Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Eddie Fisher, "Oh My Pa-Pa (O Mein Papa)"
(January 2, 1954)

Music for the old at heart. It doesn't swing, it doesn't sway, it dodders.

Lyrically, too, this ode to a dead father seems like a rebuke of America's newly-ascendent youth culture, with the narrator pining not for autonomy or kicks, but for the long-ago time when he could sit on his father's knee. Yet ponder at some of the other ways the song communicates affection for the father: he's referred using the diminutive "pa-pa"; he's "adorable" and "lovable," which are words more appropriate for a puppy than an adult, even a beloved father; he's "always the clown," which implies permanent shallowness, an inability to be serious; he's "so funny in his way," which I can tell you from bitter experience is the kind of benevolent gloss of a family member's eccentricities often used when it is wrong to speak ill of the dead. "O Mein Papa" originally came from a Swiss musical called Der Schwarze Hecht, where it was literally about a man who made his living as a clown. Not having heard the musical, I get a dread feeling that in the worst-case scenario, the clown-father was used in Der Schwarze Hecht as a vast reservoir of laughing-on-the-outside/crying-on-the-inside bathos, as clowns often are in Western Culture, but at least there the lyrics about him being a clown and clown-like would be statements of fact about the guy's career, not just value judgements. Removed from the context of the musical as Fisher's cover is, the father isn't a clown-qua-circus clown, but even less than that: merely something to pat on the head, a doll, a toy. So whatever the intentions of the songwriters, the translators, or Eddie Fisher, there is more than a whiff of patronization in this song, the child claiming mastery over his father in a very cheap way, and to me that's more repellent than any lack of teen spirit or a good beat. Detestable. 1

(link)