2015.08.12 不朽的弗兰克-西纳特拉

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The immortal Frank Sinatra
Forget Elvis Presley or the Beatles, Sinatra was the first true teen idol

Aug 12th 2015 (Updated Aug 18th 2015)

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By David Bennun

Born a hundred years ago this December, and 17 years dead, Frank Sinatra is still very much with us. You can even go and see him – or a spectral, projected version of him – at the London Palladium. “It’s not other people doing Frank,” says his daughter Nancy, in a plug for the show. “It’s Frank doing Frank.” But it’s not simply Sinatra the singer or Sinatra the showman who has been so significant: his work, his voice and his style are so instantly recognisable that little more needs to be said about them. What’s more important is the kind of star he was.

Sinatra was the first true teen idol of the mass-media era – and without teen idols, the last seven decades of popular culture would be unimaginably different. In this, as in so many things, timing was crucial. Frank Sinatra’s stardom was something that could not have existed until the point that it did – until the elements were all in place, most crucially the huge popularity of radio. Had it not been Sinatra who became what he did, it would have been somebody else. But it was Sinatra.


Beatlemania was not the first phenomenon of its type, nor was the hysteria that greeted the young Elvis Presley. Our image of those crowds of screaming girls comes from cameras that panned across their massed numbers and picked out their personal dissolutions into frenzy. The reason we don’t have the same image of the Bobby soxers – the young women who went doolally for Sinatra in the 1940s – is that they usually weren’t recorded in the same way. They certainly behaved in the same way, but we picture them chiefly in still, soundless images. It helps to look instead at a work of fiction: Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic film “The Godfather”, specifically the scene in which Don Corleone’s solemn business of the day is disrupted by uncontrollable girlish screams as the singing star Johnny Fontane (understood to be a dramatic avatar of Sinatra) arrives at the wedding party for the Don’s daughter. Sinatra was not the old-school antithesis of Elvis and the Beatles, destined to be swept away by their arrival via some mythic process of cultural inevitability; he was their prototype, their harbinger, the figure who opened the door through which they swaggered or scampered.

What was Sinatra’s particular charm? He wasn’t the first crooner of his type, by a long chalk. Nor was he outstandingly handsome, by the standards of the day; he was often mocked for his skinniness, deeply unfashionable at a time when Charles Atlas’s advertisements promised to transform you from the kind of “97-pound weakling” shunned by women and bullied by beefier fellows. But he had what all his successors in the male teen-idol role have possessed: a boyish magnetism which appealed precisely because it bypassed all but its key audience. As the blues artist Willie Dixon once sang: “The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.”


This effect is always multiplied by its shared experience: one girl mightn’t have screamed at Sinatra, but thousands together did. It first manifested itself when he was the support act to the great swing clarinetist Benny Goodman in December 1942, at New York’s Paramount Theatre. “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in,” said the entertainer Jack Benny. To sustain the febrile media coverage, Sinatra’s PR people duly hired a handful of girls to scream at him at subsequent shows: “But we needn't have… the hundreds more we didn't hire screamed even louder. It was wild, crazy, completely out of control.” Two years later came the “Paramount riot”, when over 30,000 delirious fans were excluded from a venue that seated little more than one-tenth of that number.

It’s remarkable how many other innovations one may credit Sinatra with. He wasn’t the first star to straddle mass media: the most plausible candidate for that accolade is Bing Crosby – once, unlikely as it may now seem, Sinatra’s great rival – who was simultaneously a titan of musical recording, broadcasting and the box office in the 1940s. Crosby’s appeal was cross-generational; Sinatra, hamstrung by demographics, saw his star fade as his audience aged, and revived his career by his leap into movie roles. It’s a move that stars with a teen fanbase have attempted to replicate ever since, with varying success – Presley, for instance, was ill-served by his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, in that regard, less in the idea than in its tawdry execution. Sinatra sought out and won prestigious Hollywood roles (and “The Godfather” offers a sinister account of how he did so); Parker stuck Presley into cheap and exploitative vehicles. Done right, this is a trick that can remake a career entirely. How often is the actor Mark Wahlberg recalled as the frontman of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch? Sinatra, of course, ran his film career in parallel to his musical one; he had an extraordinary talent that he never betrayed by abandoning it for another medium.

Sinatra was also among the first major music stars to launch his own label – Reprise, in 1960 – on which many of his most celebrated releases appeared. Today, in (aptly) reprised form, it makes up a key part of the Warner Music Group. And Sinatra has even proved a quite inadvertent innovator. In a recent article for Slate, on the prevalence of songs in the current charts credited to one artist while “featuring” another, Chris Molanphy makes an interesting observation: America’s very first top ten, in 1940, was led by the single “I’ll Never Smile Again”, credited to the big-band leader Tommy Dorsey, with a vocal by his in-house singer, Frank Sinatra.

“Elvis didn’t die,” Parker told reporters in 1977. “The body did... This changes nothing.” Sinatra outlived Presley by two decades, but the notion of an endless career driven by constant reinvention surely relied on Sinatra’s example. Sinatra’s still here. Maybe he’ll be here when we’re all gone too, the first of the mass-media immortals.

Sinatra: The Man and His Music London Palladium, booking until October 10th

image: getty



不朽的弗兰克-西纳特拉
忘掉猫王或披头士吧，西纳特拉是第一个真正的青少年偶像

2015年8月12日（2015年8月18日更新）。


作者：David Bennun

今年12月，弗兰克-辛纳屈（Frank Sinatra）出生于100年前，去世17年了，他仍然和我们在一起。你甚至可以去看他--或者他的一个幽灵般的投影版本--在伦敦钯金球场。他的女儿南希说："这不是其他人在表演弗兰克，"她在为这个节目做宣传。"是弗兰克做弗兰克"。但是，如此重要的不仅仅是辛纳屈这个歌手或辛纳屈这个表演者：他的作品、他的声音和他的风格是如此的容易辨认，以至于不需要多说什么。更重要的是他是什么样的明星。

辛纳屈是大众传媒时代第一个真正的青少年偶像--如果没有青少年偶像，过去七十年的流行文化将会有难以想象的变化。在这一点上，正如在许多事情上一样，时机是至关重要的。弗兰克-辛纳屈的明星地位在它出现之前是不可能存在的--直到所有的元素都到位，最关键的是广播的巨大普及。如果不是辛纳屈成为他所做的，就会是其他人。但它是西纳特拉。


披头士狂热并不是第一种类型的现象，迎接年轻的埃尔维斯-普雷斯利的歇斯底里也不是。我们对那些尖叫的女孩人群的印象来自于照相机，这些照相机扫过他们大量的人数，并挑选出他们个人陷入狂热的情况。我们对鲍比-索克斯（Bobby Soxers）--1940年代为辛纳屈（Sinatra）疯狂的年轻女性--没有同样的印象，原因是她们通常没有以同样的方式被记录。她们当然有同样的行为，但我们对她们的印象主要是静止的、无声的图像。看一下小说作品会有所帮助。弗朗西斯-福特-科波拉（Francis Ford Coppola）1972年的经典电影《教父》（The Godfather），特别是在歌星约翰尼-方丹（Johnny Fontane）（被理解为辛纳屈的戏剧化身）来到唐纳德女儿的婚宴上时，唐-柯里昂一天的庄严事务被无法控制的女孩尖叫声所扰乱的场景。辛纳屈并不是猫王和披头士的老派对立面，注定要通过某种神话般的文化必然过程被他们的到来扫地出门；他是他们的原型，是他们的预言家，是打开他们大摇大摆或飞奔而来的门的人物。

西纳特拉的特殊魅力是什么？他并不是他那种类型的第一个歌星，这是很重要的。按照当时的标准，他也不是非常英俊；他经常因为瘦弱而被嘲笑，在查尔斯-阿特拉斯的广告中承诺将你从那种被女人躲避、被强壮的家伙欺负的 "97磅的弱者 "中转化出来的时候，他是非常不时尚的。但是，他拥有他在男性青少年偶像角色中的所有继任者所拥有的东西：一种男孩的磁性，这种磁性之所以吸引人，正是因为它避开了所有的关键观众。正如蓝调艺术家威利-迪克森（Willie Dixon）曾经唱过的那样。"男人们不知道，但小女孩们明白"。


这种效果总是因其共同经历而倍增：一个女孩可能不会对辛纳屈尖叫，但成千上万的人一起尖叫。1942年12月，他在纽约的派拉蒙剧院为伟大的摇摆单簧管演奏家本尼-古德曼（Benny Goodman）做伴奏时，这种效果首次显现出来。"艺人杰克-本尼（Jack Benny）说："我以为这栋该死的大楼要塌下来了。为了维持激烈的媒体报道，辛纳屈的公关人员适当地雇用了几个女孩，在随后的演出中向他尖叫。"但我们不需要......我们没有雇用的另外几百个女孩叫得更响亮。这很疯狂，很疯狂，完全失去了控制"。两年后发生了 "派拉蒙暴动"，当时有超过30,000名神志不清的歌迷被排除在一个仅能容纳十分之一的场地之外。

值得注意的是，还有许多其他创新可以归功于辛纳特拉。他并不是第一个横跨大众媒体的明星：最合理的候选人是宾-克罗斯比（Bing Crosby）--虽然现在看来不太可能，但他曾经是辛纳屈的最大竞争对手--在20世纪40年代，他同时是音乐唱片、广播和票房的巨头。克罗斯比的吸引力是跨时代的；辛纳屈受制于人口统计学，随着观众年龄的增长，他的星光也逐渐黯淡，并通过跃入电影角色重振其事业。此后，拥有青少年粉丝群的明星们一直试图复制这一举措，但成功率不一--例如，普雷斯利在这方面被他的经理人汤姆-帕克 "上校 "误导了，与其说是想法，不如说是在执行过程中出现了流弊。辛纳屈寻找并赢得了著名的好莱坞角色（《教父》对他如何做到这一点进行了阴险的描述）；帕克则把普雷斯利塞进了廉价和剥削性的工具中。做得好的话，这是一个可以完全重塑职业生涯的技巧。演员马克-沃尔伯格（Mark Wahlberg）有多少次被人回忆起他是 "马克与时髦乐队 "的主唱？当然，辛纳屈的电影事业与他的音乐事业并行不悖；他有非凡的天赋，但他从未因放弃它而放弃其他媒介。

辛纳屈也是第一批在1960年推出自己品牌的主要音乐明星之一--Reprise--他的许多最著名的作品都是在这个品牌上发布的。今天，它以（恰当的）重现的形式，构成了华纳音乐集团的一个重要部分。而辛纳屈甚至被证明是一个相当不经意的创新者。在最近为Slate撰写的一篇文章中，Chris Molanphy提出了一个有趣的观点，即在目前的排行榜中，普遍存在着由一位艺术家 "演唱 "的歌曲。1940年，美国的第一个前十名是由单曲 "我再也不笑了 "领衔的，这首歌是由大乐队领袖汤米-多尔西（Tommy Dorsey）演唱的，由他的内部歌手弗兰克-辛纳屈（Frank Sinatra）演唱的。

"猫王并没有死，"帕克在1977年告诉记者。"身体死了...。这没有改变什么。" 辛纳屈比普雷斯利长寿20年，但通过不断重塑驱动的无尽职业生涯的概念肯定依赖于辛纳屈的例子。辛纳屈仍然在这里。也许当我们都离开时，他还会在这里，他是第一个大众媒体的不朽者。

辛纳屈：男人和他的音乐》伦敦钯金剧院，预订至10月10日

图片：Getty