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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, and c
Read more

Blues Is King. Marshall Crenshaw. 1985. Warner Bros.

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marsha
Read more

Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. BeauSoleil. 1988. Arhoolie.

  A modicum of sadness is built into BeauSoleil’s rendition of the Lawrence Walker ballad Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. It’s the emotional center point around which the song revolves, illuminating the record’s good faith by fixing the listener’s attention on the band’s collaborative dynamic, the process by which they draw poignancy from each instrumental performance. Every pop record is an implied contractual agreement between artist and listener, with listener consenting to his role as subjective recipient of the commercial audio product. The basic nature of this role is subject to change over a period of time as the listener’s relationship with the record changes, given, but not limited, to issues of personality maturity. Typically, the consumer role will fall into one of two camps: either the faceless, one-of-millions mass audience whose pop experience is often social or the cogent individual whose expectations of the pop experience are more personal and long lasting. The most signifi
Read more