Tag: Frank Sinatra

Just Grow Up

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

From the Archives: Nicotine Theological Journal (January, 1999)

Just Grow Up

A recent visit to Yale, complete with watching a Yale-Princeton hockey game, reminded us of the suffocating ubiquity of post-1950s popular culture. Being some twenty years removed from college life it was curious to see Yale undergraduates participating in the rah-rah spirit that college students of our generation studiously avoided in the name of being independently cool. Even more surprising was to see the overwhelming support for the Yale band, an extracurricular activity that certain boomers associated with losers and nerds. But here we were, in 1998, watching kids supposedly indoctrinated in the dogma of political correctness and postmodernism not just playing in but singing along with the band. Perhaps even more remarkable was that these nineteen- and twenty-year olds knew the words to the songs the band played. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Credence Clearwater Revival – it didn’t matter. These students sang along. The scene was almost surreal. These college students were joining in the singing of music that in our generation was supposed to be a pronounced statement against joining anything. Of course, one of the great myths of popular culture is that of the solitary individual who does his own thing, even while two-thirds of the teenage population are doing exactly the same thing.

BUT ASIDE FROM REVEALING the conformist side of pop culture’s individualism, this scene also spoke volumes about the triumph of rock ‘n roll. Who could have imagined college students in the 1960s and 1970s singing with the college band to popular songs three decades old? Would any of us have known the words to the songs of Frank Sinatra or the Andrews Sisters? So why then won’t John, Paul, Ringo and Mick just go away? Perhaps, an even more pressing question is why people are not embarrassed to continue to live like teenagers even when they are in their forties and fifties?

One way of considering this question is to contrast the Rolling Stones’ relatively recent tour (lots of 1970s bands are doing retrospective treks, we understand) with what Frank Sinatra did for almost all of his life and with what Tony Bennett continues to do – that is, sing the songs that made them stars. It was not the least embarrassing for Sinatra to sing his kind of music because it was and is adult (don’t ask for a definition; it’s like pornography). It may not be Mozart or Vaughn Williams, but the way of singing, combined with the ethos such songs create, do not require listeners or adoring fans to act like teenagers. In other words, no one thought Frank silly singing his songs into his eighties. The same cannot be said for Mick Jagger. In fact, one cannot think of a more laughable sight than a man who is a grandfather acting like he is still the high-school deviant whose only care seems to be questioning all forms of authority.

WHICH RAISES A FURTHER question – why the triumph of rock ‘n roll in most sectors of Christian worship? Why has perpetually adolescent music become appropriate for expressing praise and adoration to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? This is not to suggest that ballads like those made popular by Sinatra would be fitting. Our preference runs to the Psalms of the Old Testament set to tunes that are either singable by all generations or chanted. But the triumph of rock ‘n roll, whether soft or not, seems to run contrary to the apostle Paul’s instructions in Titus where he told older men to be temperate, serious, and sensible, and older women to be sensible, chaste, and domestic. If this is indeed conduct fitting sound doctrine, in fact, if gravity and self-control are virtues that sound doctrine is supposed to produce, then why has Christian worship become the arena where the musical forms of the Stones, Beatles and CCR, already domesticated, are now baptized?

Of course, our culture has many problems, but it does not say good things about our churches that by failing to see any difference between serious and frivolous music they are also in danger of losing the ability to distinguish adolescence from maturity. Of course, churches who follow the lead of pop culture may become as mainstream and as ubiquitous as the Stones, but they are likely to look just as silly when they turn fifty.

Do Muslims and Jews Have This Problem?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

In the mood of the season, I found a Youtu.be video with Frank Sinatra’s rendition of Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.

Maybe yours doesn’t but my mind boggled (again). Frank Sinatra, the singer alluded to in The Godfather, with real ties to the Rat Pack, and no model of family mores, is singing Charles Wesley (one of the original Methodists’ better verses). Again, the mind boggles.

This is how familiar Christmas is for Americans (and people in the West more generally). Not only did Sinatra sing Wesley. But producers in the recording industry believed that Frank singing a batch of Christmas songs would be a revenue enhancer. And these entertainment geniuses decided not only to include some of the secular and corny songs, like Jingle Bells, but also the sorts of material that Anglican cathedral choirs include in Lessons and Carols services.

Is your mind boggling yet?

Do Muslims have songs to sing about the birth of Muhammad? Do Jews sing about the birth of Abraham? One way to tell is to live in a Muslim or Jewish society during the holy days? How much religious music seeps out into the larger commercial world?

I don’t know (and am willing to learn from readers).

But one of the things that makes Christmas great (in all senses of the word) is that recording celebrities have put out so many albums and cds devoted to the birth of Jesus.

For the New Schoolers out there who like to chalk such cultural expressions up to the church’s (which one?) transformatalistizational powers, the pervasiveness of Christmas cheer is a sign of the longing that many people have the good news that the nativity narratives begin. Yes, we need more Christ and less Frank in Christmas, but for Americans to devote the better part of six weeks every year to the celebration of Christmas is an indication of Christianity’s abiding appeal.

For Old Schoolers, though, the relentless persistence of Christmas in all its schmaltz and devotion is an indication of how little discomfort Christians feel about making their own holiday an affair for Muslims, Jews, and secularists to enjoy or endure. Imagine thinking that Frank Sinatra’s Christmas albums would sell in Istanbul.

At the same time, Old Schoolers who know the history of the church calendar should not blame Roman Catholics for the ubiquity of Christmas sales and music. Protestants in the United States did not observe Christmas (minus some Episcopalians and Lutherans) until the late nineteenth century when department store entrepreneurs like New School Presbyterian, John Wanamaker, connected the dots between God’s gift to man in sending his son, and the gifts that Americans could give to friends and family to participate in that incarnational spirit.

Protestants made the world safe for Frank Sinatra singing Wesley, not the bishops.