Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that...
...care what people like my colleague and me think of Sinatra? My own higher notions about music were incubated while listening to Jethro Tull albums (whoa--a flute!). Sinatra's body of work, meanwhile, stretches back to the 1930s and is nothing less than "the final statement on pre-rock pop," as Will Friedwald, the invaluable Sinatra scholar, recently wrote of the Songs for Swingin' Lovers! album, released in 1956 and generally considered Sinatra's finest LP. "Something radically different just had to come next," Friedwald continues, "because nothing in the realm of Tin Pan Alley could top this bravura...
...nearly 40 years of performing left ahead of him in 1956; more than two-thirds of his professional life was spent in the rock era, much of it reacting to rhythms and attitudes he found alien. "The most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear," Sinatra wrote of rock 'n' roll at the time of Elvis Presley's pre-eminence, no doubt hoping to turn back the Mongols. It didn't quite work, and in efforts to maintain his commercial viability, Sinatra would eventually record Presley's hit Love Me Tender as well...
...Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, there is the sheer force of conviction, feeling, the weight of personal history in his voice. In this, only Holiday is his rival--perhaps even his better. Both exemplify what people in my generation like to flatter ourselves is unique to rock 'n' roll and its offshoots: the immediacy, the idiosyncrasy, the genuineness of expression. Sinatra is the century's musical equipoise, the pivot between the carefully crafted pop of its beginning and the looser, fiercer sounds...
...girlfriend as an ironic courtship gesture--I was young, it was the '80s--the song Strangers in the Night caught my ear. It's an admittedly queer place to start amid the glories of the Sinatra canon, a chintzy little hit from 1966 with a dopey pop-rock arrangement; the singer himself gives it the brush-off with his famous dooby-dooby-doo coda during the fade-out. But not everyone can start with What Is This Thing Called Love?, and even here Sinatra manages to invest the ticky-tacky lyrics--"Strangers in the night/ Exchanging glances/ Wondering...