Monday, September 29, 2003 Anton Karas, "'The Third Man' Theme" (April 29, 1950) This is just a guy on a zither. That's it. No singing, even. I don't think I know of any other hit record, much less a number one, that's just one instrument, modern-day all-computer hits excepted if they indeed count and if they indeed exist. (I bet they don't. Exist, I mean. Somebody always has to drag in a keyboard...) It would've been an unlikely chart hit in any era. A shift of circumstances, Carol Reed passing by some other Heuriger, one where Karas wasn't playing, would bring us forty-five years later to this tune winding up on one of the volumes of The Secret Museum of Mankind (if he was lucky) (if we were lucky), and then I'd think, "hmmm...charming. Sprightly. Love that walking bassline" and that's about it. But there's a film attached whether we like it or not, and the memory of that film is so strong (even if, like me, you've never seen it but know roughly what it's about) that you can only hear an acid jolliness, a jig with crossed fingers behind the back. 8 (link)

Sunday, September 28, 2003 Eileen Barton, "If I Knew You Were Comin' (I'd've Baked a Cake)" (April 15, 1950) Sometimes I think I know how Adorno must've felt when he was exiled in America. IF. I. KNEW YOU WERE COMIN', I'D'VE BAKED A CAKE. BAKED A CAKE. BAKED A CAKE. Barton sings her opening lines with a twinge of the cranky, as if she's sick and fucking tired of singing take after take of this crappy little song in her most unnatural voice. Maybe she's unwittingly captured the passive-aggressive jollility that comes by when you're entertaining unexpected and unwanted company. In her more aggressive moments, I actually feel a twinge of empathy for her and the accompanying Dixieland revival musicians for having to go with this transparent awfulness. (This could serve as the basis of a 'pro-pop' argument for emotional authenticity in singing: faked sentiment that draws attention to itself ruins the air-tight fantasy we were hoping to find in the song. -- and sentiment is just too hard sometimes to fake well.) Every other part of the song (except maybe some of the drum fills) sounds just as obnoxiously insistent as her singing; the hand-clapping, the horns, the cutesy piano. It's as if Bob Merrill et al. took their songwriting cues from Rosser Reeve's Unique Selling Proposition: the song's unique sentiment that differentiates itself from all other competing songs on the marketplace gets hammered into the mind through the three Rs. IF I KNEW YOU WERE COMIN', I'D'VE BAKED A CAKE. BAKED A CAKE. BAKED A CAKE. And for all its inanity, it did have a unique sentiment: you could say that the songwriters saw a vacuum of songs appropriate to sing to unexpected company, and they filled that vacuum accordingly. The fact that a lot of the music of the pre-Beatle era was made with an eye towards that kind of social performance -- sing-alongs at parties, folk hootenannies, scout camp-outs, fraternal organizations, all of which seems very quaint now -- may go some ways to explaining the inanity of a lot of the music of that time. You'd think that the more musically literate a nation was, the more sophisticated its musical output might be. But I can see why just the opposite might be true in a society like 1950's America where social performance is a key way that music is consumed. The listeners in a society where everybody has learned just enough about music that they can credibly play the day's hits on a piano at a party, say, or a sing a simple tune on key, might consistently choose music that accords with their merely modest musical gifts. On the other hand, the listeners in a society where only a select few can play a instrument well (which could arguably describe American now, or is more the case now than it was in the 50's, what with declining rates of musical literacy) wouldn't necessarily recognize 'playability' or 'singability' as a meaningful criterion for anything. They might 'naively' enjoy all sorts of things of varying degrees of complexity, whereas the mainstream music-lovers in the former society might be attracted more to songs so rudimentary they could've been composed on a toy xylophone, as this song was. 1 (link)