Miscellany #1: Hey, Lady

1. The Romanticization of Pain

I heard this song in the car the other day. 

I must have heard it before, but when I was a lot younger, before I got that the song is about Billie Holiday (and it's not very subtle about it). I did get that this last time, though, and I was really struck with how kind of icky the song is.

Sing me something terrible that even dawn may come.
You and me, we don't believe in happy endings.
Hey, Lady Day, can you save my life this time?
Can you cry so beautifully you make my troubles rhyme?

The thing about Billie Holiday is that she's been endlessly projected upon by so many people. She's like Oscar Wilde, or, I don't know, Judy Garland? Someone who is seen as not fitting into the dominant mold, and being broken by that struggle, and ultimately destroyed by it; someone who created lasting art in the process; and someone who never got to tell their own story (or whose tellings of their own story, like De Profundis, have been conveniently pushed aside by general audiences, or are suspect, like Lady Sings the Blues), allowing fans to read all of that life story into their work.

Holiday's late recordings are, in my opinion, terrible. I don't blame her for this - a hard life took its toll on her voice, and her substance abuse further hampered her abilities. Listening to Holiday after 1955 or so has always struck me as a kind of failure porn, or pain voyeurism - her ravaged voice and missed notes celebrated by the listener for their authenticity. The Magnetic Fields song really highlights this power dynamic between the listener and Holiday: here, Billie is being asked to put herself through pain ("Sing me something terrible"... "cry so beautifully"...) so that she can heal the narrator. (It's conceivable that the narrator is talking about early/peak Billie Holiday, but I doubt it, because the music she recorded in those years is generally cheerful and bouncy. And, honestly, no one is ever talking about that stuff when they say things like this song is saying.)

That painful music can be helpful, even therapeutic, in a painful experience is not crazy, or morally wrong, in my opinion. But the song goes further: "You and me, we don't believe in happy endings." Did Holiday enjoy her late recordings? Did she feel that she was producing quality music? I personally don't know. I'm not sure if Stephin Merritt knows either. But the song begs that question - Holiday's purpose is to be in pain, so that the narrator's pain can be healed.

Billie you're a genius enough to be a fool.
A fool to gamble everything and never know the rules.
Some of us can only live in songs of love and trouble.

This is obviously getting into some noble savage stuff here with that first line. I'm always reminded of On the Road - Sal in the "Denver colored section," wishing he was

anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned.... wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.... There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment and "white sorrows" and all that.

For Sal, the African Americans and Mexicans are "joyous" because they aren't burdened by what he calls "white ambitions"; in the Magnetic Fields song, Billie, freed from society's norms by the ability to be ignorant, isn't joyous, but she does have an inner peace or resolution that the white narrator wants to find. The narrator lumps himself with Holiday while also putting her on a noble savage pedestal. The balls it takes for the narrator to ask Holiday to save his life (because of a breakup) by leveraging the pain and suffering which caused Holiday herself to die under arrest on a hospital bed at age 44 is astounding.

2. The Transcendence of Pain

The fact is, I was already thinking about Holiday's late work even before hearing that Magnetic Fields song, because on another car trip this song came up on my iPod:

This is Sinatra in 1986 - 1986! Frank was seventy years old, had been sounding rough since at least the early 1970s, and was definitely sounding not that great by the 1980s. Every so often when I was younger, a later Frank recording would come on the radio, and he always sounded terrible, especially compared to the 1950s records I loved to listen to, like A Swingin' Affair. So I always avoided late Sinatra recordings for much the same reason I avoided late Billie Holiday recordings - they seemed like pain voyeurism, and to be honest I didn't get much enjoyment from hearing one of my favorite singers repeatedly fail to hit notes he could hit with ease in his prime.

Then, for whatever reason, a few years ago I decided to listen to some of his later recordings. I think Will Friedwald, who doesn't cut Frank more slack than is necessary, recommended The Main Event Live, from 1974, in his excellent book on Sinatra. Whatever the impetus was, I ended up venturing into some 1970s and eventually 1980s recordings, including Live at the Meadowlands, the "Past" disc of Trilogy, from 1980, and L.A. Is My Lady, from 1984. And I was shocked to discover that while, yes, many tracks made me cringe as I heard Frank's voice fail spectacularly (often on bad song choices), there were just as many where he sounds energetic, excited, and agile, as with the "Come Rain Or Come Shine" at the Meadowlands. Some of these later recordings are now some of my favorite Sinatra recordings.

Why? I still can't listen to late Billie Holiday, so why can I listen to late Sinatra? I think it has to do with why we listen. As I explored in my previous post, many listen to late Billie Holiday because they feel the pain and suffering her ragged voice seems to embody is beautiful, or poignant, or sad in a way that rewards immersion. In essence, they are listening to Billie Holiday's late recordings because she will fail. And, though I don't enjoy those recordings, I understand that perspective. Holiday's failure is poignant - I personally just don't think that poignancy is enjoyable to hear. But Sinatra's failures are never beautiful, or poignant, or sad in any way but pathetic.

My guess is that this has to do with power. Holiday was a black woman, often exploited, definitely discriminated against, who struggled with domineering men and debilitating addictions. Her late recordings show a woman persisting, despite her broken voice. They can be interpreted as an expression of power - the power Holiday retained to imbue a song with deep meaning. Sinatra was, at his peak, one of the most powerful men in the world, a friend of multiple Presidents, musicians, and movie stars, connected to the mafia, a best-selling singer and a movie box-office draw. Sinatra at the end of his career is a man desperately trying to grasp a vocal power which is now out of reach. His voice is weak, is cracks and catches, it defies his commands. Late Billie Holiday sounds old before her time; late Sinatra just sounds old.

For me, then, the draw - the power - of a track like the one above is Sinatra's triumph. Listen to him during the instrumental break, a little after the two minute mark. He's still singing, his voice reaching high, blending with the horns in a way that can't help making you smile - the notes aren't perfect, but he's having a blast. And when he comes back in to close out the song, his voice sounds tired, but he is in command. Late Billie Holiday is poignant because it is a documentation (a validation, in the case of the Magnetic Fields song?) of powerlessness; late Frank Sinatra is triumphant because it is a documentation of power fleetingly recaptured, before the next regrettable cover or faltering ballad begins.