April Stevens’ and Nino Tempo’s version of Deep Purple became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I’ve enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you’re gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we’ll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.
Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently ‘wallows’ in a song like this, giving into its ‘cheap’ emotions. The emotions are ‘false’ and ‘faked.’ The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, ‘catchy.’ The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to ‘push the listener’s buttons.’ The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on.
Theodor Adorno would not approve.
There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don’t collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I’ve read almost none of it. Who has time?
But I have been re-reading Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961), said to be his best novel, wherein we find on p. 135:
“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”
And then there is the poet Wallace Stevens with his great aphorism, “Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”
Yates would approve.
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I’ve been a Dylan fan from the early ’60s. In the ’60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That’s a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and sound bites. A large theme. Get to it conservative bloggers. Why do I have to do all the work?
Dylan’s most sentimental song? I don’t know, but Forever Young is in serious contention.
A long, long way from It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding and Visions of Johanna (Marianne Faithful) and Desolation Row. Here is the original of Visions of Johanna.