Word: sinatras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This, really, is my point: masterpieces--like Songs for Swingin' Lovers!--are easy to love. They are what we remember artists for, but they aren't always as illuminating, or as cherishable, as the failures and throwaways. More often than not, even Sinatra's crud speaks his virtues. You can't ask much more of a performer than that...
Bruce Handy writes TIME's Spectator column. He thought he'd be sick of Sinatra...
...Sinatra--this is both his gift and, on occasion, his downfall--is always Sinatra. Beyond his technical prowess as a jazz-influenced pop singer, building on the innovations of 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...
These are not original observations; people who had the fortune to grow up with Sinatra already knew. I first caught on when, while listening to a Sinatra greatest-hits album I had bought for a 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...
...could see the lingering lure of Astaire art in the reaction to Frank Sinatra's death. That wasn't just Rat Pack nostalgia. It was an effusion of fondness and respect for a fine song finely sung, for vocal connoisseurship, for the ability--the first or the thousandth time he sings a song--to mine the meaning of a lyric...