The American Spectator

Let’s keep this party polite
Never get out of my sight
Stick with me baby, I’m the guy that you came in with

They might be reminded of how constricted they are in their dealings with the fairer sex, even as, it seems, all the barriers have come down. Part of Sinatra’s old-style manliness was also about sophistication and knowingness, of course; his up-tempo music (always played by the top hands in the business) exudes a class and refinement that rock, devoted to spirit over craft and rooted despite its best efforts in the adolescent, simply does not possess.

I’m not sure Sinatra ever quite convinces us that he is as happy as the music and words of these songs instruct him to be—more often than not, the joy seems fleeting, as in “Summer Wind”—but the sense of five-carat style and once again, mastery, come through. That mastery, so evident to older listeners, can still sneak up on Sinatra’s lost generations.

It happened the night of my own wedding reception, when, watching my bride dance with her father to “Summer Wind,” it occurred to me that Frank Sinatra was undefeated, stronger than rock.

And yet, to twist the words of Andrew Marvell: at my back I always hear rock’s wicked guitars thundering near. This past summer, the wires carried news of the death of Bo Diddley, one of rock’s pioneering instrumentalists and bandleaders, who created a syncopated guitar style that is routinely copped, in song after song, right up to the present day. I read a few obituaries and then headed over to YouTube, where I saw an astounding video of Diddley performing “Road Runner”—barely a minute and a half of intoxicating, percussive rhythm. It was almost enough to make me forget why I’d turned away from rock in the first place. And to be fair to rock, it’s not just a backbeat that Sinatra’s music lacks. It’s words that sound like they could be spoken by characters in today’s movies and songs. However crude or simplistic many rock lyrics were, and however self-conscious and pretentious they have become (especially in comparison with those of the Gershwins or Cole Porter), it’s also true that rock’s informal, profane, hipster vocabulary was the language of at least the last third of the century.

Regardless of the tiresome debates about the literary value of rock song lyrics—which invariably become a debate, really, about the literary value of Bob Dylan song lyrics, the only ones worth arguing about—there’s no point denying that Sinatra’s remoteness from a younger audience has to do not just with how he sings, but what he sings. While he was releasing September of My Years, Dylan listeners were hearing this:

Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession’s her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness

That makes for a steep linguistic contrast with Sinatra’s instruction that, say, love and marriage go together like the horse and carriage. Hearses can ride in carriages, too, and to younger ears, accustomed by now to all manner of wordplay in rock songs, such lines sound stale and dead. I’ve winced at my share of Sinatra lyrics. Only the singer’s skill compensates—that is, assuming the listener considers such singing compelling in the first place. If he doesn’t, then he is left with a dead singer singing dead words.

Sinatra expressed his own views about rock early on. Speaking in 1957, he made himself infamous among the younger crowd by declaring that “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics…it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” He never renounced this judgment, though in time he covered some pop-oriented material, including George Harrison’s “Something,” which he remarkably called one of the greatest love songs ever written. Near the end of his life he consented to the novelty album Duets, featuring the likes of Bono, Anita Baker, and others who sang along to his pre-recorded renditions. The album, which became a top-seller, was an ingenious bit of marketing, if not music, and it also made clear that the old musical divisions were breaking down. His views of their work aside, aging pop royalty had come to crave the Sinatra affiliation, a professional way of marrying up.

Yet even when they paid him tribute, the rockers could never let go of their self-regard. At a televised 80th birthday tribute in 1995, Bruce Springsteen praised Sinatra’s music for evoking a “nasty sense of freedom,” whatever that meant (it sounded like an outtake from “Born to Run”). In an embarrassing tribute at the Grammys a year earlier, Bono celebrated Sinatra for setting an example that rock stars wanted to emulate: that is, he had “bad attitude” and snarl and edge, he was a tough guy, and he was not to be “messed with.” Sinatra, Bono seemed to imply, was really a rocker! Rather than acknowledging that Sinatra’s greatness embodied something separate from and mostly incompatible with rock, Bono instead argued that his virtues were really rock’s virtues. It doesn’t get more patronizing than that. The rockers can’t necessarily be blamed for trafficking in Sinatra caricatures that had, after all, been around for decades. But the Sinatra tough-guy persona was much more complicated than the facile public image of a pre-rock and roll bad boy.

Hamill writes that Sinatra “perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans…[He] created a new model for American masculinity.” Maybe; it’s difficult to believe that there is a single model, anymore, for American masculinity. But it’s certainly true that Sinatra’s great ballad albums, song after song about the pain of lost love, depict a raw vulnerability, at times even what sounds like helplessness, that is far riskier than what most male pop singers would hazard today—even as, paradoxically, touchy-feely men are so much more in vogue than they were in the 1950s. When a typical wimp singer of today like, say, R.E.M.’s wormlike Michael Stipe, goes groveling in song, nobody is surprised; he risks nothing by exposing himself. Angst is all that he has to sell.

That’s what makes Sinatra’s lost-love music so compelling; he’s no tofu-eater. He hangs out with gangsters, for crying out loud. Yet here he is telling us: I thought I found the gal I could trust What a bust This is how the story ends: She’s gonna turn me down and say, “Why can’t we be just friends?”

The whole tough/tender circle is squared in “One for My Baby,” a classic Sinatra performance. Here the two personas come together: the hard-living guy, alone in the bar after hours, still knocking back the booze, but left alone with the bartender to lament the “end of a brief episode.” And there are those vintage lines at the end that mark off Sinatra’s era from the coming rock age: “This torch that I found/It’s gotta be drowned/Or it soon might explode.” The rock instinct is just the opposite: the torch should be lubricated for maximum flammability, the better to express in a howl that will be regarded, on sheer force alone, as art. And we’re all invited to witness the conflagration, still guided by the predominant aesthetic of the last half-century, as set down by Jack Kerouac: “The only people for me are the mad ones…” If you’re not one of them, you’re not really in the game. To refuse to go mad, to just tip Joe and then walk home alone, seems somehow inauthentic in this rock world. In his music, at least, Sinatra never did go mad, never relinquished control. Among many other things, his work dramatized the great discipline it takes to resist the temptations that loss offers for letting everything go. That’s a long way from the rock vision of following impulse where it leads.

Listening to Sinatra now, having come to him so late, feels something like being one of those early middle-aged characters in his great 1950s ballads, who suddenly wakes to discover that the answers he thought he had weren’t answers at all. Or perhaps it’s more like the musical equivalent of realizing that your father was right all along. After the initial sheepishness, a certain satisfaction, even liberation, results, and Sinatra’s music becomes a great undiscovered thing about middle age, a strong and unexpected bulwark to hold up against the advancing years, its pedigree matchless, its worth already proven.

But it’s altogether different from the exuberance of youth, when it was you who knew better, and your poor old man who didn’t know diddley.

Paul Beston is associate editor of City Journal.