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 ere's a dry statistic: persons aged twenty through twenty-nine purchased twenty-one percent of all albums sold in the U.S. in 2003. Here's another: the same RIAA consumer profile showed that persons forty-five and older purchased twenty-six percent of all albums sold, up eleven percent from 1994.Last year, Barry Manilow released an album. It was called The Greatest Songs of the Fifties, though a more accurate title might have been Very Popular Songs of the Fifties. It sold 156,000 hard copies in its first week of release and shot directly to No. 1 on the charts. If we assume the 2003 figures cited above haven't undergone some radical shift, which they haven't, this means that about 32,000 twentysomethings ran right out and bought the new Barry Manilow record shortly after it hit the shelves.
I have now listened to The Greatest Songs of the Fifties seven times in a row. It is an entirely sexless album, almost pristine in its purity. No hips within a city block of The Greatest Songs of the Fifties can gyrate or shimmy, what to speak of thrusting. No one will ever get or give head with this record playing in the background, unless they're doing it to spite me, in which case, send pictures. None of this is really a slam on the record itself, though, and therein lies the answer to the question on everybody's lips: "Who's buying this thing?" You are. You, or someone exactly like you, is, and that special someone is buying copies to give as gifts. You, or someone like you, is buying this album precisely because it goes down easy. Unlike the hundred thousand things competing for space in one's daily field of view, Barry Manilow does not strut cock-like across the walk; he does not blare; he will not show his boobs. He is a comfortable, known quantity, and every single day, another once-jaded young man or woman wakes up to the knowledge that comfortable, known quantities are the greatest things in the world. Back in the late '80s, social conservatives set to work reframing recent history. "The '60s" started to sound like shorthand for "back when you could just get high and fuck all night without having to worry about it"; the '70s, for prudes, was even worse, as the drugs and the fucking were more plentiful and easier to come by. (Sorry.) Recasting the open, exploratory character of that age as a harbinger of doom became a sort of parlor game among right-leaning commentators, something to work on between news cycles. You still read editorials about this every six months or so — George Will is especially fond of writing them — condemning the years from (roughly) 1965 to (exactly) 1981 as a dark and troubled time during which most of our present problems put down roots. It's important to call bullshit on this stuff, because the conservatives are dead right about one thing: namely, it's not what actually happened that matters, but who tells the story best. The commonly advanced description of pre-Reagan America as an incipient moral vacuum from which only Emperor Ronald could save us contrasts sharply with the in vivo view of the time that we get from the Barry Manilow album II. Musically, II is either a little or a lot better than you remember. Manilow's feel for syncopation is quite nimble, and he can milk more emotional nuance from a minor key than people with twice his credentials: the eight bars that bridge to the refrain of "I Want to be Somebody's Baby" are
Where is the moral bankruptcy, the ego-mad hedonism, the godlessness? Nowhere to be found; indeed, Manilow sings sadly of one-night stands (the Hal David-assisted "Early Morning Strangers") and suicidal housewives ("Sandra") like a man sharing generally acknowledged truths: that casual sex is a poor substitute for intimacy, or that one's dreams are as important as one's responsibilities. Less than a year later, Manilow released Tryin' to Get the Feeling. Its cover, a cartoonish bronze miniature of the artist at his piano against a red backdrop, has haunted my dreams for years. The album's budget is audibly bigger than that of its predecessor; the strings, the baritone chorus, the depth of it all is dazzling. Disco, whose easy syncopation II quietly anticipated in places, begins slinking into the guitar figures and the string arrangements. Tryin' to Get The Feeling is the album that gave the world "I Write the Songs"; it went triple platinum, and its philosophical outlook can be summed up by a few sentences. First, music is a very nice thing, and it is good for people ( "Bandstand Boogie," "I Write the Songs," "Beautiful Music"). Second, intimacy is a thing to be ardently sought ("Why Don't We Live Together," "You're Leavin' Too Soon," "As Sure As I'm Standing Here"), and nothing can really take its place in a well-rounded life ("Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again," "She's a Star," "A Nice Boy Like Me"). The odd man out is "Lay Me Down," a somewhat bizarre lost-love number whose refrain is "Lay me down and roll me out to sea."
What Manilow's massive success tells us about the '70s is that the character of the age, as remembered by long-view critics, was both as wanton as they fear — even mainstream artists like Manilow sing songs in which people hook up just for the sake of hookin' up — and considerably less so. Casual sex, in Manilow's tremendously popular songs, are occasions mainly for empty pleasure and soul-searching reflection. It's not as if Barry was a voice crying in the wilderness here, either. He was preaching a gospel to which most everyone publicly subscribed. Thus Manilow's albums tell us something important about terms flung around in political discourse — terms like "the mainstream," "the average person" — and about vague but potent memes such as "the ongoing decay of American morals." There is no such decay, as these songs make clear. The mainstream was always a place in which individual pleasures were as important as any other measure of value. The values common to the mainstream, who vote with their pocketbooks, are in fact those of the pop charts; they encompass both The Greatest Songs of the Fifties and "Laffy Taffy." They do not naively define marriage as a place of certain and sanctified joy. They do not demand one yardstick for all, nor are they afraid of the present day, because that is where they live. That Barry Manilow's records ease this message in without breaking a sweat is their greatest triumph. You don't have to even notice that your own values are being merrily affirmed, song after innocuous song. You just have to tap your foot. n°
© 2006 John Darnielle and hooksexup.com. |
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
