Pre-rock pop in all its surprising, sentimental variety is now a Vegas cliche of boozy bonhomie and cocktail-hour flirtation
It's hard not to have a good time with Duets II, Tony Bennett's new album. Bennett is a generous host, gently guiding varied collaborators through their turns. The songs are familiar classics, given a deluxe veneer by rich arrangements. But all the amusement can't quite cover up a whiff of embalming fluid. This is nothing to do with Bennett's octogenarian status ? he's the liveliest and sharpest thing about the record. It's also nothing to do with the unfortunate coincidence that the record contains Amy Winehouse's final recording, an incoherent run through Body & Soul that is no kind of memorial.
No, the body on the slab is the music itself. The great American songbook has been stripped of whatever context its entries might have had, and exists now as the soundtrack for endless imagined or real TV specials. More broadly, pre-rock pop in all its surprising and sentimental variety now seems reduced to a Vegas cliche of boozy bonhomie and cocktail-hour flirtation. After enjoying Duets II for the first time, I put on Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, my favourite of the great albums he made with arranger Nelson Riddle. The elderly Bennett and the prime Sinatra are an unfair comparison ? but I wanted to remind myself how this music felt in its prime: the singer leading you through a song, exploring an emotion like an idea in real time, the arrangement discreetly supporting each twist in his feelings.
There's some of that on Duets II, of course, all of it from Bennett himself: the album's best moments are where you hear the singer collaborating with a song, not another star. On This Is All I Ask, he has delicious fun with the intro ("As I approach the prime of my life ?") before ushering in Josh Groban, whose stiffly operatic performance kills the song. The tracks likely to draw most fire on Duets II are the songs with modern, melismatic voices like Mariah Carey, but actually it's the opera types ? Groban and Andrea Bocelli ? who most starkly demonstrate the fact these songs were built for singers with technique. Power doesn't suit them ? they require nuance.
Special occasions like Duets II aside, the other place we'll encounter the pre-rock era this winter is on The X-Factor, where a small set of jazzy standards has become part of the show's repertoire ? prominently in the annual pile-up of "big band week". There's a lot to dislike about how reality shows approach this music, suborning the song's narrative into a contestant's wider storyline. But there's also something enjoyable about hearing unschooled performers try to read and interpret songs, however fearful the results are. There's always a chance you'll hear something that genuinely does put new life into a song you thought you knew, even through sheer incompetence. But ironically, given how much pop in the 40s and 50s relied on interpretation, "big band week" on the show is always the least surprising, most rote task for its contestants, an excuse for some tired Rat Pack dress-up and a Michael Bubl� guest spot.
In the X-Factor history of pop, of course, everything gets smoothed out ? the theme park take on pre-rock music is part of a show that treats pop as a continuum of entertainment, from Billie Holiday to Bruno Mars. For someone like me, growing up as a music fan in the 80s, this is a surprisingly radical notion. Back then it was an article of faith that everything changed in 1955 and that pop predating that was something alien and antique. But the reality TV version of history collapses that certainty: here Elton, the Beatles, Michael Jackson et al are presented in continuity with their pre-rock forebears, and it's the periods of rupture that are gently nudged aside. You're far more likely to hear a song made famous by Sinatra on The X-Factor than you are one made famous by Elvis. In some ways I welcome this rebalancing of pop's past ? but any benefits are undermined when the vision of what old pop was is so ossified: it's become a mummy in an exquisitely tailored suit.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/22/death-of-great-american-songbook
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