Monday, July 02, 2007

Say What?

Sorry to be flogging a deceased equine, but extremely irksome New York Times pop music critic Kelefa Sanneh is spouting nonsense again.

In a review today of the debut album by alt-chanteuse St. Vincent (a/k/a Annie Clark) he observes:

"'What Me Worry' is a velvet-upholstered ballad, with teasing, mannerly lyrics that could easily have been written in an era before rock ’n’ roll [emphasis mine]:

Do I amuse you, dear?
Would you think me queer
if, while standing beside you,
I opted instead to
disappear
?"

Uh, excuse me? Anybody hearing echoes of Cole Porter in that? Rogers and Hammerstein? Jerome Kern? Slim Gailliard? Stephen Foster? That Elizabethan lute guy Sting just covered badly? Any standard Frank Sinatra actually sang?

Seriously, if anybody can find even one reasonably well known pre-rock Classic Pop song in which the word "opted" has ever appeared, please let me know.

There's a larger issue here, of course. It's been apparent for several years -- or at least since Judy Miller invented Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the Times gave four (count 'em, four) op-ed spaces to Ann Althouse (the Miss Havisham of Wingnuttia, in NYMary's brilliant phrase) -- that the Newspaper of Record is having something of an institutional nervous breakdown. That they continue to let a pretentious flake like Sanneh peddle similar piffle on a weekly basis suggests that the mental illness afflicts more than just the hard news/editorial side of a once great paper.

6 comments:

ntodd said...

Seriously, if anybody can find even one reasonably well known classic pre-rock pop song in which the word "opted" has ever appeared, please let me know.

Show me a rock song that's ever used the word 'dyspeptic'!

Kid Charlemagne said...

Vout o' reenee Steverino!

Kid Charlemagne said...

I've mentioned this before, but the Yachts, a late 70s early 80s new wave group from England, use to toss words like "tantamount" and "dross" into their lyrics.

steve simels said...

Hey, Rick Springfield threw the word "moot" into a rock song.

But I still say "opted" has never been in a pop song before.

And I still say Sanneh is a pretentious flake.

P. Drāno said...

What is Powerpop's posture on "rockism" though?

steve simels said...

P. Drāno said...
What is Powerpop's posture on "rockism" though?

Ccomparing other people's taste in music to genuine bigotry, as do Sanneh and the British nits he stole the act from, is morally offensive as well as self-serving nonsense.

IMHO.