One remarkable thing about music is that, in addition to being a standalone medium of art, it also serves as a powerful and important ingredient in other media.
This week's Saturday Listening Corner will present three pieces that, in addition to their original independent meaning, have also gained additional prominence as small parts of other, much later works... all of which had something to say about historical hard times, and are disturbingly relevant to the world we live in today.
Let's begin after the fold.
First, we have Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5. Brahms wrote the Hungarian Dances in the 1860s, but for me this piece will always be associated with Charlie Chaplin's brilliant first "talkie," The Great Dictator. Here is a recording of the piece being played on my hand-cranked Victor Credenza phonograph:
The Great Dictator is a satire of Nazi Germany, created and released BEFORE WWII, with Chaplin playing dual roles as "der Phooey" Adenoid Hinkel (an obvious Hitler stand-in), and a poor Jewish barber who has just come back from years in a mental ward (after a WWI injury) to find his neighborhood changed and his people oppressed by the new regime. The film makes brilliant use of music at several points, including the piece above in a bit of visual comedy in which the barber shaves a client in time with the music, and a later sequence in which the Hinkel performs a delicate ballet with a giant floating globe, in what--despite the complete lack of spoken dialogue in the sequence--is possibly one of the most direct and poignant commentaries on megalomania ever committed to film.
Second is a popular post-war song called "Beyond the Sea." It was originally a French song about the changing "moods" of the ocean, but the English-language version by Jack Lawrence simply took the melody from the French "La Mer" and had completely unrelated lyrics, about pining for a lost or absent lover. Here is a recording by the Harry James Orchestra, again playing on my 1926 Victor Credenza:
It has been used in a number of films prior to this, but those of a younger generation will likely be more familiar with this song from the use of the more popular Bobby Darin version in the video game BioShock. BioShock, in addition to being a fun and well-crafted game, is a very clever deconstruction of the Ayn Rand worldview. The story follows the player on a flight that crashes into the ocean, where you discover a fantastic, secret underwater city steeped in luxury and self-indulgence, but which has mysteriously fallen into chaos and decay. It was founded by an anti-government, free market extremist named Andrew Ryan, whose memorable pre-taped introduction to the city runs:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
We then spend the next 10-20 hours of gameplay gradually discovering just how dramatically this sort of idea can fail. Think of BioShock as the anti-Atlas Shrugged.
The third and final selection I'd like to share today is "Why Don't You Do Right?" as performed by Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman. Here is the record on the Victrola:
(sorry about the audio quality on this one; I had the camera a little too close to the phonograph, resulting in some minor clipping)
There have been many versions of this song recorded, including an excellent recent rendition by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but the version that sticks in my mind will forever be Jessica Rabbit's nightclub performance from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Spoofing the noir detective films of the 1930s, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? follows a down-on-his-luck private eye who is dragged into investigating the murder of a popular cartoon producer, and trying to prove the innocence of a popular cartoon character. SPOILER: While the plot revolves mainly around the tense relations between cartoon characters and the "real world" around them, what is revealed in the end is that the murder was actually committed by the anti-toon Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), so that he can remove the legal obstacles keeping him from bulldozing the cartoons' homeland and building a freeway and mini-malls through the area.
It is also revealed that the Judge has bought up the public transportation system in order to dismantle it, and thus push the idea of increased private automobile ownership. Based loosely on the real-life undermining of the Red Car system in southern California during this era, the film casts this is a "crazy idea" that the public would never accept (which, of course, it long since had by the time the film was made). Bitter humor about an "insane" and "unacceptable" idea to dismantle a system that serves the public in favor of bolstering a private business agenda... where have we heard that one before? Anyone? Bueller?