High And Low

By RICHARD CORLISS

Start with two fellows from Omaha, Neb., born 25 years apart. One was frail, comical-looking, yet he epitomized elegance in an era when glamour was the ability to steer a slim lady around a dance floor. The other man was bulky, brooding, with the artistic mission to break things: codes of behavior, the very notion of "good acting." In their distinct ways--grace vs. power, gentility vs. menace, tux vs. torn T shirt--Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando represented the poles of 20th century popular culture. Astaire gave it class; Brando gave it sex.

These terrific artists also illustrate a pretty little truism about modern culture. In the first half of the century, pop culture imitated the upper class, and in the second half it aped the underclass. Once we gazed on high; now we play limbo with cultural norms. How low can you go?

America at the century's dawn was a billboard of extravagant promise. And two new art forms, movies and the popular song, formed the flying wedge of American hegemony, sending a message of optimism and expansion all over the world. The movie narrative with its cozy moral, the 32-bar song of soaring sentiment and quick resolution--both sold love, success, assimilation. Romantic yearning and career striving were two sides of the same all-American ambition.

There was energy aplenty in these films and songs--an undying verve and assurance. But the energy was controlled, confined by the need for universal acceptance. In a homogenous culture you want everyone to see your movie, listen to your radio show, sing your song. That meant playing by the rules. Even the pioneer rebel Paul Robeson did that, speaking eloquently, singing handsomely, shrouding his revolutionary sexuality.

How bogus, how beguiling, that in the midst of the Depression, Hollywood erected Art Deco penthouses for swells with nothing better to do than dance the night away. Did audiences rebel at this fantasy vision? No, they wanted escape--escape into elegance. Nearly everyone opted for that patina. Gangsters and jazzmen went to their gigs in cool dark suits; gas-station attendants wore bow ties. To look natty was to buy into the Hollywood myth. Mr. DeMille might never come to Podunk, but Middle America was always ready for its close-up.

New cultures created new elites. Jewish-American composers like Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern invented the popular song and dominated the field for a swank half-century. And as they had borrowed from Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, so did they help bring black artists into the mainstream. Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker ran their astounding riffs on the backs of sturdy pop tunes by Jewish immigrants. This fruitful collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes--pop's twilight of multiracial synergy.

By then, everything had changed, collapsed, coalesced. An early fissure appears in 1951, when Brando brought Stanley Kowalski to the screen; the great beast was unleashed. With the mid-'50s eruptions of lurid B movies, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book and the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, the revolution was born. Now teenagers were the social arbiters, and their pleasure was to love stuff their parents hated. They renounced grownup culture (which was turning pappy and repetitive) for a language of their own.

And what language! Ten years earlier a boy might have sat reverently by the living-room Zenith to hear the Metropolitan Opera and pick up a little Italian along the way. Now he hid in his bedroom with his plastic 45-r.p.m. player straining to figure out what the heck Little Richard was screaming. "Well long tall Sally she's biffaspeesheega [built for speed, She got] everything that Uncle John need." And what exactly, the boy wondered, did Uncle John need?

That was soon all too clear. Pop culture, once the domain of allusion--the cunning metaphor, the fade-out after that first kiss--now needed to spell and shout it out, as culture exploited every renegade adolescent impulse. The escape into elegance was replaced by the fun house of sensuality. In the new gross-out culture, bad taste was the official taste. Sit-com kids, once kittens and princesses, went rampantly rude. The inner child was triumphant--hear him roar!

Everything else fell into place, and apart. The no-sweat crooner singing someone else's tune disappeared. Now, thanks to Bob Dylan, everyone was a singer-songwriter, a bleedin' artiste, with a go-to-hell-or-watch-me-writhe-there attitude. Formality gave way to the tyranny of the casual. Billionaire entrepreneurs dressed like the nerds in the family garage they always were.

As the homogenous culture evaporated, everything got niched out. Blacks watch sitcoms whites don't watch. Most parents have stopped trying to pretend they understand the songs their kids love. There are no "standards," in either sense of the term: no more songs that teens and grandmas simultaneously hum, no more starched codes of behavior.

The Brando culture was vital and restlessly innovative, but it carried the seeds of its own boredom. Revolutionary pop was too speedily accepted, turned into mainstream mulch and, in a trice, its own parody. Artists with any hope of staying power were forced to reinvent themselves a la Madonna. And her triumph was not any singing style, or even a winking decadence, but simply the prolonging of her career.

Those of the Old Guard didn't have to work that hard. The shadow they cast was longer, warmer; they wore their classicism so easily. Unburdened by having to make each new piece an artistic event, they simply refined and perfected their gifts. Crosby, Ella, Cary Grant--these people had lasting appeal.

You could see the lingering lure of Astaire art in the reaction to Frank Sinatra's death. That wasn't just Rat Pack nostalgia. It was an effusion of fondness and respect for a fine song finely sung, for vocal connoisseurship, for the ability--the first or the thousandth time he sings a song--to mine the meaning of a lyric.

There is a lesson for pop purveyors of this century and the next. Craft counts; elegance endures; smooth is still cool. Brando may have won the war, but Astaire has the glory.

Richard Corliss, a TIME senior writer, likes a Gershwin tune. How about you?