FREE RAMBLE ON ESSAY (plus vote in the Song vs. Song poll)

First off, please vote in the Song vs. Song poll on the other Patreon, we've got a big one this week! "Freak on a Leash" vs. "Nookie"!!! You must vote in this!! https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-freak-45405296

But anyway: If you just ignore these, every month I write up a song I have strong feelings about, which is available at the $4 level under "Ramble On." As an enticement to get people to subscribe, I'm going to put one up for free here, this was one of my favorites plumbing the dark depths of Barry Manilow's cheese-masterpiece "Copacabana."  

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BARRY MANILOW - Copacabana 

Liza Minnelli once performed “Copacabana” on an episode of “The Muppet Show.” The pairing is almost too perfect; Liza, like Lola, was a woman out of time. Eternally linked to the Hollywood Golden Age via her mother Judy Garland who she greatly resembled, she found her calling in showtunes and gaudy stage and screen musicals, during a time when both theater and film were shedding the glitz of Old Hollywood. Her biggest role was in 1972’s “Cabaret,” a movie about another classic form of theater violently ending. All this made her an apt choice to play not just Lola the ‘40s showgirl, but also Lola the aged ‘70s washout, wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong time period, ruined by tragedy.

I first heard “Copacabana” while watching a rerun of that “Muppet Show” episode, and it fucked my shit up. I would have been around six years old, before I had developed any understanding of camp or irony. The episode itself is odd and experimental, with Liza playing herself playing an actress playing Lola, but the layers of meta-fiction, the campiness of the song, the fact that Rico and Tony were played by giant furry monsters – none of this did anything to dilute the horror of the song. It wasn’t Tony’s murder that got to me either; it was Lola’s sad afterlife as a confused damaged old woman, her love and youth and sanity long stolen from her by Rico’s fatal bullet, by the cruel passage of time, and of course by Tony’s real killer.

His name was Barry; he was a showman. Maybe one of the greatest of all time, had he performed in a different genre or a different age. He was not as much an anachronism as Liza, the ‘70s soft rock boom was very good to him, but his style hearkens back to an older era of pop. Compared to Elton John or even late-period Neil Diamond, he had no edge or even a whiff of “authenticity,” whatever that is; his stock and trade was schmaltz, corny sincerity delivered with gusto, and it made him a punchline for many decades. But though he made his name off of soppy ballads, the song he’s best remembered for is “Copacabana,” an extremely atypical track in his catalog and just a weird ridiculous song in its own right.

“Copacabana” was originally intended as a work of nostalgia, of the post-war era when South America was the height of trendiness (being the only place on Earth not blown to shit during WWII). Havana was a glamorous tourist hotspot rather than a Commie Threat to America; nightclubs like the Copacabana (a real place, if you don’t know) played the hottest songs from Brazil and Latin America. Manilow had already written a nostalgia song, “Bandstand Boogie,” an unironic tribute to ‘50s innocence; there was no reason why “Copacabana” couldn’t also have been a straightforward celebration of ‘40s glamour. And yet for some reason Manilow’s songwriting took a darker turn.

I don’t know why Manilow decided Tony had to die. Perhaps he associates that whole scene with old movie melodramas; he even includes a non-visual version of that old trope where two people wrestle over a pistol and there’s a mystery gunshot and a long pause while we wait to find out which one got shot. But what gets me is that the chorus has barely anything to do with Lola and her loss. The title of the song is “Copacabana,” not “Lola,” and Manilow belts out the thrill of the club (The music! The passion!) completely unconcerned with Lola watching the love of her life bleed out on the floor. Barry was a divorced man; he ended his marriage to pursue a career in show business, and succeeded. Perhaps the song is subtextually biographical; what is “Copacabana” but the triumph of show business over love? Tony is long dead but the Copacabana still stands, which is all that Barry cares about, and perhaps all that Lola cares about at this point too. The song is soaked with irony but it’s all in the text, not the performance; Barry doesn’t seem like he’s being sarcastic. He’s Barry f’ing Manilow, after all; he couldn’t sing it any other way.

But Barry probably understands the darkness of his song better than he lets on. I don’t know if it’s an official music video but there is a performance video on YouTube (linked above). In the video, after Barry finishes the final verse, he finds a female dance partner and they close out the song by sambaing through the outro, which strikes me as a fairly callous response to the tragedy he just sang about. The big that’s-entertainment grin never leaves his face even when he sings about Lola losing her mind; it comes off as demonic. It’s dark camp; the story becomes serious because Barry isn’t taking it seriously. In 2014 Barry quietly married his male manager after forty years in the closet; I’m hardly versed in the subject but I suspect there’s a strong queer-theory reading in the sheer malevolence with which Manilow tears this boy and girl apart. There’s also a TV-movie adaptation of the song where Barry, in his only acting role, plays Tony (Annette O’Toole, no Liza, plays Lola). I haven’t seen it but I can’t imagine it’s any good. Slight, elfin Barry can’t be Tony; he can only be the cruel omniscient narrator, the grinning emcee of the program (shadows of “Cabaret” again).

Thirty years pass within the lyrics of the song; more than that has passed in the real world since it was released. The rhythms of Latin jazz found a welcoming home in disco; the two genres have more in common at this point than differences, they’re both firmly a part of a distant past, they have all the same associations of glamour and crime. And yet when Barry reveals that the Copacabana is now a discotheque and a brief moment of thumping bass interrupts the track, it feels like the most shocking and unwelcome of intrusions. “But that was thirty years ago” is such a jarring time jump, it was jarring to me as a kid and it’s even more jarring now as I get older and more haunted by lost years. Barry sings “Don’t fall in love,” the hook resolves into a minor key, the singers hauntingly intone “Copacabanaaaa” and Barry smirks at the audience. Lola remains trapped in the past, trying to relieve an era when music and passion were always the fashion, even though that same era brought her nothing but misery. Nostalgia is poison, folks, and don’t you forget it.