Posted 6:55 PM by Gene

Another Modernaires tune has hit me on the head: "There! I've Said It Again." Most people know the timorous tenor Bobby Vinton's version, forgetting the so-called Million-Dollar Monotone Vaughn Monroe "introduced" it back in '45 -- though I learned just yesterday that Benny Carter first played it in '41, but wasn't a hit with it -- amazing with such a supremely gorgeous ballad, which was meant for the full-throated group treatment (Monroe sang it with a girl quartet); but then we must remember Glenn Miller was first with "I'll Never Smile Again," which he took with Ray Eberle at a quick and indifferent tempo never thinking his rival Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers (and Frank Sinatra) would make it the kind of slow, dreamy ballad he specialized in.

Listening to this masterpiece of pop music I know why I get exasperated at the press's mental dross that turns every last bit of fool's gold into solid platinum. American culture was once as big as the continent, and larger than life; listen to Copland's Billy the Kid and you hear a composer almost in awe of his nation. You could be proud of it, and of you. Though we can't view it through anything but the grotesquely distorting prism of its time, of the golden age of radio, and the golden age of film, and the golden age of song (and the golden age of war), The Swing Era could not have been made anywhere else; and its tunes were larger than life, not a few coming from the pens of patriotic immigrants like Harry Warren who brought opera to the music. Today it's all screamin' 'n' whackin'. That one-hit wonder whose picture I posted today will be long gone before she has a chance to make another, but that picture makes me grimace because if someone with any looks sang like Doris Day or Kitty Kallen or Peggy Lee or Jo Stafford, and she sang Styne and Cahn, or Burke and Van Heusen, unlikely though it is and despite the incorrigible notion of "retro" she'd not only be the champagne toast of America, she'd be every young man's fantasy, instead of another of the SOB SUMNER's girl-toys and another shrug of the shoulders. But what truly rankles is when the hacks get their hands on our current undying genius; [C]RAP (for one example) is less offensive than the idiots who turn it into high art and excuse its every prejudice, and thus twist the knife for its every sleazy manner of offense. And always the typists must close their pea minds to what we once were, and once did, conveniently assuming a defensive posture to speak of genius when even they know better. That's why I say against all reason if every last movie ad-blurbist and TV ad-blurbist and rock cri-TIC lost his job it would be America's victory, and why, disastrous though it would be, I long for the day MNI sells for ZERO.