Thursday, June 25, 2020

Timbre

According to Wikipedia, there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions available, why is it that the Kingsmen’s cover version the one most widely known? As we all know, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded the song a week or two after the Kingsmen, but the Raiders’ version failed to become a hit. Why did the Kingsmen’s version succeed and the Raiders’ version fail? After all, it’s the same song. Or is it?

In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk asks a relevant question: Why  do rock fans “listen again and again to the same records”? Why did a student that Gracyk knew wear out “a new Neil Young cassette in a month”? In answer to these questions, Gracyk writes:

What is needed is a plausible account of how “Louie Louie” can retain its impact when the record is played over and over. The answer must be that song structure is often an incidental framing device for something further; a “coathanger,” as John Sheperd puts it, upon which other qualities and “significant personal statements” are hung. Alan Durant proposes that recording shapes listening by locating the corresponding pleasure in “precise recollection and anticipation: knowing sounds, movements, and instrumental textures by memory and familiarity, rather than by extrapolation from perceived patterns, symmetries and learned musical structures.” But why should this anticipation please us? (58)

The short answer to this question, Gracyk says, is timbre (“what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note”). The problem is that timbres “fade” after a short period of time, “becoming more imprecise with the passage of time” (60). In other words, our auditory memories, when it comes to musical timbres, are poor. We can’t remember a song’s timbres precisely, so we want to hear it again (and again). So why is the Kingmen’s version of “Louie Louie” the one that became the most widely known? The short answer is the song's timbres.

In film studies, the closest analogy to timbre is mise-en-scéne, that magical dimension of a movie that is generated by the gap between a director’s (auteurs) intentions and the camera’s automatism (André Bazin). When discussing the role of the music producer in the creation of a record, music critic Michael Jarrett writes:

When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery. (Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings, 37).

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

My Huckleberry Friend

Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River.” For the sake of convenience I reproduce the lyrics in question here:

Two drifters off to see the world
Theres such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon river and me

As sung by Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song reveals her rootlessness, her yearning to take flight, to get away—unusual characteristics for the heroine of what is essentially a romantic comedy with a few screwball elements. Childlike and often childish (as the heroines of this genre frequently are), “free-spirited,” she has escaped an unfulfilling life in rural Texas, abandoned her husband and step-children, and moved to New York City. Her reinvention takes the form of a revolt against conventionality—defying social convention is a characteristic trait of the screwball heroine. Subject to whims and tantrums, impulsive, a “kook” (derived from “cuckoo,” late 50s-early 60s lingo for someone who flaunts convention, individuality expressed through eccentricity), she seeks to avoid the confines of responsibility and in order to maintain her independence she avoids commitment, seeking to prolong her adolescence as far into adulthood as she possibly can. 

Perhaps this is why Breakfast at Tiffany’s has that wistful, melancholic mood that I identified in my last post. After thinking about this movie for several years, it seems to me that the ending, in which Holly and Paul famously kiss in the rain as the music swells, cannot conceal what seems to me to be a hint of sadness. Why? Because inevitably, like Huckleberry Finn, Holly is going “to light out for the Territory.” Critic Judith Crist expressed a similar idea (without invoking Huck Finn) during an interview in 2009:

But what’s clever about the way they ended Breakfast at Tiffany’s—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ (Quoted in Sam Wasson’s book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fifth Avenue, 5:00 a.m., p. 168)

Like Judith Crist, I cant shake the feeling that the couple’s relationship will not last, either. Perhaps Crist felt that Paul Varjak (George Peppard) wanted to control Holly, to suppress her, that he isn’t the “right” match, rather like having the wrong couple end up married at the end of a screwball comedy—imagine Johnny Case (Cary Grant) married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) at the end of George Cukors Holiday (1938). Yet the sadness I’m trying to identify isn’t simply an issue of compatibility, or certain hesitations about George Peppards performance (it is no secret that director Blake Edwards was strongly against casting him in the role), but something deeper than that, having to do with the underlying motivations of Holly’s character. Leslie A. Fiedler wrote about Huck Finn in a way that is applicable to Holly Golightly:

[H]e does not know to what he is escaping, except into nothing: a mere anti-society, in which he is a cipher, a ghost without a real name. “All I wanted was to go somewheres,” he tells Miss Watson, “all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Huck is heading for no utopia, since he has heard of none; and so he ends up making flight itself his goal. He flees from the impermanence of boyhood to that of continual change; and, of course, it is a vain evasion except as it leads him to understand that no society can fulfill his destiny. (Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 464-65)

Perhaps Fiedlers observation is more applicable to the Holly Golightly as portrayed in Truman Capotes novel rather than the Hollywood adaptation. Nonetheless, the diegetic use of “Moon River” requires an explanation, and there is nothing in the movie that interests me more.

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Moon River and Me

According to legend, after a successful preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, Martin Rackin, although happy with the test audience’s positive assessment of the film, insisted that the scene of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” be cut from the picture. Some accounts aver that Rackin had been an opponent of the song all along. Others say that he preferred a different composer than Henry Mancini. Is there any truth to these rumors? Composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Moon River” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and additionally received the 1962 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Given the song’s huge success and popularity, could the production head at Paramount really have been so obtuse? How could he have failed to recognize the song’s greatness?

Pure speculation, but perhaps the reason why he wanted the song cut was because he felt the scene was narratively unnecessary. For the sake of argument, I might even say that I agree with him: the scene doesn’t advance the plot. However, plot is only one dimension of a movie. The “Moon River” scene is essential to the film—imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s with the scene omitted. What is lost? Holly singing “Moon River” contributes nothing to the plot, but has everything to do with mood or atmosphere. The song’s subjectwanderlust, the lure of the riverdeepens our understanding of Holly’s character and also invokes a wistful, melancholic mood that haunts the rest of the movie. The scene is an instance of diegetic music, music that is actually played within the fictional space of the film’s story.

Of course, the movies are loaded with such moments, and the best of these moments remain indelibly etched in our memories. For author and critic Umberto Eco (1985’s “’Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”), the greatest movies are “great precisely because they contain such moments. The challenge presented to us is how to write about such moments in a way to do them justice. As Christian Metz stated in his now famous epigraph (cited by James Monaco in How to Read a Film), “[M]ovies are difficult to explain because they are easy to understand.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Nancy & Lee, Part V: Pop vs. Rock

The summer of 1967 became known as the “Summer of Love,” in effect an opportunity to market new fashions, rock music, and alternatives to Western (or European) thought and religion to the young people of America. As a moment in history, the designation was supposed to signal a profound shift in consciousness. A pop song was written to announce this shift, John Phillips’ “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” sung by Scott McKenzie. Thousands of young people, celebrating the American values of freedom and the open road enabled by the automobile, flocked to San Francisco, later to Monterey (for the Pop Festival), where that summer “bohemian chic” was all the rage. Fashion designer Thea Porter was responsible for most of the bohemian chic fashions of the 60s and 70s—caftans, diaphanous patterned shifts, and Middle Eastern (or Oriental) influenced dresses and blouses.

“The hippie look started out as more of a political statement, a type of anti-fashion, but it soon became the fashion itself,” states Laura McLaws Helms in her book, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic, co-written with Venetia Porter, the designer’s daughter. Changes in fashion allowed for new, exotic, and, occasionally, bizarre expressions of individuality. The Fall of the Summer of Love began on October 17, 1967, when the musical Hair had its off-Broadway debut at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, later opening on Broadway in April 1968. The Monterey Pop Festival was to rock (a noun that once had been a verb) what Hair’s “tribe” was to Bohemian chic. The entertainment industry realized that it was time to market products specifically for the counterculture.

Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967, featured the band members in jackets designed by Thea Porter on the album cover.
The vaguely Oriental jackets, coupled with the band being photographed using a prism lens, all suggested an hallucinatory “trip.” As purveyors of Bohemian chic, the band announced itself through the album cover as playing a new kind of music signaling a new form of consciousness. Any number of terms were applied, correctly or incorrectly, at the time to the band’s music—psychedelic, hallucinatory, “mind-expanding,” “trippy.”

NANCY SINATRA: My music was left behind in a way…since I was never embraced by my peers. I was stranded, on my own, to fend for myself . . . . I remember, years later, meeting Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow at the Clinton White House. They virtually snubbed me. I was hurt.

An interesting comment, to be sure. However, I’m not sure that it was Nancy Sinatra’s music that was left behind. She represents a pop music aesthetic that signifies values that certain individuals, such as those named above, hold in disdain. She is a representative of a fashion style that was considered conservative—miniskirts, go-go boots, simple A-line dresses—that was rejected by rock culture’s adoption of the values represented by Bohemian chic—non-Western, Oriental, and superficially radical. Anti-fashion became fashion, earnestness became pessimism, and the supposed shift in consciousness became an obsession with sex and hallucinatory drugs. Pop music was for so-called “empty people,” superficial in thought and feeling. In contrast, rock was for those who felt deeply, those who adhered to the fundamental modernist values: individuality, spontaneity, inspiration. By associating itself with modernist values (previously adopted by jazz culture), rock leveraged itself into the position of being the superior pop musical form.