Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

THE CREAM OF CROSBY 331 tains in order the following subway stops — Louvre, Palais Royal, Tuileries, Place dc la Concorde, and Champs Elysees. I took this line once, stopped off at the Lido on the Champs Elysees and got there just in time to hear a girl sing "Take The A Train" which can hardly mean anything to the French. You'd think the French would write songs about their own subways. But no. I was in that enchantingly beautiful city, Bruges, during the Whitsun holiday, which is strenuously celebrated in Belgium. There were carnivals in all the city squares. Blaring from one of the merry-go-rounds, competing with and almost drowning out the thirteenth century bells of the Cathedral of St. Sauveur, was Hoagy Carmichael, old gravel-voice himself, croaking "Am I Blue?" "Stardust," "Penthouse Serenade," "Time On My Hands," "September Song" — they'll ring in your ears everywhere this side of the Iron Curtain and conceivably on the other side, too. We Americans have not succeeded very well in exporting ideas. We are not very well understood anywhere and neither is democracy or capitalism. It has occurred to me that one device for selling our ideas might be the popular song. Let's get Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein and the rest of them to wrap up a few American ideas in good popular dance tunes. They'll be sung all over Europe. The G. I.'s took the jitterbug, which has pretty well passed out of the picture in America, to Europe during the war. It's still there, though not just everywhere. At the Vieux Colombier in Montparnasse, where the Sorbonne students hang out, you'll hear some of the best American jazz in the world and also see some of the most amazing jitterbugging and Big Apple — a dance which has completely died back home. In both cases, the French have formalized the dances. There is less abandon, less improvisation, and more precision and formal movement, though they are still danced at the speed of light. In Our Defense THE following is a condensation of an article I wrote for "The Manchester Guardian" in an attempt to explain and defend commercial broadcasting to the British whose own broadcasting is a government monopoly. Bear in mind that it was written for a nation which harbors some profound misconceptions about American broadcasting. A great many touring Englishmen have clattered through our broadcasting studios in the last few years in an attempt to assess, pro or con, American radio. What opinions they took back to Britain I have no way of knowing but I rather suspect they were reinforcements of the opinions they brought over in the first place. The B. B. C. and the Beveridge Committee have dispatched some very competent witnesses to our shores but, I should say, they have prowled around in the wrong places. They have lunched with the best people. They have dined. They have banqueted. They have been subjected to torrents of argument. I strongly suspect that few of them had time left to listen to our radio and form their own opinions. The fact is that American radio is very difficult to appraise in a hurry. Our most popular programs have been on the air so long that a single "hmmm" from Jack Benny, possibly our most popular radio entertainer, means volumes to us and absolutely nothing to the uninitiate. At the same time, our commercial plugs, our broadcast advertising matter, are so loud, repetitive, offensive and silly that it drives most Englishmen out of their wits. It does not quite affect all of us that way because we are more used to it. Through long practice we have acquired selective deafness; we simply turn off our ears as people living on a streetcar track learn to ignore the racket of the wheels while remaining fully sensitive to the slightest cough from the baby upstairs. Actually, this gift of selective deafness is largely responsible for the worst excesses of our commercials. We have become so immune to commercials that the dosage has to be steadily increased like addiction to heroin if it is to be at all effective. While the advertiser has committed some grave offenses, he has a good many