The Neglected Ordinary.

Interesting book review at the New York Times. The byline is Nellie McKay, one of the freshest and smartest pop stars in decades. (Her new album, unreleased because she was dropped by her label, is wonderful. It may end up being another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot when it finally gets released. I’m not sure she’d take that as a copliment.)

Anyway. The book she's reviewing is about seven pop stars of the 1950s who have been somewhat unfairly neglected, according to the author. Patti Page is the one I’m most familiar with; the others are Frankie Laine, Pat Boone, Fabian, Georgia Gibbs and Tommy Sands. I’ll get on board any Patti Page revival bandwagon. Pat Boone, though . . . dude's stuff doesn't even work as camp. Not for me, anyway.

Still, some excellent points about the difference between Music History As It Is Written and the actual experience of pop consumers, most of whom don’t value the things a lot of critics do. (Seriously, who wants to be Lester Bangs? He was a loser.) It’s something I’ve been thinking about here and there, lately: Ordinary Music. The stuff that gets supplanted by the Great Musical Revolutions that people get excited about. Like light opera, killed off by jazz; über-innocent 50s pop, killed off by rock & roll; AM pop, killed off by new wave; adult contemporary, killed off by hip-hop. Except the deaths have always been greatly exaggerated by the people who liked what supplanted them. The people (usually girls, and what precisely is wrong with girls?) who like the Ordinary Music, the lovely, charming, sweet, wholesome, romantic, and uplifting music, have never been unduly bothered by those great revolutions that people with unshaven beards feel so strongly about.

Nellie McKay has one foot firmly in both camps, which is something that always interests me. She’s fully conversant with the lovely, shimmery Broadway/Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building/Barbra Streisand stream, but she’s a child of the magpie 90s, too, and won’t shy away from a beat or a sample or a riff or a curse. Marketed as the anti-Norah Jones, she’s in some ways really the anti-Clear Channel. You know, forget all the goddamn market shares and demographics and high walls shutting out the other kinds of music; it’s all good stuff. She gets me excited about modern music the same way Outkast and Shakira and Gorillaz and other genre-busting acts do.

There’s not even anything wrong with Norah Jones, so long as she’s taken in her proper context. Like the old Saturday morning commercials used to say, part of this “balanced breakfast.”