Sunday, August 22, 2004

Rosemary Clooney, "Come On-a My House"
(July 28, 1951)

This song was written by Pulitzer Prize winner William Saroyan AND Chipmunks auteur, Ross Bagdasarian, surely a pairing of fabulous non-obviousness. If pop actually came anywhere near fufilling part of its manifest destiny of being the primary reconciler of unbelievable cultural contradictions, stupid playwright- rec. producer collabs would be a commonplace, right? (Tho if it were I guess the contradictions would no longer hold.) Who wants to raise their hand for David Mamet and Eminem? August Wilson and Kanye West? Tony Kushner and the Scissor Sisters? David Guare and Greg Alexander? Shouldn't corporate synergy be good for something other than slamming its big leather boot in the face of THE PEOPLE, even if it's just for cheap laughs? (Actually S and B were cousins so it wasn't that non-obvious.)

Anyway. Clooney herself hated this song and only recorded it when Mitch Miller threatened to fire her if she didn't. I'm seeing in her obits quotes from her like "a cheap way to get people's attention" and "sounded more like a drunken chant than an historic folk art form." It's supposed to be "Armenian" (both S and B were Armenian-Americans) and maybe in its original form it was but as Clooney had no idea what an Armenian accent sounded like so did a slight Italian one instead. It's a little broad but not too broad; she exaggerates some vowels and lets some others trail off into incoherence, but if she succumbed to total stereotype she wouldn't be able to purr and curl the words to the beat the way she does. The song itself rests upon two distinct -- and somewhat comic -- ethic female stereotypes, that of the ravenous hot tamale of a girl who's never satisfied and the overbearing overample matron who gives and gives and gives, both united in smothering the nameless object of the protagonist with fruit and caaa-ndy, and in a nice touch of subtle crudeness, (Easta) eggs. Not knowing anything about Armenian folk song I could still be tricked into thinking it's a folk song of some kind, a folk song from a Europe where famine was a fact and where paradise is filled with food, like the Land of Cockaigne and the Garden of Eden, America, too. (It can also look like a lurking hell, witness the witch's house in Grimm's Hansel & Gretel.)

Not such a dumb song now, is it? Well, no, it's still kinda dumb. But sexy. Well, a little. Harpischord's awesome, though. 5

(link)