This seems seems to have strayed somehow away from the original topic.
Back to Berlin. Writer Gary Giddins once tried to define what he has accomplished as a songwriter and I think that's still the most realistic description available:
QUOTE:
As Armstrong was to jazz or Griffith to film or Joyce to fiction or Balanchine to dance or [...] Scott Joplin to ragtime, Berlin was the progenitor of modern song - the agent of transition, who shaped the diverse strains of a fading era into the representative art of a new one and made himself that new art's premiere practitioner. The nature of Berlin's accomplishment is such that the more closely you scrutinize it, bringing to the job however much doubt and scepticism you think necessary for the probing of so massive a reputation, the more miraculous it seems. His work embodies as comprehensive and diverse a marriage of high and low culture as we've seen in any sphere of the seven lively arts and shows no sign of fading away. That he never received a Pulitzer Prize or election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters is fair indication of how confusing and perhaps threatening the canny raffishness, demotic eloquence, accessible beauty, and unembarrased universality of his music is to the benighted Europhiles who continue to lay wet blankets on native fires. To the extant that our lives are measured in song, we live in the Irving Berlin era
Comparing Berlin & Louis Armstrong:
QUOTE:
The similarities are more intriguing: Two of the most influential figures in American music were set on their ways with backgrounds of grinding poverty and minimal education. Fueled by genius and a resolute work ethic that left no time for self-congratulations or complacency, they claimed the world
Berlin didn't write only "catchy dance tunes" but his was the most diverse repertoire of any 20th century songwriter. In the 1910s he was amongst those who - to paraphrase what Springsteen once said about Elvis - "freed the body" and with his "subversive songs" he undermined Victorian morale (yes, the old folks had fun too in their youth!). He was the first songwriter to understand how to write for the radio and was instrumental in paving the way in singing styles from the shouters and belters like Al Jolson to the crooners like Crosby and then from the 30s to the early 50s he was always able to beat the younger writers like Gershwin and Porter on their own ground, both on Broadway and in Hollywood (esp.when writing for Astaire) But his most important accomplishment was to be something like the inventor of modern love song who set the rules for everybody to follow and to challenge. Dylan's own brand of love songs in the 60s were developed against the background of these rules and he often enough tried to circumvent the Berlin tradition by going straight back into the 19th century and by giving his songs a Folk authenticity. But before you change something you must of course know & assimilate the rules. Without Berlin (and some other songwriters of that era like Shelton Brooks) there would have been no "Girl Of The North Country", "One Too Many Mornings", "I Don't Believe You" etc etc.
In the 20s Irving Berlin "was reworking the traditional figure of the forlorn lover, placing him in a room as empty as a prison cell". Early prototypes of this song type - although some ideas had already been anticipated in "When I'm Alone I'm Lonesome" (1911) and "Someone Else Maybe There While I'm Gone" (1917) - were his so-called "syncopated ballads" "All By Myself" (1921), "All Alone" (1924) and "What I'll Do" (1924):
QUOTE:
What'll I do
When you are far away
And I am blue
What'll I do
What'll I do
When I am wond'ring who
Is kissing you
What'll I do
What'll I do with just a photograph
To tell my troubles to
When I'm alone
With only dreams of you
That won't come true
What'll I do
or:
QUOTE:
All by myself in the morning
All by myself in the night
I sit alone with a table and a chair
So unhappy there
Playing solitaire
All by myself I get lonely
Watching the clock on the shelf
I'd love to rest my weary head on somebodys shoulder
I hate to grow older
All by myself
These were among the most innovative songs of their time, sad and touching miniatures intricately weaving lyrics and music. This topic turned out to become one of the mainstays of 20th century popular song, used and reworked so often that we often hardly recognize it and take it for granted.
Berlin was a master of minimalism, a songwriter who "disguised his intricate artistry under a veneer of utter simplicity" (Furia) by offering very scarce pencil sketches. Berlin's "deceptive" (Feinstein) minimalist simplicity, his "easy syncopation of 'vernacular' phrases" was innovative and new in the 20s. It was an answer to the florid poeticism of the 19th century and it especially countered the stilted language and the extreme artificiality of the love songs of the generation before him, exemplified by turn-of-the-century hits like "After the Ball" and "A Bird in A Gilded Cage". Berlin cut the lyrics of his love songs down to its barebones and - far away from any eliticism and high brow arrogance - was not afraid to write like the people spoke. He was able to "manipulate the subtlest relations between words and music" and worked on a micro-level, as Philip Furia has described:
QUOTE:
"Much of the lyrical artfulness of Berlin's [ballads] stems from his subtle fragmentation and juxtaposition of words against music [...] By breaking up the verbal phrases [...] Berlin's 'ragging' produces fragments that rhyme in unusual ways [...] The repetitive rhymes capture the obsessive sensibility of such a prisoner of love, and Berlin's insistent folding of sound fragment around sound fragment tightens the psychological chains [...]" (Philip Furia)
This way of ragging the words against the music was developed by Berlin by transferring the syncopation of ragtime melodies to lyric writing. "I established the syncopated ballad and I have shown that the metre can be 'chopped up' to fit the words". Berlin's ballads "imply a solitary listener, at the phonograph or radio,and his technique of folding the tiniest rhyming fragments over and over one another creates a lyrical 'space' - self-enclosed, repetitive, faceted - that is designed for the self-absorbed plaintative singer who inhabits it" (Furia). That's exactly the starting point of the 20th century love & anti-love song.
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