parlando

musical mythmaking

Posted on October 1st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Music Criticism.

Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology has written a fine post about (among other things) the self-perpetuating mythmaking of musicals, taking off from the example of Richard Dyer, and this quote from Gerald Mast:

Americans take musicals for granted because we do them so well and like them so much. Because they are so close to us, we simultaneously take their enjoyment and dismiss their art. The ruse that musicals are supremely unimportant is the masquerade that gives them their power to move and amuse.

Ford:

Entertainers famously give audiences what they want, but this is not all they do, because, as Richard Dyer notes, their professionalization places them at a level of discernment above that of their audience. And so entertainment has a pedagogical function: it also teaches the audience what it wants, or might want. A routine like "Make 'em Laugh" makes a point of “getting back to the classics,” which in this case means old vaudeville routines executed at lightening speed, one after the other, to the accompaniment of a song that in effect instructs the audience to find this sort of thing funny. It is funny, but both the song and Donald O’Conner’s virtuoso physical performance make an implicit argument that you should find this funny, because the audiences of the past thought it was funny, and future audiences will too.
[. . .]
Professionalized entertainment therefore relies on a sense of its own history, expressed as myth. [. . .] The idea embodied in the phrase “the King is dead; long live the King” is never so well illustrated as in showbiz, where the radically different personalities, styles, audiences, and historical/cultural/social backgrounds of successive stars are papered over in a historicist myth of continuity. In That’s Entertainment! stars anoint their own successors—Bing Crosby introducing Frank Sinatra, for example.
[. . .]
And yet this practice of myth-making is taking place within a historical period of mass disenchantment. [. . .] The fundamental incongruity between the willful myth-making of musicals [. . .] and American society as a whole is understood in terms of "escapism." [. . .] Marxists critics are more apt to see this as a bad thing and to value art that “tells the truth” about society, while those in the entertainment industry are apt to wave away all such concerns with appeals to “entertainment”: both sides are indulging in a certain ideology, and each ideology adopts its own strategy of self-protection. As Gerald Mast points out, musicals always insist on their fluffiness, their lack of substance -- they protest, a little too much, that they are “only entertainment,” which places them outside of critical argument and into that realm protected by the words de gustibus non est disputandum.
[. . .]
Entertainment is fully able to reabsorb any revisionist narrative back into its own narratives. The musical is a tougher animal than we once thought, because it can metabolize the foreign matter of its fans' cynical and secret knowledge. Judy Garland is fired from MGM, and it becomes more and more widely known that Judy Garland is a pill-popping emotional wreck -- and a few years later we get A Star Is Born, which transmutes the revelations that had shattered her youthful myth back into . . . myth.

There's a good deal more.

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