I enjoy listening to recordings of great singers, but as I get older I have much less patience for listening to what they're actually singing about, which is often either profoundly vacuous or just plain moronic. For some reason, even when he was older and wiser enough to know better, Frank Sinatra was quite content to give voice to the insipid concerns of a callow youth, an embarrassment to himself and his audience. Surely a man in his seventies should be performing romantic ballads about sex after hip replacement surgery and the difficulty of delivering sweet nothings to a paramour who is deaf. Golden oldies like My Way, if truly golden, would contain details of how the balding singer pays his mortgage on a fixed income and how he hopes to cope with rising healthcare costs. "I planned for retirement and I did it my 401K waaaaay!"
In fact, my response to the lyrical content of the so-called Great American Songbook is invariably "act your age" and "pull yourself together," followed by the spine-chilling screech of a record-player needle being peremptorily removed from a vinyl surface. Consequently, my sensitively erudite ears no longer need to suffer through such auditory indignities as Moon River and Blue Moon: so many moons, so little emotional maturity. These days, my appreciation of music is strictly limited to songs in foreign languages I don't wholly understand, mostly heavily orchestrated French and Italian melodrama. Who knows, for example, what Gino Paoli or Charles Trenet are warbling about? It is probably more juvenile than the worst drivel of Rodgers and Hammerstein but I shall never know, so I can simply sit back and enjoy the swirling sounds without feeling like a cretin.
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