Jack: And when either of them sings it—indeed, when any of the hundreds and possibly thousands of artists who've recorded that song are doing their thing—you're not really thinking about Cole Porter and the force of his charisma, either. The song is a freestanding cultural object, a template, belonging to everyone and no one, always different, always the same.
I kinda think the Great American Songbook has a special status. For one thing, it's a historical phenomenon -- I don't think there are songwriters working in the same mode today except as, essentially, museum curators or historians. It's pop music, but not in the narrow, genre sense. It *used* to be pop music in that sense.
I also think, within the period when that *was* pop (narrow), there was a sense of appropriation which implies an ownership of the song. Most of the songs came from the musical theater, were recontextualized/stolen/covered by a performer ("she made it her own") and then stolen/covered by the next one. There's a live Sinatra "Mac the Knife" where he sings about, essentially, how he's taking the song from Ella. He also had to be consciously thieving when he started singing "Luck, Be A Lady" -- the song that Sinatra's co-star Marlon Brando sang in Guys & Dolls. The song became Sinatra's -- imbued with the "Sinatra" brand.
Jackie Susann: But Grant, and kinda talking out my arse here, surely there are expected modes of dress/appearance that go with classical and folk tunes? Like, I think most classical music is played by dudes in tuxes, and the CDs are marketed like they were played by dudes in tuxes. If a bunch of kids with mohawks and skateshoes played it, it would be a totally different experience. Right?
With classical, yes, but with, ummm, "authentic" folk, no. Folk music, in the sense of "Hush, Little Baby," is sort of free of performers altogether -- songs that are handed down from parent to child, that exist in a world without stages or recordings, but just with people singing in bedrooms, on porches, wherever. The music everyone knows and sings -- without taking it out of its "proper" context (all that extra-musical stuff involving who's song it is, names, album art, where you hear it, etc.). The folk made by Woody Guthrie and Peter, Paul & Mary was taking that stuff and formalizing it into, well, something like folk-pop. Or pop folk.
Also, I think Mozart at the time it was new was being played by the equivalent of kids in mohawks and skate shoes. The tux thing seems to me to be a later stab at eliminating the performer as an element -- they're all identical. In a symphony orchestra, you tend to know only the conductor's name. I can't even name the members of Kronos (although they're stealing motifs from the pop genre and sticking them into classical performance because it's clever -- ditto Vanessa Mae, who's described as "classical pop"). Classical music does have pop stars, I suppose, but I don't think they function the same way as Green Day or Celine Dion. |
