I Love To Make White Straight Men Whine and Cry - Hate Mail

HAL DAVID AND BURT BACHARACH were skilled songwriters, for all I know Bacharach still is, I checked, he's still alive. This Guy's In Love With You is a very skillfully written song. It's definitely written to give the effect of "a guy" singing a love song.   

 

I once read a piece about "how to get rid of a gay accent" curious about what such advice would consist of, though if I wanted to get rid of an accent it would be my inland Maine accent and I don't want to.  The advice leaned heavily on making your voice as uninflected as possible, "giving as little away as you can", syllables as short as possible, not lingering on vowels, not altering the pitch on a vowel. Especially the way that Herb Alpert sings the songs it's a perfect example of how a guy should sing following that advice. Andy Williams and some of the other crooners, not so much. I think it was Debussy who complained there was too much singing at the opera. I think Herb Alpert often plays trumpet with a similar kind of articulation, a very dry "manly" articulation. Maybe it's the difference between someone who plays an instrument and sings and someone who just croons. 

 

I will say that most of the gay men I know talk like "guys" that way.  I don't, I talk like a backwoods hick.  Only drier.

That said, it isn't one of their songs that instruct women in how to be submissive to men, it's a man singing a love song, it wouldn't be one of those though he being a "guy" he's more about himself in that song than the women in those other songs all about "their men" are definitely not about themselves. Some of the ones that do carry that messaging are as bad as any of the atrocious pop songs with that content from the period, though much of what else followed in the 1990s to today is far more viciously pathological than that sinister though less overtly so time.

Now that I've said that, the meaning of lyrics is important. I was thinking that the other day when I was listening to an album of pieces played by Mary Lou Williams, one that included her masterful and ever fascinating variations on Limehouse Blues.

 

 

 

Years ago, I had only ever heard one recording of people singing Limehouse Blues, the great Mills Brothers from the early 1930s and was long ago appalled by the casual racism of the lyrics, so I was always uneasy about liking the tune and, even with what good improvisers do with it. It's one of the more popular standards for that with good jazz improvisers. I had to go online and look up the lyrics to find out that as sung by more modern artists, though they are far from up to modern standards of equality and non-stereotyping, they were no where near as racist as the original from exactly a century ago. I read that the song was originally from a London musical review with it being a piece set in a Limehouse district dance-hall-brothel.  I'd originally concluded it was about an opium den, but prostitution has always been closely associated with drug addiction.  I doubt most of the people who hear the melody as treated by jazz musicians have much of a sense of that connection.  You only get those through the words.

You can care about that kind of thing or not, I happen to and don't feel at all embarrassed to care about it. I can give Bachrarch and David their due while acknowledging the issues surrounding thier songs. 

 

Update:  Yep, I got him whining and crying.  He reminds me of this little gem.