Culture Vultures: The Cat in the Hat
Steyn, Mark
"Culture Vultures: The Cat in the Hat" by Mark Steyn The Cat in the Hat There are some sentences you never expect to hear as long as you live —like "We'll be back after the break with Don Ricklcs and Bob Dylan." But...
...This is a routine slur, despite the fact that Como has made a couple of decent albums in the last two decades, which is more than you can say for the Stones...
...With Who loves ya, Frank...
...Good grief, cry the film-makers, don't blame us...
...Everyone's so big on attitude that the music's quit hying to keep up...
...to "How Long Is That Doggy in the Jailhouse...
...Not these clowns...
...This is Frank's achievement at 8o: he said "F---you...
...In a word, Perry has no attitude...
...He'll pass on the album, just give him the sleeve...
...Hit Parade" now means a bunch of gangsta rappers getting together and showing off their gunshot wounds...
...Most of us are familiar, if only by reputation, with The Money Train, which recently demonstrated, to such inspirational effect, how to incinerate a subway token booth...
...All he does is sing...
...Snoop Doggy Dogg's murder case is ongoing...
...That didn't work for you...
...One year and five minutes after Tupac's shooting, his rapping confrere Randy Walker, producer of "Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.," was shot dead...
...Everyone just gets absorbed into the lunch-counter culture, all lined up side by side and instantly available...
...Wait'll you hear the new sound—splurge...
...Unlike Elvis, the Stones, and Tarantino, the gangsta rappers don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk...
...Tupac records for the Death Row label...
...about Frank is epitomized by a brief encounter from a few years back...
...Nowadays, in fact, that's pretty much all it's got...
...These guys are for real...
...He takes something raw and real, and makes it blandly decorative...
...But he doesn't seem to get it: he is the mainstream, and it's as f---ed up as you can get...
...Ever since Elvis Presley we've had corporate continuity masquerading as permanent revolution...
...While Hootie sang "The Lady Is a Tramp" in his Sinatra hat, hatless Frank sat to one side snapping his fingers, as if through sheer willpower he might drive the band to swing like it would under him: riding the rhythm section, kicking home those consonants...
...Tarantino, supposedly this week's bad boy of film, is really the Lawrence Welk of testosterone...
...The movie sells the attitude...
...Bad attitude...
...I didn't...
...But Hootie isn't that interested in the music: He wants to deflect a little of Frankie's cool his way...
...Attitude is style and pose separated from any true emotional impulse...
...Rather, like those increasingly bizarre specialty coffees — raspberry carmel latte — the fact that the constituent parts don't go together is no obstacle...
...Miller extended his hand in friendship...
...In other words, we're striking an attitude...
...But poor old Perry has no known position on the Vietnam war...
...This is the weird odyssey pop music has taken since it began promoting attitude over music in the mid-fifties: from "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window...
...Frank walks like America," says Bono...
...But that's what the ABC announcer said, and he meant it...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn The Cat in the Hat There are some sentences you never expect to hear as long as you live —like "We'll be back after the break with Don Ricklcs and Bob Dylan...
...With these boys, pop music is at last as dangerous as has been claimed by the hawkers for forty years...
...Alas, for the average New York subway employee or warehouse security guard or 7-Eleven clerk, that's not a viable alternative...
...I patterned my life after you...
...Slick Rick had to record his latest album while doing time for attempted murder...
...it's like a snake-oil salesman who never leaves town...
...A recent British TV documentary deplored the fact that Mick Jagger now just swanks about with the aristocracy: "The Stones," bemoaned critic Sean O'Hagen, "are now about as dangerous as Perry Como...
...Indeed, by this stage in Frank Sinatra's all-star 8oth birthday salute, the only surprise was that Don and Bob weren't fingersnappily duetting together on "You've Either Got or You Haven't Got Style...
...But, pace Bono, rock 'n' roll, like American culture generally, has a serious attitude problem: there's too much of it...
...I was trying to think of the last time I heard a rock 'n' roll rebel denounce 01' Blue Eyes, and I reckon it was Mick Jagger who, about five years ago, said with his customary eloquence: "I mean, like, that stuff that, like, y'know, came before us, like Frank Sinatra, it was, like, really crap, y'know...
...In fact, the ABC special devoted an entire segment to the way Frank wears his hats...
...Swagger and attitude...
...He's got attitude...
...If you want your death transformed into a rock video, arrange to be shot by Quentin...
...Frank's the Chairman of the Bad...
...Sinatra and Mitch Miller, his old bete noire from Columbia, happened to be crossing a Vegas lobby from opposite ends...
...This is a healthier—and more honest—way of looking at it than Bono's...
...Get a load of our latest act, Deep Doggy Doo-Doo...
...Frank Sinatra has got what we want," said Bono, of the rock group U2, at the 1994 Grammy Awards...
...and Close to You, the album he made with the Hollywood String Quartet because he so loved chamber music, he wanted to see if you could do a pop record with a classical quartet...
...There was also a compilation of his screen fights—"and those are just his home movies," Tom Selleck said, admiringly...
...The defense of such films is preposterous: on the one hand, we have to have complete artistic integrity, but, on the other hand, hey, everyone knows it's only a movie...
...But pop culture wants to have its cake and eat it, too—to torch the subway booth, but still keep the tokens...
...and he's kept walking...
...One of the most important aspects of William Bennett's success in shaming Time Warner into getting out of the gangsta rap business was that it called all the record company execs to account for their four decades of peddling us nothing but posturing...
...Sick of grunge...
...0+,.' The American Spectator February 199 6 45...
...It's no coincidence that, as political correctness has commended to us such ludicrously genteel circumlocutions as "person of color" and "differently abled," there's been, almost in inverse proportion, an increasing ugliness in our non-verbal culture, in music and motion pictures: the one movement attempts to divorce language from meaning, the other to divorce action from meaning...
...44 February 1996 The American Spectator Quentin, it's exquisitely orchestrated and beautifully choreographed...
...gangsta rap, but I'll say this: it isn't about attitude...
...In real revolutions, the stock market plummets, the currency collapses, the stores get looted and your inventory destroyed...
...In humdrum reality, brutal murder is a sloppy, one-take affair...
...Serious attitude...
...I'm no fan of44 That four generations of rock rebels should pay homage to Sinatra is a reminder that there is no counterculture...
...Bored with Snoop Doggy Dogg...
...Sinatra snarled, "F---you...
...This is the Sinatra of the sound-bite generation: broads, hoods, chicks, punks, I want to wake up in the city that doesn't sleep, ring-a-ding-ding...
...That four generations of rock rebels—Little Richard, Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Hootie and the Blowfish—should pay homage to Sinatra on a TV variety show is a reminder that in America there is no counterculture...
...Try this...
...Keep walking...
...The master of this—the greatest poseur in a poseur's culture—is Quentin Tarantino...
...Which just goes to show that it's easier to wear Frank's hat than fill his shoes...
...But rock 'n' roll has become so used to peddling attitude that it doesn't know how to do anything else...
...and the recent concert recording of the Soliloquy from Carousel, with the voice rough and exposed but full of dramatic power and emotional truth...
...Movie violence is minstrelsy: as much as the Christy Minstrels rubbing burnt cork on their faces for the amusement of middle-class whites, it's appropriating real pain and transforming it into a vaudeville turn...
...01' Dirty Bastard had his liver blown away by some dirtier bastards...
...While on bail for a sexual assault charge in 1994, Tupac Shakur had his groin pumped full of bullets and just narrowly escaped being reduced to One-pac Shakur...
...the consequences—the grieving widow, the kid whose college education that hapless clerk was working overtime for—are left to real life...
...What is it the rock crowd digs about Sinatra...
...If so, then how we celebrate him reveals just what we value...
...But most of today's rockers are latter-day Frankophiles...
...Of course you can't mention it on network TV, but what most of these folks like MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...he has no known position on Marianne Faithfull —at least (for those who recall one of the most notorious police raids of the sixties) not one involving a Mars Bar...
...After the ringa-ding-ding wannabes faded away, I went back and played 1981's She Shot Me Down, the darkest album Sinatra's ever made...
...It's felt...
...At the Grammys, Bono pledged to continue "f---ing up the mainstream...
...There are a lot of people here tonight who patterned their careers after you," observed Roseanne...
...As Vanity Fair likes to point out, entertainment is now America's biggest business and its moguls are "the new establishment...
...He's big on attitude...
...For those with ears to hear it, it makes for distinctly un-easy listening...
...Perhaps Ira Gershwin put it best in another context: "The way you wear your hat...
...He was the first man to introduce vulnerability to pop singing, as well as such fine emotional nuances as self-disgust—and that's not attitude, it's real...
...Woody and Wesley, the director, the writer, the producers, none of us has ridden the subway in years...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
