Irving and Cole
Irving Berlin and Cole Porter knew each other. They admired each other’s work. They were two of the major architects of the Great American Songbook, which they didn’t realize at the time of course, because it’s hard to give one’s self such superlatives when you’re making it up as you go, unless you're Kanye West, who at least was right until about seven years ago.
As such Berlin and Cole were contemporaries, trafficking in Broadway musicals and big bands. Berlin and Porter were unique in their vocation in that they composed both music and lyrics, rarely if ever availing themselves of collaborators. Self-containment is both admired and suspected in the musical arts. Think of Brian Wilson, lovingly assembling works of capacious genius in near-isolation, while Mike Love sat in the tiki lounge giving him shit for it.
(Crap, I told myself I wasn't going to soil this site by bringing up Mike Love. Ah well. Mulligan.)
Berlin exemplified American self-affirmation. He took care of the nation’s most beloved emblems. His job was to capture, with spools of sentiment and affinity, the promise America represented to itself and outsiders (one of which Berlin, a Russian-born Jew, technically was). Berlin wasn’t always gung-ho and naïve about it, though. He may have perceived America as craving some eternal form of innocence; fucking annoyingly that’s still the case. But he wasn’t oblivious enough to consider it practical. Certainly not in my favorite song of his, which if you haven’t guessed and I’m half-sure you have, is “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
Berlin was a macro-journalist, fascinated by what American trends, events and movements brought forward: the sums of the parts. He was specific about the parts when he needed to be—the “high spats” in “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—but he delivered landscapes. In Berlin’s broadest strokes—“Blue Skies,” “White Christmas,” and for those about to high-five, “God Bless America”—his symbolism and emotionalism was even more generalized. They were core ideas encased in perfect melody.
That’s not to say Berlin was an absentee technician without emotional depth, because his melodies have inserted themselves into the private lives of multiple generations. How can anyone whose music sets off complex responses—who gets people weepy over the hope that it would snow on December 24, now and anon—be a hack? Hacks don’t endure, and Berlin does.
Berlin knew what people craved: “I wrote about what people wanted to hear. I packaged their feelings and sold them back.” Abrupt as that admission may sound, it’s not cynical. His confidence in his ability to connect with proletariat music consumers helped him put himself out in the marketplace, being relatively aggressive with publishers and theatrical types to get his music in their productions. Berlin avidly sold himself.
That’s what Berlin tried to get Cole Porter to do: get out there. As sure as Berlin was about his own talent, he was even more confident about Porter’s. “Anything I can do, you can do better,” he once quipped to Porter, twisting one of Berlin’s own choruses.
But Porter handled business differently. He set up provisions in his drawing room with a piano, hoping potential patrons would come to him. Porter was not an overt salesman. There were aspects to his music that he didn’t want to explain. That might have had something to do with his having to construct a matrix of untruths to his wealthy grandfather, who wanted him to study law, in order to get his songwriting career off the ground. His covers included telling his family he’d joined the French Foreign Legion as a ruse to partake in Paris’ dynamic social scene with his new wife (herself, it must be acknowledged, another disguise for Porter's private life).
It’s hard, even ridiculous to imagine Porter’s work couldn’t sell itself as easily as Berlin’s or anybody else’s. But it contained some peril. Porter’s songs weren’t as emblematic as Berlin’s. Most of the time, Porter went inner. The action in Porter’s songs didn’t happen on Main Street USA; they happened in well-kept but chilly drawing rooms a few blocks away.
Berlin’s characters were forthright; Porter’s were bedeviled. They remembered “what moments divine, what rapture serene, ’til clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted.” Porter had his light moments as well, which came off as acrostic solutions using set devices (“Let’s Do It,” “Too Darn Hot”), but even they had a yearning behind them that polite society couldn’t deal with after they were done tittering. Porter scraped against outlaw culture where Berlin considerately demurred: There’s no chance Alexander’s Ragtime Band would have ever been powered by the cocaine mentioned in “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Jim Morrison’s Ragtime Band, maybe. But not Alexander’s, the teetotaling schmuck.
You may have guessed, again, that I'm more of a Porter guy than a Berlin guy. I suppose that's true. No, I can confirm that's true. Porter's songs confronted emotions the singer wasn't always comfortable with. That's why songs like “Begin the Beguine” and “Night and Day” are recorded so frequently: Singers are compelled by the subtle anxiety, the challenge of answering the unanswerable. There's fear and self-doubt in there. Even the intro to the happily flattering “You're the Top” starts with the line “At words poetic I'm so pathetic.”
I think Porter has translated more easily to our current state of terror, but his disquiet also rendered itself in times when society was awaiting positive change. Songwriters still draw from that impulse of skittish query, and it's recognized as a Porter hallmark. That's why songwriters like Stephin Merritt and Neil Hannon get compared to Porter so much, as well as because of their skills with internal rhymes and details.
Sometimes songs announce themselves. They’re clear and powerful. They make house calls and they don’t leave after you’ve asked them to. I had some examples I was going to list, but they may not match your own.
Other times, we have to come to them. Their codes aren’t so easily decrypted, so we have to spend a few days with them in the drawing room or the bedroom or the bunker or the padded cell if and until they finally divulge themselves. When they do, it’ll usually be in an ethereal mist that we’ll have to brush away just to read the hovering, self-important calligraphy. And you know how modernists hate serifs.
But with both types of songs, there’s still a wealth of information remaining afterwards that we have to figure out ourselves, and at some point we decide whether we’re going to keep going there or if we’re just going to stop and reap the fortunes or cut the losses. If we keep going there’s a good chance that, in an empirical, historical sense, we’ll be wrong.
