A Music Critic in Quarantine
I’ve been a music critic for a long time, so I frequently — and in these days of worldwide distress more frequently than ever — get questions about what music I think people should listen to and what I’m listening to. In fact, I haven’t felt much like listening to music. It’s not because I don’t love music any more. I don’t turn to music these days for the same reason it’s hard for me to read. It’s that I almost can’t bear the idea of doing anything “serious.” Let me try to explain.
Every day, the news demands something from us. Some response. Outrage, praise, sympathy, support of some kind. Great music, like great books, is not for background sound or distraction. A great work of art wants us, asks us, to confront its profound truths. Art demands our fullest attention. And deserves it. But we already have too many demands on our fullest attention. We’re already stretched too thin.
So I’m reluctant to engage with great music, just as I’m reluctant to engage with the great poetry I truly love. I can hardly believe I’m bringing myself to admit this.
So what am I listening to or looking at?
Well…
A couple of weeks ago, a friend in Paris sent me a link to a video that completely captivated me and lifted my spirits. I liked it so much, it actually made me glad to be self-quarantined. Why would I want to go out when I could just stay home and watch that video over and over again?
It was a kind of mash-up of dance numbers from old movies perfectly — brilliantly — timed to fit a recording of Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk.”
There was lots of Fred Astaire (could there ever be enough?), dancing solo (including up a wall), with Ginger Rogers (of course), or with Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, or Eleanor Powell (whom people might not remember, although in the 1940s she was one of the biggest dance stars in Hollywood — perhaps someone more technically efficient than soulful except when she danced with Astaire). There’s some Gene Kelly (including the famous dance number he did with Jerry, the mouse from Tom & Jerry cartoons, and the wonderful somersault over a couch with Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor in Singing’ in the Rain). Jimmy Cagney (whose gangster movies make us forget what a terrific dancer he was) turns up by himself and with Ruby Keeler.
Then there’s Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tapping up and down the stairs (there are lots of steps in this video) with little Shirley Temple. Bob Fosse dances a hot, angular Fosse number with Carol Haney in his very first screen choreography. And the astounding Nicholas Brothers, one of Hollywood’s greatest dance teams. One of my favorite moments in this whole five-minute video occurs when “Uptown Funk” stops for a couple of seconds to catch its breath just after we’ve seen the Nicholas Brothers and then a trio called the Berry Brothers fall to the stage floor into a set of mind-boggling splits; then when the music re-starts we see the Nicholas Brothers return to their full height just by sliding their legs together as if they were being sucked up by an overhead vacuum cleaner.
We also get delicious clips of wonderful dancing by movie stars we don’t think of as dancers: Louise Brooks, Gracie Allen, Laurel & Hardy (in a mock can-can), even Groucho Marx literally kicking up his heels, and Lucille Ball cracking a whip in full Technicolor S&M regalia — all these marvelous stars at their lighthearted best, and in perfect fusion or syncopation with that terrific rock song.
I had no idea these mash-ups were a genre. Numerous videos of this sort have turned up on YouTube, most of them not nearly as good as this one (a video devoted entirely to Rita Hayworth is extraordinary in its own way).
Click Here to watch the video. If you click the cc (closed-caption) icon at the bottom of the screen, you can see the name and date of each film these fleet and fleeting moments are from.
PS. If you’re really curious about what else I’ve been listening to, check out my Fresh Air review of Cheek to Cheek, the four-CD set of the complete duet recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Pure heaven. (Click Here to take a listen.)
Lloyd Schwartz’s poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. He is also a noted Elizabeth Bishop scholar, co-editor of the Library of American’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters, and editor of the centennial edition of Bishop’s prose. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his columns on music in The Boston Phoenix. Since 1987, he has been the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Recently retired, he was the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.