This article is a couple of years old but still worth scratching your head over. Slate magazine assembled a panel of voters who ranged from writers to musicians to nominate the songs they thought would be added to the so-called Great American Songbook in the coming years.
The "Songbook" concept is pretty malleable -- it's not an actual book but instead a more or less widely accepted canon of jazz and pop music standards frequently covered and reinterpreted by vocalists. So it could pretty easily accumulate new songs even though there's no set criteria for inclusion. Some general characteristics include relatively more complex lyrics and a kind of flexible character that can be adapted by a wide range of singers and stir a wide range of emotions.
So the Slate panel nominated its own candidates and the article at the link gives the top 30. It's a pretty dumb article and not only because of some of the songs -- which we'll get to in a minute. Whoever wrote the intro rightly pointed out that the Songbook acquires new tunes according to no set formula. But then the writer whiffed by calling Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" "a commercial disappointment from a critically derided band." Journey may have been critically derided during its late 70s and early 80s heyday but "Believin'" hit #9 in the Billboard Hot 100 and sold a million copies. The article hadn't been published for very long before someone -- probably someone old enough to listen to the radio in 1981 -- engineered a correction that suggested "Believin'" was a commercial disappointment compared to the other singles from the album. But considering that "Stone in Love" didn't chart and "Still they Ride" barely cracked the top 20, some more correction is in order.
In any event, when we get to the songs themselves we have to first confront the question, "Wha," as in, "What were you people thinking?"
Included on the list are several rap and hip-hop tunes -- I'm a big fan of some old-school rap, in which clever rhymes and even cleverer wordplay elevate a rapper and his or her tune above the wannabes and competitors. But the panelists, exploring mostly music from the last 25 years or so, include songs with a blizzard of unrhymed free-form sexual boasting and FCC non-compliant verbiage unlikely to be covered on any wide basis.
A few suggestions make sense, like Idina Menzel's Frozen soundtrack smash "Let It Go," but for every one that does is another that makes none. Like Liz Phair's "**** and Run," in which the singer laments awakening next to yet another in a long string of one-night stands instead of being in a relationship. I'm no professional music critic or writer who can make Slate's list, but I think one pretty strong indicator a song won't make the Great American Songbook is that you can't sing it in front of Grandma.
It's hard to say what exactly the panelists thought made their suggestions a good fit for the Songbook concept and maybe that's the problem, that they didn't really know themselves. Either way the idea that someone is going to karaoke or re-record a version of Eminem's "Lose Yourself" in, say, 2065, means these suggestions may be filed and forgotten.
4 comments:
I'd like to click through to look at the list myself, but where is that link going exactly?
Corrected. That was bizarre. I originally read the article through a Pocket link from a suggested story on the browser homepage but to link it I did a search to find the original.
The tab I did that on is long gone now so I don't know if the window actually had that alphabet soup or the real link. This time it's the real link.
Yeah, none of those really fit in the songbook tradition. The most recent entry I can think of is "Time After Time" that gets included on jazz albums, anyway.
Although my boys have sung both "I Want It That Way" and "Hey Ya" recently, so those are getting recycled somewhere.
I have to wonder if the "songbook" concept can exist in modern songwriting. The songs would have to be heartfelt and moving, subject to interpretation. How can you interpret many of those songs?
Although "All I Want For Christmas Is You" will probably move to the covered Christmas song songbook since it was a hit, so other artists will want to try it.
I can see three, maybe four of these tunes being re-arranged and done in something other than a novelty format a la Postmodern Jukebox. The rest pretty much have to be sung by the original artist to continue to carry meaning.
The Songbook entries tend to combine interpret-able writing with being fairly well known; it seems to me that today what's well-known doesn't offer wide interpretation and what might offer the interpretation is not that well-known.
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