musical antique and, since they're wearing the magic headphones that seclude them from parental curiosity, come to a startling conclusion. This stuff was, IS, fabulous.
Fabulous or not, it's part of their lives. The No. 1 hit single of recent weeks, Shaggy's "Angel," buttresses a banal romantic rap with the 1968 hit "Angel of the Morning" (composed by Chip Taylor, who was Jon Voight's brother and also wrote the primal anthem "Wild Thing"). Paolo Conte's international hit "Happy Feet," played frequently by pundit turned DJ Rush Limbaugh, is a perky devolution of the Jack Yellen–Milton Ager tune sung by Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys in the 1930 "King of Jazz." A current TV spot for the Corcoran Group of real estate agents features the 1953 Rosemary Clooney rendition of "Come On-a My House," an Armenian folk tune Americanized by playwright William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (who, as David Seville, created the helium-voiced Chipmunks — have we surfeited on music trivia yet?).
Venerable culture hasn't disappeared; its past is present. The cooler commercials and half the music videos are shown in pearly black and white. Tony Soprano slouches into a epiphanic funk watching James Cagney as a Chicago gangster in the 1931 "Public Enemy." The hippest, funniest show of the '90s, "Mystery Science Theater 3000," was nothing but guys making sophisticated cracks about bad old movies — and thus making them good.... for something. More broadly, the parody element inside so many hit movies and TV shows, as well as the sampling of hip-hop, demands that the consumer have a panoramic familiarity with the pop culture of yesterday and the day or decade before. You won't GET "Scary Movie" unless you know "Scream"; won't get "Scream" unless you know "Halloween"; won't understand "Halloween" without "Psycho." That leads kids to the video store — perhaps not for the best the past had to offer, but certainly for a huge hunk of it.
And we say, why not the best? Beyond the search for pop detritus, beyond the Ed Wood festivals and Nick at Nite "Three's Company" marathons, there is a cottage industry in the higher forms of nostalgia. Boxed sets of DVDs and CDs give new life, and cogent exegesis, to hundreds of deceased artistes; today the great names in movies and music are Kino Video and Rhino Records. The invaluable "Encores!" series of revival concerts at New York's City Center present the most buoyant musicals within a stone's throw of sick old Broadway. Gary Giddins' exemplary Crosby biography demonstrates how a sharp writer can flesh out the hazy silhouette of a dead, "conventional" singer. Public Access cable, at least in New York, allows the sainted moles of low-art and high-trash research to show clips of rare films and TV shows. Keeping up with the past is a full-time job, and an important, terrific one.
So let everyone else focus on the hot new movie or show or performer. (Let me do it too, in my day job.) Today's comet is but one colorful blip on the long EKG of popular culture. This column, to appear every week or so, will spotlight, and often celebrate, what came before and is still there — on all those cyber-age discs and in just about everyone's muscle memory. I want to write about a "new" collection of Tin Pan Alley lyrics, a "new" 10-CD set of Mildred Bailey sides, a "new" package of silent short comedies that Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton made back when Woodrow Wilson was President. By examining these and other burnished classics, I hope to prove that there's nothing wrong with that old feeling. Indeed, it can be as potent, challenging, exhilarating as the best of the new. That old river of pop culture, for those who visit it, is a fountain of youth.
HOMEWORK
What do these 10 songs have in common, and what are some other suitable examples?
"Are You
Lonesome Tonight" (Elvis Presley)
"Blue Moon" (The Marcels)
"Dream a Little Dream of Me" (The Mamas & the Papas)
"I Only Have Eyes for You" (The Flamingoes)
"The More I See You" (Chris Montez)
"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (The Platters)
"Try a Little Tenderness" (Otis Redding)
"Way Down Yonder in New Orleans" (Freddie Cannon)
"When I Fall in Love" (The Lettermen)
"Who's Sorry Now" (Connie Francis)
What about these ten? What do they have in common, and what are some other suitable examples?
"Gloria"
(Laura Branigan)
"I Can't Help Falling in Love With You" (Elvis Presley)
"It's Now or Never" (Elvis Presley)
"Jealousy" (Frankie Laine)
"Let It Be Me" (The Everly Brothers)
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (The Tokens)
"Mack the Knife" (Bobby Darin)
"My Way" (Frank Sinatra)
"Skokian" (The Four Lads)
"Strangers in the Night" (Frank Sinatra)
"You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" (Dusty Springfield)
E-mail us with your suggestions. We'll get to them in future editions of That Old Feeling.