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Saturday, February 12, 2005
Leroy Anderson, "Blue Tango"
(May 17, 1952)
It's an orchestral instrumental -- in fact, the first instrumental record to sell a million copies. Unsurprisingly, there's not much I can say about: I admit I get unmoored when I can't talk about lyrics or voice. A tango, though...
Tango is so redolent of the fifties, right? Not the fities of the Argentines themselves, of course. I mean those cheeky Americans, ruling the world, maybe going on vacation to far off lands, throwing money at the locals, then returning to buy long-playing records with "ethnic" themes, play them a few times, then file them away somewhere, maybe that drafty coat closet by the front door. Then the Americans DIE and their children have to get rid of everything right quick, so along with the rayon clothes, the knock-off Noguchi coffee tables, the chipped salt and pepper shakers, they ship the near-unplayed records off the to the nearest Goodwill, where they get tossed in with some of the fifty bazillion copies of Whipped Cream and other Delights Herb Alpert probably bought to juice up their placement on the charts, after which hot young ironists buy them for a buck and a chuckle, repeating the mad cycle of consumerist consumption and excretion and reconsumption until mankind does that final suicidal plunge or our robot overloads do the honorable thing and enslave us.
I've listened to the song about fifteen times in a row and I feel neither irriation nor interest. As such it's hard for me to imagine why something like this would spend weeks on the Billboard throne. What did people do to this song? Did they tango to it? Why do I have such a hard time imagining Americans tangoing en masse to anything?
Anderson's other big tunes I can understand because I can remember them. "The Syncopated Clock" traveled down the decades to meet me at Jacob Gunther Elementary School in the late '70's, when art teacher Gary Gaccione choreograph young kids with paper clock hats as they had Bob Fosse moments on folding chairs. (Enjoy one of your few internet mentions, you googling fucker -- I'm still bitter about the incident with Robert Hallacheck and the white-out.) The original "Sleigh Ride" (the orchestral one without the "lovely-weather-for-a-sleigh-ride-together-with-you" lyrics that were added later) gave me something of a shock a few years ago when The Gap used it in a commercial a couple years. You'd think I would've ambiently absorbed all this track's contours from years of oldies Christmas programming, but I didn't remember or know that towards the end Anderson's Norman Rockwell vision of sleigh rides gets reprised in jazzy syncopation (in fact, I wondered if The Gap hired some hack to remix it), making it rousing in a way that "Blue Tango" can't touch. 2
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