No Pussy-Footin' Around Here!

In the old days, people of my generation didn’t pay much attention to the torch singers like Julie London or Peggy Lee. I surely didn’t until decades later in life. I liked both of them, but I never shared that affection with many people at the time. I guess it was too unhip or something. They were sort of sex objects at the time. It was a time of sex objects. Male singers or musical groups would paste photos of beautiful women on their album covers who were just models, not members of the band. Why exactly we’d be expected to buy saxophone or trumpet masters according to the beautiful tits or hips or lips of some anonymous model, I didn’t know then or now. But the album covers of Julie London or Peggy Lee didn’t have to be fake or falsified; these great-looking women WERE the artists AND the sex objects. My generation just missed out on some things by being such snobs or by making such quick decisions about someone’s worth. Now that I’m old enough to not give a shit what anyone thinks of my musical tastes, it’s easy to like these beautiful singers with the sexy images! I even like Doris Day, it turns out, as long as she just sings and doesn’t come stumbling and prat-falling at me out of one of those awful movies she made with Rock Hudson.

I’ve been listening to a lot of old singers on Internet Radio lately and it’s almost all good. I’m sorry I wasn’t appreciative sooner, but everybody’s got a right to be a fool in his own lifetime, I guess. All things considered (meaning, my rock and roll obsession, etc.), I’m lucky I even knew to like Barbra Streisand! (Thanks for that one, Jeanne!) Even classical music sneaked in there somewhere, but not as much as I like it these days! These days, I like lots of softer, less hip music. Old people can’t be trusted, it turns out. And I’m one of them. (But Lawrence Welk can still keep his pussy-footing crap to himself! I’m not that changed.)

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