You won’t find two better exponents of the split in modern American popular song-writing. Sondheim descended from the school of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kern, Porter, and Berlin; Newman is a creature of Hollywood and modern pop. The eclipse of the great American songwriter–a royal line that began with Gershwin and runs through Sondheim himself–has obsessed pundits and songwriters for almost half a century. Their chief culprit is usually rock and roll. But when they argue that rock ruined songs by coarsening them, by catering to the baser instincts, they sound like TV preachers. And they ignore the fact that modern pop has produced some of the century’s greatest songs.
Rock conflated two jobs–the songwriter’s and the singer’s–into one. Frank Sinatra needed an Irving Berlin, a Cole Porter and a Hoagy Carmichael. Today’s performers–from Ice-T to Michael Stipe to Alanis Morissette–create their own material, and too often you wind up with singers who can’t write or writers who can’t sing. (Country music remains the one field where song-writers still write for performers.)
And with everyone tuned to a different radio station, nobody knows the same songs anymore. Tony Bennett recalls starting out at New York’s Paramount Theater, where he played seven shows a day: “In the morning you worked for the teenagers, in the night for the lovers and husbands and wives. And management would say, make sure you sing songs everybody likes.”
As loud as the world has gotten in the last few years, it’s gotten curiously quieter, too. It is as though, deprived of tunes that anyone can hum, we have forgotten how to sing.
America, as a result, is a less tuneful and lyrical place. Fans of Johnny Mercer didn’t have to have Ph.D.s to delight in a song that rhymed “palace,” “chalice” and “aurora boreal-is.” The reigning lyricists of the ’80s and ’40s, writers like Mercer, Mitchell Parish and Lorenz Hart, were “magnificently literate men,” in the words of the jazz critic Gene Lees. “One assimilated from them one’s sense of the English language. They were glorifying and elevating it, not in inaccessible works of High Culture but in popular music that you heard every day on the radio.” A first-class sore-head, Lees thinks those days are long gone. But he didn’t count on the kids.
Any baby boomer knows the weird feeling of realizing that the kid knows more songs than the parent. And it’s not just Barney songs. From school, from cartoons and old-movie videos, from somewhere they pick up the words to “Over the Rainbow” or “Glow Worm” and even “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”
“Half of my audiences are very young,” says cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci. “They want to hear this music of Cole Porter and the Gershwins. All of it is new to them, and they say, these are great songs.” Marcovicci is constantly receiving new songs from composers eager to fill the shoes of a Carmichael or an Arlen. “Their songs may not be popular on the radio, but they have the same grace and wit as the songs in the ’80s or ’40s.”
While Marcovicci might be accused of accentuating the positive, who would ever have thought that Willie Nelson would have one of his biggest hits with “Star-dust” or that Tony Bennett would turn up a huge success on “MTV Unplugged”? Even though our tastes may have grown more pluralistic, we still know enough to tip our hats to this musical aristocracy. Better yet, the remnants of the golden age of American song writing and singing can take heart from the fact that their greatest lesson–that there is often no difference between what’s good and what’s popular–is now the law of the land.
