The Friday Canon: FRANK SINATRA

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Swingin' crooner Frank notched up 31 UK Top 40 hit singles, but which ones are the best of the bunch? You get TEN ticks to decide...

[Poll #1016325]

Donna Canon results up later.

Comments

Re: Really?

[strange-powers.livejournal.com]

My point is that Sinatra wasn't part of adolescent culture because there was no adolescent market to sell to in the forties. But I don't think adolescent culture defines the boundaries of pop.

Re: Really?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

depending on how you define adolsecent, but there was war cash in the forties

Re: Really?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sinatra was totally a bobbysoxers scream idol in the early 40s -- he had to reinvent himself as an adult concern, via films and the capitol sleeves and so on, and the fact that he was able to was a very big deal in fashioning a conception of "adult" sophisto-pop in the early 50s

(swing -- esp.white swing, like benny goodman -- had its first big success among students and fairly young adults)

Re: Really?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

he was also considered both louche and dangerous in the 40s, not doing his duty and stealing the girls from boys who did.

then his adult sophisto pop was not a reboot or a newness, but turning a bug into virtue...

Re: Really?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

more than this -- it was about key elements of a generation seeing themselves as kids-no-more but rather adults, so it was also a kind of "coming of age" music, rooted in the earlier style but more mature in content and manner (LPs were new and aimed at non-kids; 45s were new and aimed at kids; teens -- who obviously already existed -- were now targeted as a specific market)

i'm fairly sure this idea of a generation aware of itself maturing was new, as a marketing thing and as a point of social discussion (pop sociology as a thing that got into the papers was also a new and widespread thing in the early 50s)

Re: Really?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

i dont think the pop soc thing is nessc accurate, cant almost all yr claims also cover the 20s?

Re: Really?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i can't think of a development in film or music which manifests this, can you? age-distinct tastes obviously predated the 20s, and the jazz age was a manifestation of a generation defining themselves by taste-choice, but i can't think of the arrival (in the music; in movies) of a realisation that "look we jazz agers are older now and this is what we've moved on to liking" (if there is one, what is it?) (conscious niche-marketing really didn't begin to evolve until the 30s, and it was still broadly regional and cultural)

i think the idea of pop culture having a historical sense of its own movement is a 50s things

Re: Really?

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

Niche Marketing is what happened w. the entire career of Clara Bow....

and in europe esp, when swing moved from an american import of pleasure into something more radical with the rise of nazis, wouldnt that be similar:


In the Rhine-Ruhr area, resisters from the Socialist Worker Youth, the Red Falcons, the Bunde, and Catholic Youth Groups got together in large, ad hoc delinquent groups called the ... Kittlesback pirates. With size and local knowledge on their side, they openly defied the Hitler Youth, the the extent that the organization became "virtually defunct" in some areas. The most consistent irritant for the Nazis, were the Catholic youth org., which refused to integrate with the Hitler Youth even after they had expressly ordered to do so...
John Savage Teenage, pg 272

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok, i think you're right about the notion that particular stars were favoured by particular audiences and age groups maybe -- and that that's the first manifestation of niche marketing -- but there wasn't a general sense of a "youth market", so much as a sense of a "clara bow market" who happened to be young? the specific analog to what i'm talking about would be more like, who did the clara bow audience move onto AFTER her (and did these latter films contain consciousness of the having been crala bow fans at an earlier time)

(jon may say difft, i haven't read his book yet, but isn't it largely about teens rather than ppl who were formerly teens but now aren't?)

swing in germany: no, that's not the same thing at all (adoption of a music or a look or whatever as badge of political difference long predates the 20th century -- besides, what yr describing doesn't contain a sense of the fact of change over time as part of its content, at least as you've stated it)

obviously generations have aged and their tastes changed since time immemorial -- what i'm saying is that the marketing towards that generation didn't (prior to the 50s) depend in any significant degree on their knowing that they were collectively aware of what their tastes had been and had now become

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

i dont know the answer to the clara bow question, the hayes code was constructed to avoid youth from enjoying the sex and death--explotation and b movies were made and marketed to youth, post hayes, and there was some interlocking b/w those and war films during wwii...but that isnt music...

you are right about swing, i think

another direction

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

what about pulp sf and fandom?

Re: another direction

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sf didn't really divide internally into niches until the 60s, i don't think -- when the new wave arrived, elements of golden-age content became straight kids-stuff fare (for example andre norton increasingly wrote for children; i don't think she'd set out to when she started, and her sf style didn't really change)

reflexivity and nostalgia-for-my-own-tastes-as-a-teen maybe arrives with star wars in movies (lucas recapping HIS tastes as a teen, but not as a "matured teen"; so it's not like capitol-era sinatra's rlationship to late 30s swing); matured reflexivity becames SF's "thing" with william gibson's "the gernsback continuum", tho arguably delany -- a very reflexive and self-aware writer -- had gone there a lot earlier (but i don't think he took many readers with him)

the sf and monster movie stuff in the 50s is more consciously adolescent in aim than the same material in the 20s or 30s