Word: berlin
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...Berlin's musical dexterity was both obvious and ingratiating. He heard Gershwin play with syncopation in "Fascinatin' Rhythm," then executed his own elaborate, fairly daring ricochet rhythms in "Puttin' on the Ritz," "Monkey Doodle Doo" and "Everybody Step." Profligate with melody, he tossed extra bridges into "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" and his longest (64-bar), finest construction, "Cheek to Cheek." The strange chord shift in bridge to "You're Laughing at Me" has endeared the song to jazzmen...
...Lyrically, he could be sloppy: rhyming "m" and "n" sounds, cheating by using "piano" as a two-, then a three-syllable word in "I Love a Piano." A devilishly intricate rhyme a la Stephen Sondheim ("We'll have Leontyne Price to sing a/ Medley from 'Der Meistersinger'") was not Berlin's style - to Sondheim's caviar, his lyrics were Spam - but in "Annie Get Your Gun" he did a triple rhyme ("You can't shoot a male in the tail like a quail") whose comic force quickly escalates musically and in the singer's volume. And he could pay cheeky...
...fashion. In 1910 and beyond, there was a rage for "coon songs," which were to be sung as if by black performers - often by whites in blackface. "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is such a song, the name of the bandleader tipping listeners of the day to his race. Berlin wrote numbers popularized in blackface by Eddie Canton ("Mandy"), Al Jolson ("To My Mammy") and Bing Crosby ("Abraham" in "Holiday Inn"). Some of Berlin's coon songs offered what now seems like subversive social commentary. Beneath its jarring title and setting, the 1915 "A Pair of Ordinary Coons" could be making...
...sensibilities matured over the decades, Berlin adjusted some songs to avoid offense. The 1927 "Shakin' the Blues Away" begins: "Every darkie believes that trouble won't stay if you shake it away." Later it was changed to "Everybody believes..." "Puttin' on the Ritz" was originally about Manhattan whites going uptown: "Why don't you go where Harlem sits/ Puttin' on the Ritz/ Spangled gowns upon a bevy/ Of high browns from down the levee/ All misfits/ Puttin' on the Ritz." By the time Fred Astaire sang the tune in 1946, it had become another of Berlin's twittin'-the-rich...
...Social conventions change. What seems obvious to one generation will mortify the next. Today, most whites are embarrassed by the condescension toward and grotesque stereotyping of blacks in early 20th century mainstream culture. But Berlin probably did not recognize the hurt he and others inflicted on blacks by the racial characterizations in their songs. A political conservative and life-long Republican, he was a social liberal, as he proved during World War II. When he took his military show "This Is the Army" on the road, his troupe was the only integrated company in uniform. Everyone traveled together...