Why are they always singing? You got something to say, SAY IT!

April 5, 2009 8:45 AM

As a child of the 70s, I have often had some sort of revulsion to movie musicals. Well, it more like "perplxed." For instance, "Flying Down to Rio" with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire is on right now. As is the norm for Astaire movies, there is a lot of singing and dancing. My question: Why? My understanding is that these style movies were the preferred and desired form of movie entertainment at the time, but how did that come to be? And why are there so few today? Books on the subject are welcome answers.
posted by tcv to media & arts (17 comments total)

Shortly: Before there were movies there was a stage. Singing was a good way of projecting one's voice, and tone, before the advent of microphones and PA systems, while dance was a way of entertaining and bringing action to the limited size of a stage. The people you mention were younger than these origins (for the most part) but they were raised in that tradition.
posted by furtive at 8:54 AM on April 5

This is an extremely difficult question to answer, because it stabs at the heart of human nature. For reasons open to endless speculation, the human animal loves music, song, dance and stories. And if those things can be combined, all the better.

I would argue that the musical is -- and always will be -- with us in one form or another. In Hollywood, there are fashions and trends, so musicals will come and go there (trends are another opaque part of human nature: things become popular and unpopular for complex, chaos-theory-ridden reasons), but if Hollywood quits housing musicals for a while, they will roost elsewhere, such as on VH1. A music video is just a short musical.

I think shows like "American Idol" (which is one of the most popular shows on television) fulfill the same need. It may be a "reality show," but it's a story interspersed with musical numbers.

I think you can see a direct line from theatre's religious origins (rife with music), to Greek drama with its chorus, to Elizabethan drama with its many songs, to opera, to vaudeville, to Broadway, to Fred Astaire, to MTV...

(I've never been to a rock concert, but I understand that they borrow many ideas from musicals. Of course, some simply involve singing and dancing, but many involve spectacle and storytelling.)

(Also, almost every comedy TV show, and some dramas, eventually does a musical episode. I never watched "The Drew Carrey Show," but every time a alighted on it for a second while channel surfing, it seemed to be in the middle of a big musical number; many "Saturday Night Live" sketches and "Simpsons" episodes involve musical numbers; I remember a musical episode of "Chicago Hope," etc.)

In the '70s, there was a trend in film towards "realism," which was a reaction against the "escapist" films of the 50s and 60s. That's partly why musicals died in Hollywood.
posted by grumblebee at 9:12 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

Note re Hollywood fads: there are very few Westerns made nowadays, yet they used to be a mainstay; I suppose was have some films nowadays that are similar to Screwball Comedies, but that style definitely goes in and out of fashion; In the 50s, Monster Movies were the rage. Now they are rare; In the 70s, every 5th movie was a disaster movie. They're mostly history. For now.

Hollywood is fickle.

Meanwhile, in Bollywood, the most popular form of storytelling is....
posted by grumblebee at 9:16 AM on April 5

A big part of night-life culture in the 30s-50s involved going to clubs with entertainment that involved live music, singing and dancing. This trend started to die out post WWII.

Movie goers in the Great Depression 1930s and the World War II years were looking for serious escapism, which they found at the movies. Also, the major consumer of films during the 1940s were women. The average American female during the 30s and 40s did not live near the Cocoanut Grove; could not afford to buy fabulous dresses to go out dancing in and during the mid-40s there was a good chance her man was off to war. A matinee movie ticket was affordable though, and for awhile, a woman could escape into a romantic daydream and forget the stress of her real life.
posted by pluckysparrow at 9:20 AM on April 5

Actually the musical lives on -- in animation. Disney is always making hit musicals, which then become hit stage shows. My daughter loves THE LION KING, for example.

The musical also lives on in kids' movies. HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL and its sequels were enormously successful.

Adult musicals have been less successful. It might be the turn towards realism -- it's hard to take someone bursting into song. But I think the music has also changed. The kind of music you hear in a musical isn't the kind most people are listening to. 8 MILE was a successful movie-with-music about Eminem. You might not think of it as a "musical." But it is.
posted by musofire at 9:23 AM on April 5

Two words: Moulin Rouge.

To elaborate: think about Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and how the soundtrack interacts with the narrative. Think about other films that you remember for a soundtrack of discrete songs (as opposed to incidental music) that perform the function of the musical. There were plenty of slacker/Gen-X 90s films that worked along those lines: Singles, for one.

The film-with-a-compelling-soundtrack is the musical for a post-Walkman world, a world in which recorded music is ubiquitous. The 1950s musical isn't being made today for the same kind of formal reasons that separate the 1950s musical from La traviata.
posted by holgate at 9:39 AM on April 5

Actually, there are quite a lot of singing/dancing flicks (i.e., movies that feature vocal and physical performances) being made nowadays if you consider what's being made for/about teenagers, rappers and hiphoppers, getting into the music/dance industry, putting on a "High School Musical," winning dance competitions, etc. This seems clearly to reflect the way that youth have driven the music industry since the 50s, compared to how it was "adults" that set the tone in the years before and during WWII.

The typical mid-20th-Cent. stage or movie "musical," like Oklahoma or West Side Story or Carousel, in which the characters start singing in the middle of an otherwise naturalistic conversation, has clearly died off, fading away like opera, its presumed parent form. But plenty of people still find it fascinating to watch gorgeous bodies flinging themselves skillful through space to a captivating soundtrack, and always will. As pluckysparrow implies, it's just that venues and delivery styles change.

And as furtive says, when movies were young, they mostly just put on screen what had up to then been known to be entertaining on stage. Movie makers have since discovered a lot of other compelling and profitable ways to be entertaining with their new medium.
posted by dpcoffin at 9:49 AM on April 5

I think a large part of it is much more simple than than the nature of the human condition. In the era of big studios, do you finance an unproven screenplay or an already successful stage musical? If you watch the old musicals they really treat the viewer more as an audience, it was really a natural extension of vaudeville performances to the screen.
posted by geoff. at 9:56 AM on April 5

Ethan Mordden has written quite a few books about the musical. Though he focuses on the stage, the books are excellent, very readable histories, and highly recommended. Rick Altman's The American Film Musical is a great piece of (mostly) cultural history. Jane Feuer's The Hollywood Musical and Richard Barrios' A Song in the Dark are even more academic--the appeal is more in the ideas than in the words.

And The Oxford Companion to the American Musical is one of those semi-browsable, semi-reference books. If you read it, you'll make a long list of movies to watch.
posted by box at 9:57 AM on April 5

Better watch this, while you're thinking about musicals in modern life.
posted by dpcoffin at 10:03 AM on April 5

Lots of the stars of the old musicals (notably Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Judy Garland) got their start in vaudeville, so musicals were a natural extension of their background when film began to take over vaudeville's place in American entertainment. Films that featured musical numbers would have been a great hit with audiences familiar with the musical / dancing acts of vaudeville.

Wikipedia has a lot to say about the history of musical theatre here.
posted by corey flood at 10:11 AM on April 5

It's sort of based on historical realities -- movies all of a sudden had sound, so having people sing and having their dancing be synchronized to the songs was at that point novel. It was also a good way to bring stage performers to the movies and cash in on their popularity. Astaire was definitely already a star touring performer.

Obviously the actual appeal that kept them popular and made them such a huge genre is more complex than that -- music is aesthetically pleasing, songs can speak to "unspeakable" emotions (especially in a era when Hollywood was so limited by censorship -- really the great era for the musical was the early '30s to the early (maybe mid) '50s -- the same period as the Hays Code was in force).

Another book rec is Richard Dyer's Only Entertainment -- there are a few chapters that talk about the musical, but especially "Entertainment and Utopia," in which he tries to break down the appeal of "entertainment," using the example of the musical.
posted by SoftRain at 10:14 AM on April 5

Every artform has stylization of some sort, some conventions that we accept because it leads to pleasure. In movies, you can cut back and forth between different views of the same scene or knit together different scenes. In novels you can hear inside someone's thoughts. In songs, words (usually) rhyme at regular points in the beat. None of these take direct cues from real life. But no medium captures the unvarnished experience of life — and there is no such thing anyway! All our life experiences are mediated, even without art.

The conventions come and go. If we were to go back in time and watch a popular revue of the 1870's I expect we would find it very, very odd — or at list ridiculously stylized. Yet it would have struck the audience as natural. If they were to step forward and watch American Idol or The Dark Knight they would think the world was populated by insane people.

It's no mistake to not enjoy singing and dancing in musicals. That's your right, although I must admit I feel a tiny bit sorry for you. (If you grant musicals the right to let the characters sing their feelings, you'll find the music grants a window into much wider feeling than merely speaking.) But it is a mistake — aesthetically, a big mistake — to believe that what you accept in art is "normal" while the musical is strange. All art requires the audience to sign off, tacitly, on a whole vocabulary of conventions before enjoying.
posted by argybarg at 11:47 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

One important thing to remember about all of this is that the musical theater that emerged in New York in the early twentieth century largely provided what is not insignificantly called 'the American Songbook.' In a time when we listen to our music as privately as we can, isolating ourselves with headphones and hoarding our 'playlists,' it is sometimes hard for us to remember that there was a time when music was a very prominent (if not the most prominent) form of social discourse and common ground. These songs were popular songs in a deeper and more significant way than we conceive of now; they were referred to in daily conversation and they were played by people on instruments in their homes, at parties, at events. Following on the great Sidney Bechet's seminal recording of Summertime in 1939, these songs formed the bedrock and foundation of the repetoire of tunes referred to as 'Jazz Standards,' songs which any Jazz musician is expected to be able to play; they were there interpreted and reinterpreted by several generations of musicians, until a song like this could turn into a song like this. Seriously, listen to those two tracks - this is the very breadth and length of Jazz, the soul of it: that these naïve little melodies with the sentimental and charming lyrics could be extended and played upon and deepened until they were something new entirely. And - this is the key to it all, the reason people can still play these songs - the fact that these songs could be so extended and so deepened proved that there was always more to them than met the eye.

The people who made these songs - Oscar Hammerstein, Duke Jordan, Richard Rogers, Hoagie Carmicheal, Yip Harburg, and above all of them the great George Gershwin - were genuinely great musicians and composers. In the history of the world, I would warrant that very few men have written songs that have so endured countless variations and changes, endless modifications and reimaginings, and yet still come out sounding so fresh and vibrant that they could have been written yesterday; the tragedy and comedy of life are played out there, and I'm not just being trite. When George Gershwin died, people were shocked and appalled; it was a blow to the entire nation. I wish I could play for you the version of The Man I Love that Benny Goodman's quartet recorded the day after his death, but I haven't even been able to find a copy of the record myself; suffice it to say that that recording has made me cry more times than I'd like to admit, it is so fitting and beautiful a tribute to another human being.

These songs were more than just trite little ditties. They also provided social commentary, and it's very important to realize that, as one of the bricks in the foundation of Jazz, they helped to fuel the movement that liberated a people. The people who wrote musicals were not unaware of this. Here are two good examples of the marvelous perspicacity of the writers of Musicals:

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
by Richard Rogers and Roger Hammerstein II
(from South Pacific, 1949)

Emile de Becque: What makes her talk like that - you and she? I do not believe it is born in you! I do not believe it!
Lt. Cable: It's not born in you - it happens after you're born!

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be carefully taught...

This song pissed a lot of people off; as the Wikipedia article linked above mentions, one lawmaker declared publicly that "a song justifying interracial marriage is implicitly a threat to the American way of life," and the song was accused of Communist overtones. It was a bold statement of certain principles which would soon come to be understood as inherently American principles, a statement that helped forge those principles in the fire of bigotry.

Another good tune, which is one that speaks for itself, is an earlier one:

(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue
by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf (1929)

Out in the street
Shufflin' feet,
Couples passin' two by two,
While here am I
Left high and dry,
Black, and 'cause I'm black I'm blue.
Browns and yellers
All have fellers,
Gentlemen prefer them light -
Wish I could fade
Can't make the grade
Nothing but dark days in sight

Cold, empty bed
Springs hard as lead,
Pains in my head
Feel like old Ned -
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

No joys for me
No company
Even the mouse
Ran from my house!
All my life through
I've been so black and blue!

I'm white inside
But it don't help my case
'Cause I can't hide
What is on my face... oh!

I'm so forlorn
Life's just a thorn,
My heart is torn
Why was I born?
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

Because you're black
Folks think you lack
They laugh at you
And scorn you too;
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

When you are near
They laugh and sneer,
Set you aside
And you're denied.
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

How sad I am:
Each day I feel worse
My mark of Ham
Seems to be a curse!

How will it end?
Ain't got a friend,
My only sin
Is in my skin!

What did I do
To be so Black And Blue?

But though they were the first artistic realm where black people could talk openly about their difficult role in society, musicals weren't only about race. They were about love, about longing and loneliness, about death, about heartache and happiness and loss and desire and all the other experiences of human life.
posted by koeselitz at 12:16 PM on April 5 [6 favorites]

I think there are many good points above, but it's also just about style and what's popular at the time. At some point we are going to think the same about action movies for example. Why do they keep getting into cars and chasing each other? Why?
posted by miles1972 at 12:21 PM on April 5

Musicals also are fun because you can participate and sing along, like people do at the Rocky Horror Picture Show. There are now also performances being done along with Repo the Genetic Opera. The wall between actors and audience is broken down a bit, and it's a different experience than just passively watching a film.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:52 PM on April 5

For the Depression, musicals were as escapist as you could possibly get.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:54 AM on April 6