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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Frank Sinatra has always been a contradictory figure. Biographers have often commented on the paradoxical nature of Sinatra's personality, attempting in vain to reconcile the sensitivity, subtlety, and stark emotionality demonstrated by one of the 20th century's foremost interpreters of popular song with the image of the violent, boorish, and insensitive thug that denned his offstage persona. The more politically minded of his biographers have also commented on his radical political swing from fellow traveler of the Communist Party to right-wing ideologue over the course of his 50-plus-year career (though whether one wants to count the last twenty years or so of it as a defensible “career” rather than an extended exercise in ill-advised self-indulgence is another matter). They have attributed this shift either to Sinatra's fury at being first courted and then slighted by the Kennedy administration, which after the 1960 presidential election smartly distanced itself from Sinatra's mob ties, or to his visceral hatred of rock 'n' roll and, by extension, the counterculture for which it provided the sound track and of which it was a partial expression. While these explanations are convincing on the level of psychobiography, they miss the larger cultural scope of the political contradictions that shaped Sinatra's career — contradictions that lend his career an allegorical significance in charting the expressions and transformations of political community formation in the mid-20th-century United States. That this allegorical significance extends beyond the caprice of the cultural studies analysis that follows is suggested by Sinatra's enduring popularity as a national icon.
1. I thank the following people for their comments and advice on various drafts of this essay: Robin Baldridge, Carrol Cox, Ken Lindblom, Curtis White, and especially Elizabeth Hatmaker, who helped me to think through one of the essay's central ideas. I also thank the Center for Cultural Studies at University of California-Santa Cruz and especially the center's directors, Christopher Connery and Carla Freccero, for inviting me to present a version of this essay as a talk there in May 2001. This invitation and the feedback I received from the audience there gave me much of the impetus for realizing the present version of this piece. Finally, I thank Jack Salzman, editor of Prospects, for his commitment to this project and for his invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript in the final stages of revision, as well as the copy editor for Prospects, John Flukas.
2. I have relied on the following biographies in assembling my account of the life of Sinatra: Clarke, Donald, All or Nothing at All: A Life of Sinatra (New York: Fromm, 1997)Google Scholar; Kelley, Kitty, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra (New York: Bantam, 1986)Google Scholar; Lahr, John, Sinatra: The Artist and the Man (New York: Bantam, 1997)Google Scholar; Wilson, Earl's Sinatra: The Unauthorized Biography (New York: Signet, 1976)Google Scholar; and Friedwald, Will's brilliant musical biography, Sinatra: The Song Is You! (New York: Da Capo, 1997)Google Scholar. It is interesting to note that rather than trying to account for the contradiction between Sinatra's onstage and offstage personas, most of the biographies focus on one or the other. Thus, the Kelley and Wilson biographies concentrate on Sinatra's infamous offstage antics, whereas Clarke and Friedwald focus on his art. Lahr's book attempts to address both, but, unsurprisingly, its operative metaphor is the performer's doubleness. Because of this split, it is ironically the “trashy,” “unofficial” biographies by Kelley and Wilson that take Sinatra more seriously as a political artist and figure, whereas the books about Sinatra's singing get mired in the usual apolitical humanism that accompanies accounts of artists lives in mainstream intellectual culture in the United States.
3. My understanding of allegory as a locus of cultural, national, and even global meaning comes from the following texts: Jameson, Fredric's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar and “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Hardt, Michael and Weeks, Kathi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)Google Scholar; Anderson, Benedict's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar; Sommer, Doris's Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Berlant, Lauren's The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson posits allegory as the locus of both historical contradiction and its imaginary solution in such forms as the romance and the historical novel. He develops his understanding of allegory as a specifically national formation in his controversial essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” which has rightly been critiqued by Aijaz Ahmad for reifying the divide between the First World and Third World and for promoting a reductive understanding of Third World literary practices (see Ahmad, , In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [London: Verso, 1994])Google Scholar. In Foundational Fictions, Sommer suggests a similarly nationalized paradigm for understanding the allegorical meanings of 19th-century Latin American romances. Drawing on Anderson's understanding of the nation as an “imagined community” and Jameson and Sommer's understandings of national allegory, Berlant examines the sexual dimensions of national allegories. My own understanding of the term combines elements from all of these theorists. I read the allegories enacted by popular texts as often national, but not exclusively so. Drawing instead on Jameson's early understanding in The Political Unconscious of allegory as an imaginary resolution of social or economic contradiction, I see such allegorical solutions as functioning increasingly on a global or international level in the latter half of the 20th century as the various actors in the capitalist world-economy become ever more globalized. I draw on Berlant's work to attend to the sexual meanings encoded in these allegories. For what is to my mind the best theorization of this process of globalization — one that does not erase the much longer history of the formation of a capitalist world-economy — see Sassen, Saskia's Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the Mobility of People and Money (New York: New, 1998)Google Scholar.
4. Kelley, , His Way, 110Google Scholar; and Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 334Google Scholar.
5. See Denning, , Cultural Front, esp. 1–159Google Scholar.
6. Frank Sinatra, “The House I Live In” (E. Robinson/L. Allan), recorded August 22, 1945, Columbia: MX HCO 1519–1. While I know that the objection can be raised that Sinatra — with the exception of “I'm a Fool to Want You” — did not have a hand in writing any of the material he performed, he did have a say (much more so than most other artists in the period) in which songs he chose to record and how these would be presented and marketed to the general public. As I explain more fully below, Sinatra also performed within a jazz idiom in which the performer fundamentally rewrites the song in every performance of it. It is thus the performance as much as the composition that gives meaning to the recording of the song. Moreover, from the cultural studies perspective of the present analysis, the songs can be read as musical texts that are associated in the popular imagination with the iconic text we call Frank Sinatra.
7. The term structures of feeling comes of course from Raymond Williams, who coined it to denote the shared forms of affect and belief that characterize emergent political and cultural formations. The concept stems from Williams's elaboration upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, a concept that Denning also employs in theorizing the cultural front as a “counterhegemonic bloc” (see Williams, , Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977]: 128–35Google Scholar; and Denning, , Cultural Front, 1–50Google Scholar).
8. See Denning, , Cultural Front, 1–50Google Scholar; and Singh, Nikhil Pal, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (09 1998) 471–522CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. Denning, , Cultural Front, 129–30Google Scholar.
10. See Isserman, , Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 9–14Google Scholar; and Foley, Barbara, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
11. Nadel, Alan, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 1–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12. The argument about the political meanings of noir or hard-boiled fiction and film that I advance in this paragraph are a condensed form of a much longer version of this argument that I put forward in my forthcoming book, Hard-boiled Masculinities: Fantasizing Gender in American Literature and Popular Culture, 1920 – 1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, in press). For a recent account of the politics of hard-boiled and noir fiction that situates it in a less oppositional manner and more squarely within the purview of American liberalism, see McCann, Sean, Gumshoe America: Hard-boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other classic accounts of the relationship of hard-boiled detective fiction to politics — ones that my own account is indebted — include Knight, Stephen, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Dennis, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Mandel, Ernest, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
13. The following books have helped me theorize jazz and blues singing and the composition of popular music: Davis, Angela, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998)Google Scholar; Furia, Philip, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Jasen, David A. and Jones, Gene, Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters 1880–1930 (New York: Schirmer, 1998)Google Scholar; Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995)Google Scholar; Friedwald, Will, Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (New York: Collier, 1990)Google Scholar; and Denning, , Cultural Front, 283–361Google Scholar.
14. Sinatra, Frank, “Laura” (D. Raksin/J. Mercer), Where Are You? recorded 04 29, 1957, Capitol: CDP 7 91209 2Google Scholar.
15. Sinatra, Frank, “It's a Lonesome Old Town” (H. Tobias/C. Kisco), Only for the Lonely, recorded 05 25, 1958, Capitol: CDP 7 48471 2Google Scholar.
16. See Corber, Robert, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 21–54Google Scholar.
17. Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” in Wallerstein, , The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 32Google Scholar.
18. Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origin of our Times (London: Verso, 1994), esp. 1–84 and 239–324Google Scholar; and Wallerstein, “Rise and Future Demise.”
19. I owe the notion of the internationalism of the new left as an “unfinished project” to my emeritus colleague at Illinois State University, Carrol Cox. During the beginning stages of this project, Carrol and I exchanged e-mails about the status of the old and new lefts and during this exchange I found his formulation of the continuing relevance of the new left's internationalism particularly compelling. For another formulation of the new left as an unfinished project, though one that largely ignores its international dimensions, see Aronowitz, Stanley, The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar. My understanding of the internationalism of the new left draws in different ways upon the following texts: Jameson, Fredric, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sayers, Sohnya, Stephanson, Anders, Aronowitz, Stanley, and Jameson, Fredric (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178–209Google Scholar; Mercer, Kobena, “1968: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula (New York: Routledge, 1992), 424–49Google Scholar; and Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
20. Cohan, Steven, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), ix–xxiGoogle Scholar; and Corber, , Homosexuality in Cold War America, 1–19Google Scholar.
21. Sinatra, Frank, “Come Fly with Me” (S. Cahn/J. Van Heusen), Come Fly with Me, recorded 10 1957, Capitol: 72434 96087 2 6Google Scholar.
22. Friedwald, , Sinatra! The Song Is You, 285Google Scholar. My understanding of the limits of postmodern irony here draws upon Slavoj Žižek's critique of cynicism as the dominant postmodern ideology. Irony loses its critical force in an era that is largely denned by cynicism and bereft of idealism (see Žižek, , The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 28–30Google Scholar).
23. Sinatra, Frank, “You Make Me Feel So Young” (J. Myrow/M. Gordon), Songs for Swinging Lovers! recorded 01 9, 1956, Capitol: CDP 546570Google Scholar.
24. The thesis about the class character of the new left is often linked to what can only be called race-baiting claims about its abandonment of the “white” working class in its support of black liberation. For examples of texts that articulate one or both of these claims, see Farber, David “The Silent Majority and the Talk of Revolution” in The Sixties, ed. Farber, (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Kazin, Michael, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Rorty, Richard, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Hollinger, David A., Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic, 1995)Google Scholar; and Edsall, Thomas Byrne and Edsall, Mary D., Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton and Norton, 1991)Google Scholar.
25. See the entirety of Rorty's Achieving Our Country and Kazin, , The Populist Persuasion, 287–90Google Scholar.
26. For accounts of the international and progressively leftist character of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, see Cockburn, Alexander, Claire, Jeffrey St and Sekula, Allan, Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond (London: Verso, 2001)Google Scholar; and Thomas, Janet, The Battle in Seattle: The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrators (New York: Fulcrum, 2000)Google Scholar. For a provocative theorization of the possibility of constructing a truly international left within our increasingly globalized “new world order,” see Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
27. Cracker, , “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now),” Cracker, released 1992, Virgin 91816–2Google Scholar.