Word: singer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weeks ago, I went into my room, turned out the lights and listened to In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning...for an entire night. Even with the variety of music around these days, such as alternative, heavy metal and rap, I cannot find any other singer or group that gets to me the way Frank can. JASON TSAI Topeka, Kans...
...will remember Sinatra as an arrogant, offensive bully. He treated the fans who made him with contempt, refusing even to acknowledge them. As the singer and his burly entourage walked through a Honolulu hotel lobby, I saw Sinatra's bodyguards shove fans aside when they approached. Sinatra's voice was made of gold. The man behind it was a monster. ALAN L. LIGHT Iowa City, Iowa...
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...
...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 in the night/ What were...
Everything else fell into place, and apart. The no-sweat crooner singing someone else's tune disappeared. Now, thanks to Bob Dylan, everyone was a singer-songwriter, a bleedin' artiste, with a go-to-hell-or-watch-me-writhe-there attitude. Formality gave way to the tyranny of the casual. Billionaire entrepreneurs dressed like the nerds in the family garage they always were...