January 2011

Overrated

It seems only yesterday that the deadly threat from Japan popped up all over the media. Books with titles like Trading Places implied that the Japanese were poised to supplant us as the world’s leading economy, while others with titles like Japan as Number One implied that this had already happened. There were didactic novels about it; one, Rising Sun , a thriller by Michael Crichton, even made money as a Hollywood film. The threat from Japan was directed at the U.S.A. in particular and at the West in general and was understood in various ways, with different levels of sophistication. The Japanese could be crudely described by a future French prime minister, Edith Cresson, as “ants” who “stay up at night thinking up ways to screw Americans and Europeans”; more academic responses saw our enemy to be a new and devastatingly effective “industrial policy,” or one or another cant phrase for neomercantilist paranoia.

Overrated

Hollywood films tend to age well. What at the time may have seemed journalistic or lowbrow often displays after the passage of years an unexpected depth and dignity. Take a look at the forgotten movies resurrected on television by American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies. Like other artifacts, films acquire a patina. But time, alas, has also treated some allegedly classic movies cruelly.

The most overrated American movie classic? It is a hard choice, narrowing down in the end to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life , that cloying, saccharine, manipulative fantasy, and, inevitably, Gone With the Wind . On sober reflection, the palm goes to Gone With the Wind .

Underrated

John Vliet Lindsay was hardly New York’s greatest mayor. He made plenty of mistakes, particularly when it came to the bungled decentralization of the city’s school system. Yet he had the misfortune to preside over a period of almost unrelenting urban crisis, a time when American cities were beset by racial tensions, drugs, skyrocketing crime rates, aging housing and infrastructure, deinstitutionalization, and both white and black flight. Lindsay took the brunt of it all; typically, he was pilloried both for giving generous salaries to city workers and for neglecting the white, outer-borough middle class who made up most of the municipal work force. His recent obituary still dwelt on the fact that he was slow to get some Queens streets cleared of snow after a blizzard … back in 1969.

Overrated

Topical jokes have always been popular. Aristophanes makes fun of Cleon; Jay Leno of Bush. But such jokes don’t last.

Most of the jokes that have stood the test of time were born on the variety stage—the minstrel shows, vaudevilles, and burlesques of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The old variety comedians played to the prejudices of their slum public. As a result, the stages of the Orpheum and Columbia circuits were filled with money-grubbing Jews, drunken Irishmen, murderous Sicilians, and lazy, shiftless plantation Negroes, the latter played mostly by white men in burnt cork.

Overrated and Underrated:

Sonny Rollins. Excuse me while I duck for a few seconds, after which I have some explaining to do.

Many of my friends believe jazz, on the whole, is overrated. I think jazz, on the whole, is underrated. From either perspective, jazz is consigned to the margins of American mass perception, and, nothing, not even Ken Burns’s mighty mojo hand, can coax it toward the center.

That makes it especially hard to single out any musician as being more underrated or under-appreciated than most. I could start with Henry (“Red”) Alien, the swing trumpet master and unsung influence on modernist horn players. But this leads to a cavalcade of “what abouts,” as in what about … Herbie Nichols, Sonny Stitt, Chris Conner, Phineas Newborn, Oliver Nelson, Gloria Lynne, Jabbo Smith, Frank Strozier, and just about every vibraphonist or sideman you can name.

Overrated

To pick a single show out of the thousands of hours that we earlier generations of couch potatoes suffered through on the mighty io-inch screen, and to dub it the most overrated of that era is tough. We had a lot of mediocrity then.

However, I nominate: Arthur Godfrey and His Friends . An island of daily drear, presided over by one jovial ukulele-strumming emcee.

He was also mean. One of his discoveries was young Julius La Rosa, a fine singer. Having decided that his discovery was becoming too arrogant, Godfrey, without any prior notification, chose to announce to his audience, after La Rosa’s performance, “Thanks ever so much, Julie. That was Julius’s swan song with us.” No one in the audience could have been more startled than the young singer by being a public participant in a live TV tragedy, Godfrey’s personal putsch.

The arrogant, tyrannical, affable, Middle American Godfrey kept right on chuckling, humming and strumming.

Overrated

Bob Dylan. He’s written some great songs, sure, and in his youth he took a contagious dry pleasure in vandals-took-the-handles nonsense. But as bard and exemplar he got awfully stuffy, didn’t he? Doesn’t seem to have much taste for getting out and making music with his friends for the folks, so his mystique is too big for his entertainment value. As for social consciousness, that goes only so far when you’re opaque and antisocial. Unlike, say, Muhammad Ali, he’s a casualty of sixties self-importance.

Underrated

Overrated

Overrated

Overrated

Joe DiMaggio’s fame rests on a hitting streak that never happened. It is as full of holes as an archery target—for example, two gift hits by friendly New York official scorers on easy bouncing balls in games 30 and 31. If either of them had been called honestly, DiMag would have had two streaks of between 25 and 30 games, not one streak of 56, and would rank somewhere near his close statistical twin, Hank Greenberg, in the pantheon.