Beware of cultural hand-me-downs

Extrapolating from an indisputable fact is called induction, which was Aristotle’s stock in trade. Taking my cue from the great man, I’ll try to make some general comments on the basis of what I saw the other day.

It was a video of a young Russian jazz singer singing Dream a Little Dream of Me at a Moscow concert some 12 years ago. She introduced the song by rapping with the audience, which is now practically de rigueur even at classical concerts, to say nothing of any other.

The introduction was effusively emotive, something to be expected from any Russian artist. The girl said she had first heard the song in Paris a couple of years earlier, and “it went right through my heart and soul.”

Now, I happen to like that song myself, although my first exposure to it predates that singer’s by perhaps 50 years. But even in my younger days, I would have been physically incapable of expressing myself in such kitsch terms. So the introduction served another reminder of why Russia and I were incompatible and always heading for divorce.

I first heard Dream a Little Dream sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and it’s really unfair to compare any other performer, including that Russian girl, to those two. But on her own terms she was actually a good singer, with a real voice and musical sense.

But when introducing the song, she described its lyrics as very enigmatic, which put me to shame. I had never detected any gnostic quality in that song, which suggested that a Russian girl in her late 20s could find things in an American song that had escaped me.

She explained what it was. One line, she said (obviously in Russian), went “say Ninety-nine and kiss me”. That must have communicated, she opined, a deep numerological meaning, or else it was simply some obscure idiom.

She then sang the song in the original English including that gnostic phrase. Now, it must have been some 40 years ago that I last heard an English idiom I didn’t know. This one, however, went right by me. What if it really had some hidden numerological subtext?

That was a possibility. Another possibility was that the girl got something wrong, transcribing the lyrics of a song sung in a language she didn’t know well.

Back to my trusted YouTube and that great duo of Ella and Satchmo. And there was Ella Fitzgerald, enunciating with her customary clarity: “Say Nightie-night and kiss me.” Nightie-night. Not Ninety-Nine. No hidden meaning. No Gnosticism. No numerology. Just a bloody good love song.

Now for extrapolation. The first one deals with Russians not being particularly good at doing homework (to that extent, I suppose, I am a Russian myself). Even 10 years ago, computers were widely available in Moscow. All the singer had to do was Google “Lyrics to Dream a Little Dream of Me”, and Boris would have been her uncle. She would have seen that the first line of the second verse simply talked about a good-night kiss.

The second extrapolation is more general, going beyond a Russian singer with her poor command of English. Hand-me-down cultures are like hand-me-down clothes. They seldom fit and usually look outdated.

The two qualifiers in that last sentence are useful because cultural interchange is a time-proven manner of augmenting one’s own cultural capital. The interest on it, accrued over many decades, may well acquire an organic, indigenous quality, enriching the culture in ways it might not have been able to enrich itself if left to its own devices.

But this can only work over a long time, with the borrower exhibiting endless patience, exquisite taste and proper respect for both the lending and borrowing cultures. If you write those three nouns side by side – patience, taste, respect – you’ll probably agree that they designate commodities seldom found in today’s world.

Thus one sees and hears snippets of borrowed cultures that are as jarring as the sound of two pieces of glass rubbed together. Last summer, for example, we were having lunch at an outdoor café in Clamecy, a sleepy Burgundian town whose claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Romain Rolland, a third-rate communist writer.

Had his comrades won their victory, the Gothic church in the middle of Clamecy would probably have been pulled down. As it was, it was lending its steps to a dozen youngsters rocking to the sound of a ghetto blaster blaring French rap. We couldn’t make out the words, but the hermaphroditic cultural hybrid destroyed our appetite.

That vocal art has nothing to do with either vocalism or art, and it sounds revolting even in its native habitat. But when ‘sung’ by people named Jean-François, Jean-Paul or Jean-Pierre it’s even worse, much worse.

In a different genre, one sees quite a few large American saloon cars on British and French roads. Those vehicles are designed for wide, straight and empty American highways, where they provide an alternative to trains and planes for long-distance travel. On narrow, twisting European roads, such cars are unwieldy and often dangerous.

Yet Europeans buy those automotive boats not because they like their handling and ease of parking, but because they too want to get their kicks on Route 66 (which is incidentally single-lane for much of its length). It’s an exercise of cultural appropriation that really is misappropriation.

The romance of popular American culture has a strong effect on the lower classes all over Europe. Frenchmen and, after many years of resistance, even Italians queue up at McDonald’s not because they prefer that fare to, respectively, steak frites or pasta al ragù, but because America is cool (the French even borrowed that word for the sake of verisimilitude).

On a higher cultural plateau, my French friends once humbled me by mentioning a great modern American writer whose name I had never heard, James Salter. Since in my youth I used to teach American literature, albeit on a truncated Soviet curriculum, I felt as if my face had been slapped.

I immediately got two novels by James Salter and found them vacuous and pretentious, although composed in well-crafted sentences. It’s not surprising that I had never heard of him in the US or Britain. But he is a household name for every well-read Frenchman I’ve met, and all my French friends are well-read and have good taste.

They simply aren’t sufficiently plugged into the Anglophone culture to detect the false notes instantly audible to, say, Penelope or me. Similarly, I must have missed the finer points of Michel Houellebecque, whose work reads like jumped-up pornography to me. Getting culture second-hand is a time-proven technique, but care must be taken and allowances must be made.

Anyway, if it’s getting late where you are, ninety-nine to all of you. Sleep tight.