George Gershwin, conducted by George Byrd (1960) -

Side A: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

Side B: An American in Paris (1928)

Intro

Jon Lovitz. George Michael. United Airlines. I’m old. My knee is sore. My back is always sore. My cultural references for Rhapsody in Blue are Jon Lovitz, George Michael, and United Airlines.

Let’s define some terms:

1. rhapsody: a piece of music in one extended movement, usually emotional in character.
2. glissando: a continuous slide of adjacent notes upwards or downwards
3. Tin Pan Alley: a collection of composers and popular music producers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Originally, it referred to a specific location on West 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan.
4. song plugger: an individual who promotes music to musicians, record labels, and customers. In the early 20th century this was a pretty good gig for a musician. You’d perform a newly published piece of music to promote and sell its sheet music to potential buyers before the widespread adoption of the phonograph.

To paraphrase MC Paul Barman, Gershwin was so New York he should’ve changed his number to 3-1-1. Brooklyn-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants - he was a great piano player - which somehow went undiscovered until he was 12. He left school to become a song plugger on Tin Pin Alley at the age of 15. Within three years he went from being an absolute novice, to a professionally paid musician, hawking sheet music by playing his piano.

Sheet music was the quantum of music sales in Gershwin’s day - equivalent to streams now, downloads a few years back, and record sales going further back. Take note of the technological evolution of commercially distributed music recordings:

From a paper being read by a performer reciting through a live instrument;
to a needle riding a groove in a wax cylinder;
to a needle riding a groove on a vinyl record;
to a spool of magnetized tape reeling through magnetically sensitive coils;
to lasers reading microscopic pits embedded in polycarbonate discs spinning at 500 rpm;
to binary code passing from some data warehouse through a cable, saved as a file on a computer or portable MP3 player;
to digital information passing from some server farm through fiber optic cable, satellites, and cell towers to your device - unowned and unsaved, yet always available. *

*I am technologically-challenged, forgive any inaccuracies in the above sequence.

Rhapsody in Blue (RiB) and Jon Lovitz, George Michael, and United Airlines

But first, Television

I watched a lot of television in the 90s. If you were any American in the 90s, that’s what you did. According to David Foster Wallace in his 1993 essay, E Unibus Pluram, the average American household consumed 6 hours of TV per day.

Little Stephen was certainly no exception here - a latch-key, low-middle income, suburban-Texan, only-child. TV was my morning breakfast companion, my afternoon homework distraction, and my late-night sleep procrastination. ‘Channel surfing’ was the perfect prologue to, ‘surfing the world wide web’ - retrospectively naive 90s expressions for mindlessly watching TV on the one hand, or actively exploring dial-up internet later in that same decade.

Sidenote: free TV still exists. You can buy a digital antenna, hook it up to your TV monitor’s coax input and tune the channel to PBS, the big network affiliates, or any of a suite of free TV stations. I recently installed one (they are like $20) and have been surprised by how few people are aware of this. Free TV is dead to most people. You can tell because the ads on free TV are for the nearly dead. You have to be old enough to remember when there was free TV and how it worked to get free TV anymore.

There’s weird shit on free TV. There’s a news station owned by a Chinese cult. I’m not kidding: NTD TV. Check it out.

I give Free TV: **** (4 stars)

Comedy Central, MTV, FOX, and Nickelodeon dominated my viewing. Late-night television was actively marketed to youth in my demographic. SNICK - Nickelodeon’s 8-10pm (late night for a 10 year old) programming, had its own Saturday Night Live style sketch show for kids called, All That. Kenan Thompson, before being the longest running SNL cast member, started there. You can add another 5 years to his SNL career to calculate his total longevity in televised sketch comedy.

There was an actual late-night show hosted by a 16 year old child on MTV, called SQUiRT TV. The most iconic moment from that show, as I remember it, was when The Fugees played live from his ‘bedroom’. To be a child in this period of media consumption meant constant exposure to advertising, sure, but also constant exposure to young people who had made it into your TV. And surely that meant something - it meant they had something that you didn’t. And TV does that thing to you that it does to everyone - it enables you to experience the greatness or humility of another person’s life from the safety of your own living room. The entertainment itself temporarily plugs the void of self doubt and insecurity, while the products it markets profess to permanently fill that void for you once the show is over and you are returned to your regularly scheduled programming: that sense of insecurity or competition over your place, your face, your body, your stuff and your cashflow.

Nickelodeon and MTV were perfectly constructed to groom children and teenagers into being lifelong media consumers, subliminally unaware of or ironically detached (but not really) from the constant throng of product placement and commercials. And as reality television, a brainchild of some MTV executives, became increasingly pervasive, the boundaries between marketing and entertainment and real life became increasingly blurred, setting the stage perfectly for the social media influencers that were to follow in the coming decades.

Jon Lovitz

My first memory of ever hearing RiB was in the title sequence to a totally decent 90s animated sitcom called The Critic, about an NYC-based movie critic, starring Jon Lovitz. While listening to RiB a million times in the last few weeks, I remembered the show so I went looking and found the title sequence on YouTube. Turns out, it’s a motif inspired by Gershwin, for sure, but not the real deal.

I honestly think it is more impressive that I remembered it despite the fact that they didn’t use the actual piece. An adult-oriented animated sitcom that only lasted two seasons captured the vibe of the piece so well that I falsely remembered it 22 years later.

George Michael

The clarinet glissando in the introduction to RiB is probably the second-most famous glissando in American music. George Michael takes first place these days. The saxophone line to “Careless Whisper” is in a league all its own. I can’t tell if George Michael captured something timeless, or if he just perfectly captured his moment, but youth today can be heard playing that riff in high school marching bands across the country.

United Airlines

United Airlines is obsessed with RiB. If you are reading this and not sure yet what the piece sounds like. Just think of it as the “United Airlines theme song” and I can tell you why an American airline would choose this piece to represent its brand.

Back to the Music

RiB is part classical, part Jazz, which makes it timeless. It is romantic and whimsical. But it is also formal and stately. It is also composed of multiple stand-alone sections. This makes it easy to chop-up, mix, and match the piece to suit your liking or your audience’s attention span.
Leonard Bernstein who nevertheless admitted that he adored the piece, stated:

“Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone; it can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact, all these things are being done to it every day. It’s still the Rhapsody in Blue.”

This piece is deeply, inextricably, and forever connected to New York City. I can’t exactly tell you why, but some combination of the composer and the composition, plus the time period, have indelibly linked this piece to NYC, USA.

New York: a destination and/or a waypoint for a vast, international diaspora - so many lives through Ellis Island in the 19th and 20th century. Millions of souls here now, manufactured in America, Gershwin’s included, with parts imported from around the world. In conjuring the spirit of New York City, Gershwin also taps deeply into one of several competing American visions.

Here is Gershwin’s description of that vision of America:

“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer … I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.”

This ‘melting pot’ vision of America is in decline today - largely defeated by xenophobia - for now. To really hammer the point home, his working title for the piece was American Rhapsody.

David Foster Wallace and the American motto

The title of the essay I mentioned earlier by David Foster Wallace, E unibus pluram, is an obvious play on an American motto, E pluribus unum.

The American motto means, “Out of many, one.” It’s on the seal of the United States. It goes way back to the founding of the nation. It is thirteen letters long, representing the thirteen colonies that unified to break away from the British. It is brief but packs quite a semantical wallop: a unified nation of people arises from its multitudinous diversity. It was never formally adopted as the motto, but was considered the de facto option for almost 200 years.

DFW’s essay title bastardizes the Latin and turns it into something grammatically unsound but essentially means, “Out of one, many.” Out of one box - the television - sprang endless hours of consumption by increasingly isolated individual psyches. Each ego became trapped in an ironic echo chamber of entertainment aping advertising mimicking television shows about entertainment.

In 1956, the U.S. passed H.J. Resolution 396, adopting “In God We Trust” as the official motto - a massive fuck you to enlightened liberalism - and a symptomatic expression of the red scare. We Americans are not irreligious commies like the USSR. We are Christian capitalists, dadgummit.

Sorry Gershwin. We’re all getting fucked by the man. I’m with you.

An American in Paris (AAiP)

Side B to this album is another famous work, but very different in impact from RiB.

Gershwin seemed to love New York City and America. Both of these pieces are about America or Americans. RiB is a romantic ode to the diversity of America, while AAiP lovingly pokes fun at Americans abroad.

AAiP played to me like a comedic musical expression of an out of place American haphazardly site-seeing in Paris. It is basically a show-tune without the show. I really did not like the music at all. It has one famous melodic line, but I thought it was too cute to be taken seriously.

Final rating

Rhapsody in Blue
***
An American in Paris
*

Cultural Detritus:

1. United Airlines advertising featuring Rhapsody in Blue
2. The Fugees on SquirTV
3. Careless Whisper, featuring the ultimate glissando.
4. New Tang Dynasty TV
5. The Critic
6. “E Unibus Pluram” - David Foster Wallace