Mr. Nihilism

[It pains me to explain a bit, but since a few people have asked me if I am insane for disliking Sam Cooke, let me clarify:  Cooke is one of my favorite singers.  This is a parody of the Atlantic magazine's pedantic, obnoxious and tediously contrarian critics.  The goal was to pick someone obviously, indisputably excellent, and then just slam him for no sound reason in accordance with that magazine's style.

I am aware there are like ten dudes in the English speaking world--if that many--who are down with parodies like this, but I had to do it.  If I didn't vent here, I'd be writing letters to the editor--and that's a habit I don't ever want to start.  Also, since some don't always notice, there's an audio version of this at the top with sound clips of Cooke, who is of course The Bomb.]


Mr. Nihilism

The persistent popularity of Sam Cooke is one of the more depressing mysteries of American culture (for lack of a better word).  As a singer, he combines everything that is bad—and there is much that is bad—about Buddy Holly and Smokey Robinson.  His voice meanders up and down the scale searching for the right note, yet never finding it.  Is he a tenor, a bass, an alto?  None of the three.  He is a rasper, more cigarette-charred whino than melodic crooner.  His lyrics, in both sound and sense, are simplistic.  Yet somehow Cooke has been one of America’s most celebrated singers for over five decades.

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A typical example from his catalog is, “That’s Where It’s At.”  What “it” is and why it happens to be there and not here is never made clear.  With each pedestrian verse the opacity deepens:

Yeah, let me tell you.
Your heart beatin’ fast,
You knowin’ that time will pass,
But hopin’ that it last: {sic}
That’s where it’s at.
Oh yeah.

This is aggressively meaningless.  A desultory rhythm section, whose instruments seem to have been selected at random, only worsens an already bad song:  a guitarist, a trumpeter, a woodblockist, and a high-hat man all spit out notes as a novice might.  (This haphazard instrumentation appears throughout Cooke’s oeuvre.)

Or consider the refrain from 1963’s “Another Saturday Night”:

Here, another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody. {sic, sic, and sic, in only three words}
I got some money [be]cause I just got paid.
Now how I wish I had some chick to talk to.
I’m in an awful way.

I’ll say.  Cooke cracks two syllables only three times here, all in the first line, before resorting to cheap monosyllabia.  One might assume that upon hearing this listeners would echo Alexander Pope’s jab at Grubstreet, “And ten low words oft creep in one dull line,” but no.  Americans instead call the song a classic.

As for the sense of “Another Saturday Night,” it is indeed “classic”:  classically American, and not in a good way.  Is the singer despondent because of America’s nascent economic imperialism?  Because of the rise of agribusiness and factory farming?  “’Cause” of the state of the literary novel?  No, none of these things trouble him.  The fact that he has no “chick” to talk to on pay-day is the source of his malaise.  Cooke, then, is a man who celebrates material profit and only laments a lack of opportunity to fornicate.

Later he sings of a recent blind-date.  Is she the companion he seeks?  No.

Instead of being my deliverance
She had a strange resemblance
To a cat named Frankenstein.

Of course Cooke meant Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and not Victor Frankenstein himself, though it is unlikely that he knew that.  (That word “cat”?  Inexplicably, it is a slang word meaning “person.”) But what is, perhaps, a greater problem than a cinematic understanding of literature is the uniquely American emphasis Cooke places upon the material.  So what if the woman is homely?  Might she also be an erudite, environmentally-conscious herbivore who’s unswayed by historiography rooted in Great Man fallacies?  Well, we never find out.  She is ugly, and that is all that matters.

Perhaps the most offensive song in Cooke’s catalog (though I find it extraordinarily difficult to pick only one) is “(What A) Wonderful World.”  Not since Shakespeare’s “Words, words, words,” has there been a more trite dismissal of academe.  (Back too is the hapless rhythm section, but one evil at a time.)  Here, Cooke makes his own ignorance of mathematics, geography, slide-rule functionality, and the entire expanse of humanistic knowledge the focal point of his attraction:

Don’t know much about history.
Don’t know much biology.
Don’t know much about a science book.
Don’t know much about the French I took.

And on and on and on.  Nowhere does he express shame for such scholastic laziness, though in passing he assures the locus of his libido that he is “trying” to be an A-student.  (This sentiment foreshadows America’s current everyone-is-special, trying-is-all-that-counts method of childrearing.) 

Is there anything about which Sam Cooke is cognizant?  Well…

… but I do know one and one is two,
And if this one could be with you,
What a wonderful world this would be.

What rudimentary addition has to do with romance is anyone’s guess. 

Since the only woman who would fall for such a proposition would have to be one as ignorant as Cooke, their pairing and reproduction could not possibly be a wonderful world’s causa proxima.  So inadvertently bleak and stupefying is this song that, in less than two minutes, it devolves from semi-literate bragging to sub-literate moans and cha-cha-chas.

Sam Cooke’s admirers hail him—favorably!—as “Mr. Soul.”  It is an apt synecdoche, though not for the reasons his fans might think.  Cooke is nicknamed for a thing that does not exist.  Indeed, his music has at its center an emptiness, a nothingness, and—lyrically—a strident and unmistakably American nihilism.  Cooke’s ongoing popularity proves that we are, all of us, “in an awful way.”