Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty by Ben Ratliff

Author:Ben Ratliff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Appreciation, Instruction & Study, Music, Theory, Recording & Reproduction
ISBN: 9781429953597
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2016-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

We’ll have to keep movin’ on.

Sand blowing, I just can’t breathe in this air

Thought it would soon be clear and fair.

Cindy Walker wrote the lyrics—at twelve!—idiomatically, but Duncan is unrattleable: he will not make them cute, he will not show you that he acknowledges the talkiness of the writing. He sings them as if he is making them up. This is a moment that tests him. He will not be arty. He is not locating a deep emotion within himself; he is reporting secondhand that one may be occurring.

* * *

A double act similar to Wills and Duncan’s—trickster/straight man, manic/depressive—defined Dean Martin’s stagecraft with Jerry Lewis. Dean Martin, obviously, had sprezzatura. The only thing he appeared to care about in his voice was his vibrato, which he downplayed anyway. Otherwise he was singing in the shower: his entire enterprise was ease edging into absence. Of his personal life, his second wife, Jeanne, remarked: “Dean can do nothing better than anyone in the world.” His repertory—a little of which overlapped with Tommy Duncan’s (“Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” “Corrine, Corrina”)—was almost invariably either love songs or jokes.

Frank Sinatra had his own kind of authority, and far broader skill as a singer than Dean Martin, but he was sentimental about being an artist. He never questioned or denied his own ambition through his art. His music implies a total belief in his own earthly power, which is always a sentimental belief.

But Martin had more authority. None of his performances particularly stand out. His stubborn consistency is a thing to be awed by. He almost commands you to relax your standards, or to think differently about the purpose of art. Though he might not have admitted it, his music promoted hypnagogic thinking: like M. D. Ramanathan, the great Carnatic singer of Neelambari ragas, singing “Sri Jaanaki,” Dean Martin singing a slow song (“If” or “You Belong to Me”) might send you in the direction of pleasant, refreshing sleep.

He was natural at being adequate. The critic Brendan Gill was exaggerating, of course, when he described Martin as “the worst and most self-confident actor in the world.” But he was also getting the point exactly. And in another sense the point was not even worth thinking about. Dean Martin made you not care what he did. He sang as if nothing was of any consequence. His delivery erases your memory as it goes along.

Still, a real integrity radiated from his singing. He appeared to be entirely game for artifice; he believed in lightness, in play. Not as a diversion, but as the thing itself, the heart of the artichoke. (As a work ethic, at least, if not as an artistic ideal.) As he performed—in the Martin-Lewis movies, on stage with Frank Sinatra at the Sands, on the Dean Martin Variety Show—he seemed committed to the idea of leisure. His, and yours. America had been a rough place until around the time he started singing. He is protecting your leisure. But beyond your right to comfort, you’re on your own.

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