Alfie. Cilla Black. 1966. Parlophone.

 Romance is a theater of heightened expectations, a stylized game of co-conspirators in which reality is often referred to, but only inasmuch as it advances a fantasy of selves. The object of romance isn’t love itself, but its simulacrum; the fantasy that when life turns its glum and silent face to us, we’ll outrun it and never surrender to boredom. The songwriter who most clearly understood the sound of post-war America’s infatuation with pop romanticism, capturing its moods and textures, was Burt Bacharach. His songwriting talent was to wed ersatz sophistication to accessible song forms, a combination that made the experience of heartbreak feel so contemporary, so modern, it still recalls those cartoon Roy Lichtenstein ingenues in startling color and Ben-day dotted emotional torment. He also relocated a song’s point of tension from overt sentiment to that perfect moment when romance tips into eroticism. Where most songwriters from previous generations went in search of the timelessness of emotions, Bacharach instead offered us the overwhelming now of our desires, and, thus, the immediacy of pop. Poignant and conventional, Alfie is a close misstep in the Bacharach songbook. Sung from a moralist’s perspective, the song puts the listener in the uncomfortable position of having to endure a harangue. Amid the beauty of swelling strings and sublime piano accompaniment, the Hal David lyric makes the ludicrous suggestion that not to fall in love is a moral failure—yet I never tire of hearing Alfie. Emblematic of the modern American past, it evokes the 1960s that went untouched by riots, anti-war demonstrations, student revolt. It belongs to the sixties of fantasy marketing dreamscape: Vidal Sassoon haircuts, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Jacqueline Susann. This was the camp epoch. The time of Susan Sontag’s famous essay, when American homosexuality became a secret too big to properly manage anymore with police raids and condemnation from psychiatric experts. The sudden emergence of this iteration of queer culture gave us the short-lived beauty of post-war American lyricism—whose ironies were compressed into the poetry of Frank O’Hara—and which, over the years, and through a series of random, unrelated marketing campaigns targeting middle class consumer culture, was quickly diluted of its transcendent gay energy, becoming a mere format, easy listening. Alfie—a #9 UK Top 50 hit for Cilla Black and a #15 Hot 100 for Dionne Warwick in the States—urges a conventionally happy ending for its mass audience, while some of us stick around for something else; the poetry of less dogmatic certainties. From the 2008 Rhino box set Magic Moments: The Definitive Burt Bacharach Collection


Sept 20 021

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