Sunday, August 15, 2004

Nat 'King' Cole, "Too Young"
(June 23, 1951)

Embattled youth on a pink velvet cake.

Lacking a decent working knowledge of the era, it's tempting to fill in the blanks and say that generational friction in songs does not actually exist in pop music until the youthquake of the 50's. But once the teenager is "invented" (or invents itself), friction appears everywhere, even in the squarest non-rock pop of the era, and don't think people didn't notice at the time. Todd Gitlin, in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: "To this sixteen-year-old, [Paul] Anka's wailing 'Diana' of 1959...expressed as much rebellion as the Coaster's 'Yakety Yak.' Boy loves woman, boy talks back to father: two sides of the same Oedipal drama."

Several decades of pop convention have come to dictate that, barring superhuman attempts at bridging The Gap, in battles between innocence and experience the antagonists are parents. Here though "the teenager" is too new and the rebellion is hedged, a little, for the "they" in "they try to tell us we're too young" is never explicitly labeled as mom and dad. In fact, they could just as easily be the couple's awfully sensible peers, who say to themselves -- just as they say to the couple -- that "love's a word/a word we've only heard/but can't begin to know the meaning of" and will hence fool around until something clicks.

Nat 'King' Cole was well into his thirties when he first sang this. I want to say that you couldn't possibly get away with that now, at least on a pop record, I don't think, though I hold out hope that I'm simply igorant of counter-examples. This won't prevent me from trying to tease out a possible meaning from it, that maybe maybe maybe modern pop personas are too overbearing to allow for the even the meager amount of play on this record ("I'm very much an adult but I'm singing from the POV of a teen."), that songs have to have a more exact relationship to the public face singing it than they did when before the era when singers were sorta expected to write their own songs (and we're not in that era anymore especially because it never really happened anyway but it's left authenticist traces all over everything whether we like it or not.)

Also, you could tease out (inter-)racial ironies from underneath the words. To overstate it, "they" say: "Oh GOD, you're just going through a phase, just jungle lust, you don't know what love means and you don't really love THAT BLACK MAN." 6

(link)