Cole Porter's Anything Goes is usually presented as a triumphant slam against antiquated mores - which, in fairness, it largely was. But its tongue-in-cheek feigned outrage loops back in on itself several times belying its own upbeat message. I'm not willing to take it for granted that Porter considered four-letter words an advancement in prose, or that he saw any grand purpose in Vanderbilts losing the shirt off their backs while Rockefellers continued to hoard enough money to fund lavish productions. Certainly the line "me undressed you like" (sung in his name by a female character in the original production) thickly underlined his frustration that his own thing didn't quite yet go.
Well, it's a Plymouth or two later, and now his thing is the only thing that goes. A gay man staring at a straight man's ass in an unimpeachable saint, but a straight man staring at a woman's ass is condemned as a pervert. In our new olden days a glimpse of stocking really is looked on as something shocking - not because of the stocking itself but because glimpsing the glimpsable has been criminalized.
I think Porter was smarter than his fans give him credit for, and this particular song not quite the conqueror's anthem, not quite the paean to the glories of the moribund jazz age, that it is commonly assumed by casual listeners. Do you think Porter resented or pitied those Puritans crushed under Plymouth Rock? Maybe a bit of both? Maybe by the mid-30s he himself was beginning to suspect that samsara does not discriminate. In that spirit I would address our newly bootstrapped aristocracy, the unassailable saints and self-appointed martyrs leading the rainbow crusade, by borrowing another old phrase by another old man: how long a time do you think you can keep fooling all of the people?
No comments:
Post a Comment