The new Annie Lennox album is just the latest underwhelming recording of classic pop standards by an aging rock ‘n’ roll star. Joni Mitchell, Bryan Ferry, Linda Ronstadt, Jeff Lynne, Glenn Frey, Sinead O’Connor, Smokey Robinson, Dr. John, Diana Ross, Art Garfunkel, Cyndi Lauper, Boz Scaggs and, most notoriously, Rod Stewart have all tackled the Great American Songbook—that loosely defined collection of pre-Elvis show tunes, jazz perennials and Tin Pan Alley numbers—with disappointing results. Why do they keep trying? And why do they keep failing?
As an answer to these questions, the title of Lennox’s album, Nostalgia, is a red herring. These baby boomers are not fondly remembering the music of their youth; this was the music of their parents—and in O’Connor’s case, her grandparents. These standards albums represent nostalgia not for one’s own past but for someone else’s past. They are not an attempt to recapture one’s youth but to establish one’s adulthood. In other words, they are inspired not by breaking molds and baring one’s heart but by craving respectability—never a reliable motive for making art.
It didn’t have to be this way. Lennox, for example, has the vocal chops to breathe new life into these songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. On her best recordings, both with the Eurythmics and on her solo projects, Lennox builds the tension by pulling back the reins on her big voice and then, at just the right moment, letting go of the bridle and confronting the listener with not the affirmation of a gospel climax but with the challenge of an unsheathed blade. You keep waiting for that moment to arrive in Nostalgia, but it never does.
It’s as if she’s trying to live up to the expensive, floor-length black gown she’s wearing in the album photos, as if she doesn’t want to mess up its elegant lines by cutting loose. Lennox has the rich timbre for these songs, but she never shifts out of second gear. And she gets caught in a rhythmic no man’s land, abandoning the driving 4/4 rock of her past and tentatively fingering a jazzy swing without quite grasping it. Some syllables slide past their syncopated appointment, and thus no momentum ever develops.
But the same problems that undermined her record have sabotaged dozens of others. Why does this keep happening? The facile explanation is that rock ‘n’ roll was born in opposition to the Great American Songbook and has been uncomfortable with it ever since. “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false,” Frank Sinatra famously said. “It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of it almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics.” “I’ve got no kick against modern jazz,” Chuck Berry responded, “unless they try to play it too darn fast and change the beauty of the melody until it sounds just like a symphony. That’s why I go for that rock ‘n’ roll music.”
But this rivalry has been much overstated. If blues and hillbilly music were the father and mother of rock ‘n’ roll, Tin Pan Alley was the godfather. Elvis Presley not only wanted to be Big Joe Turner and Bill Monroe; he also wanted to be Dean Martin and recorded songs by Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and Roy Turk. Brill Building writers such as Carole King, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka and Bert Berns were Jewish kids consciously imitating their Jewish New York elders such as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin, who also cranked out pop hits from cubicles along Broadway.
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