Autumn Leaves. Nat King Cole. 1955. Capitol.

 According to common rock lore it was at Altamont where the short lived American fantasy known as the Summer of Love met its day-long, ignominious end. Six months earlier, in a rented house in Belgravia, London, Judy Garland’s dead body was found in her bathroom, unofficially bringing to an end that period of golden age American show business when fame was still new, and quietly, busily, transitioning into cultural mythology. Mid-century, solo vocalists from Garland to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, were, through dramatic execution of the American songbook, introducing into popular performance the erotic immediacy of narcissistic allure and glamor. When Capitol Records released Autumn Leaves in 1955, Cole was already a two-decade practicing veteran of his craft, and, after only three words of the song’s introductory verse, you hear yourself led into the quintessence of high pop romanticism by a pair of masters. The Nelson Riddle orchestral arrangement is bound up in our twenty-first century consciousness with associations not only of the great solo vocalists but of Hollywood’s silver age, which depicted life as a series of extravagant gestures and over inflated emotional outbursts. The post-war entertainment industry was now focused on bringing a funhouse, freakishly distorted reflection of our emotional lives to our attention for commodification and distribution, and artists were clamoring to participate in this dazzlingly new pop experience. What Cole and Nelson Riddle captured with Autumn Leaves is a rarefied vision of our self-obsession with feelings, segregated from reality and elevated to pitch perfect ersatz elegance with all the sublime artificiality of a Hitchcock film or the poetry of James Merrill. There were many, many years of deprivation and toil preceding this halcyon American cycle of good fortune, and young consumers were eager to pay for the celebration of capitalist triumph and democratization of pop culture. The social sphere was alive with the buzz of simulacra. It was available at the touch of a jukebox button, the turn of a radio dial, the injection of a hypodermic needle. It proliferated throughout our representational government and in the pages of dedicated journalism. The world, formerly set aflame by the mechanics of war, was now ablaze with the velocity of our escape from the norm, even as we craved its stability. That tension has held until the Presidential election of 2020, when it finally began to fissure.