August 02, 2006

HERBERT MARCUSE LIVES! THE NYTIMES ASSESSES POP CULTURE ICON TONY BENNETT

        Sometimes, against his better judgment, Horsefeathers reads the New York Times reviews of art, theater and music. There we can find celebration of the whole panoply of left wing causes, the greatest praise usually going to efforts to combine multiple aspects of the anti-American agenda with depictions of the plight of the oppressed in heartless Bush-land. Actually we find Arts in the Times a useful guide: if the Times reviewers love it, we know to save our money.
        Somehow we were naive enough to assume that an appreciation of a cabaret singer's career would be free of socio-political cant. However, in a review of Tony Bennett's long career, the 1960'S Amerika hating sensibility erupts in a brief volcano of angry idiocy. Communism may have died in the Soviet Union, despite the best efforts of Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews and other Times worthies, but the Stalinist view of America as a bullying, brutal empire, exploiting the world 'proletariat' lives on even in the writings of a New York Times cabaret reviewer.
        Cultural criticism was the means by which C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse and Erik Erikson sought to indict the corruptions of Capitalism. Maybe then it shouldn't surprise us that in Stephen Holden's column about Tony Bennett, just as we're settling in for an assessment of Bennett's musical talent, we read the following: "...Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream..."
        What fevered region of Holden's brain did that come from? Probably the same area from which a seemingly reasonable person suddenly explains that all bad things from global warming to war are caused by Bush and the neocons.
        Perhaps Stephen Holden aspires to be the Herbert Marcuse of pop art criticism, or maybe he's just reflexively establishing his bona fides with his liberal co-religionists. I suppose fighting for the revolution from a ringside seat in the Oak Room of the Algonquin is preferable to thinking that, just maybe, Tony Bennett owes much of his success to those angry Amerikans, drunk with power and eager to fork out their capitalist, ill gotten gains to hear Tony Bennett sing. Personally we'd take 3 minutes of Bennett singing Because of You, over the entire collected writings of Stephen Holden.