{"id":4417,"date":"2015-11-30T17:20:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T17:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=4417"},"modified":"2015-11-30T17:20:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T17:20:37","slug":"sam-smiths-ambitious-attempt-to-reshape-the-bond-song-lands-with-a-whimper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/sam-smiths-ambitious-attempt-to-reshape-the-bond-song-lands-with-a-whimper\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Smith’s ambitious attempt to reshape the Bond song lands with a whimper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adrian Daub<\/a>, Stanford University<\/a><\/em> and Charles Kronengold<\/a>, Stanford University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Like most James Bond fans, we couldn\u2019t wait to hear the theme song for Spectre, the 24th installment in the series. And having just spent two years writing a book about Bond songs<\/a>, we were hoping it\u2019d get people excited about what these songs can do.<\/p>\n

But when we did finally hear Sam Smith\u2019s Writing\u2019s on the Wall, we were disappointed.<\/p>\n

Sam Smith\u2019s Writing\u2019s on the Wall.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The Bond songs have always behaved differently from your average theme song. Five to 10 minutes into an exciting spy movie, the action stops and we get three minutes of abstract visuals and a mysterious, vaguely threatening, vaguely old-timey song. Sometimes, just by making us sit there and listen, these odd songs can get us thinking about why we care about pop music in the first place.<\/p>\n

Writing\u2019s on the Wall never quite turns into a Bond song. It kind of acts like it will: it\u2019s got a throwback melody, the strings and horns of its forebears, and a deliberateness that reminds you of Adele\u2019s Skyfall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s missing something.<\/p>\n

A Bond song like Paul McCartney\u2019s Live and Let Die threw everything into the mix: old-time-pop piano, hard-rock power chords, orchestral freakouts, demented reggae, schoolyard-taunt backing vocals. And it didn\u2019t seem to worry whether or not these elements would cohere.<\/p>\n

The opening credits to Live and Let Die feature a song by Paul McCartney and Wings.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Writing\u2019s on the Wall is a title song for the YouTube age. Like the viral hits Nyan Cat<\/a> or Leave Britney Alone<\/a>, it does only one thing; it has only one mood and one sound: Sam Smith\u2019s voice \u2013 in particular, his aching falsetto.<\/p>\n

And what does that sound have to do with James Bond?<\/p>\n

Most of the earliest commentators heard Smith\u2019s song the same way we did. According to The Guardian<\/a>, Writing\u2019s on the Wall is so slow, so long, \u201cyou need a high falsetto threshold to get through the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The song\u2019s only memorable feature is that very falsetto, Smith\u2019s \u201cfamiliar Winnie-the-Pooh-is-lonely-and-crying vocals,\u201d as one reviewer put it<\/a>. And Pooh was one of the more flattering comparisons. Everyone who weighed in \u2013 critics, musicians, fans \u2013 felt like Smith\u2019s falsetto was doing something strange to James Bond\u2019s manhood.<\/p>\n

But since when did Bond\u2019s masculinity ever make sense? This is a franchise in which 30-something female singers perform songs written by middle-aged men that warn 20-year-old women about a 30-year-old man played by a 40-year-old actor \u2013 all to titillate 13-year-old boys.<\/p>\n

Once you start to imagine the kind of voice that could truly speak to the hypersexual James Bond, you realize there\u2019s no way to do it seriously. It\u2019s no accident that some of the best Bond songs are the campiest (Goldfinger<\/a>, Nobody Does It Better<\/a>), and that women have sung them.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Matt Monro, the voice behind From Russia With Love.<\/span>
\n Capitol Records\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

It seems that Smith confronts the Bond songs’ last taboo: thou shalt not challenge traditional masculinity. Even though the songs have rarely, if ever, sought to mimic Bond\u2019s manliness, they seem to have a much easier time with masculine-sounding women than with feminine-sounding men.<\/p>\n

The first male Bond singer was Matt Monro, a classic crooner. Next came Tom Jones, whose Thunderball tries to be an ode to Bond\u2019s virility (and tries so hard, in fact, that poor Tom Jones passed out singing it<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Paul McCartney amplified his usual sobriety with some 70s swagger in Live and Let Die. The new-wave acts Duran Duran and A-ha went for some high notes, but in service of punchy pop songs about dying and dancing and fire. The last men to sing Bond songs before Smith were aging rock stars like Chris Cornell and Jack White, whose grizzled voices reminded us that rock itself had long grown old.<\/p>\n

None of these male Bond singers makes a virtue of the fact that they\u2019re nothing like James Bond \u2013 not even the belly-flopping Jones, nor the \u201cI\u2019m still here\u201d post-Beatles McCartney.<\/p>\n

Smith does. His song has the first sustained falsetto in the Bond-song canon, and Smith doesn\u2019t exactly hide this. The instrumentation recedes, the orchestra pipes down, and in a moment of almost melodramatic vulnerability Smith tells us he can\u2019t breathe, maybe can\u2019t even live.<\/p>\n

To think that a Bond song proposes that you can be vulnerable, excitable, anxious and still be a man \u2013 no wonder some fans freaked out.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the song\u2019s most audacious move is also its most problematic.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because simply equating falsetto with vulnerability \u2013 as both Smith and critics of his song seem to do \u2013 is a pretty dramatic misreading of falsetto\u2019s cultural history, a history in which falsetto has signified power as much as delicacy.<\/p>\n

Of course, Smith has mined the falsetto time and again. There are few tracks on his 2014 album In the Lonely Hour that don\u2019t have any falsetto. But Smith can do a sexy falsetto, a coy falsetto, even a menacing falsetto<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Writing\u2019s on the Wall instead goes for what The Atlantic calls<\/a> a \u201cradically wimpy\u201d stance. And it\u2019s a stance that has as much to do with race as it does with masculinity.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s falsetto is powered by white male agency: the hand-snipping, ain\u2019t-I-a-stinker falsetto of the prep-school a capella singer.<\/p>\n

He represses the mode of falsetto typical to soul music \u2013 a falsetto that\u2019s seductive and persuasive, one that plays off a deep groove and can even read as vaguely threatening (think of Prince\u2019s Kiss<\/a>). As Sam Smith takes one step forward by making room for nontraditional masculinity in the Bond song, he takes a big step back by making his gay male voice a white gay male voice.<\/p>\n

So why does Writing\u2019s on the Wall retreat into whiteness, and why is it so single-minded?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Smith afraid of?<\/p>\n

Probably the market: us, his audience. He doesn\u2019t trust his listeners \u2013 or himself \u2013 to live with the tensions and contradictions that Bond songs have always flaunted.<\/p>\n

Most Bond singers are scared of what they might do to the Bond-song tradition; Smith is scared of what that tradition might do to him. But Smith\u2019s impulse toward self-preservation becomes the song\u2019s power source; his fear-response is to make himself look fragile, to sound small just when you expect the song to go big. And vulnerability is Smith\u2019s strength. Fright is his comfort zone.<\/p>\n

Writing\u2019s on the Wall does the Bond song backwards \u2013 which means that like the best of these songs, it makes us ask what the Bond song is good for.<\/p>\n

Adrian Daub<\/a>, Associate Professor of German Studies, Stanford University<\/a><\/em> and Charles Kronengold<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Stanford University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adrian Daub, Stanford University and Charles Kronengold, Stanford University Like most James Bond fans, we couldn\u2019t wait to hear the theme song for Spectre, the 24th installment in the series. And having just spent two years writing a book about Bond songs, we were hoping it\u2019d get people excited about what these songs can do. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":4418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40],"tags":[335,336,316,53,337],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4419,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4417\/revisions\/4419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}