Paul Anka Probably Doesn't Read Pitchfork

Paul Anka: Rock Swings

The new Paul Anka cover album, Rock Swings, has been met with incredulity, reluctant approval, and outright dismissal (come on, Stylus, that shit is just lazy).

The project isn’t anything remarkably new, which is one reason I won’t spend as much time analyzing (or maybe “analyzing”) it as I’d originally planned -- to be honest, this is more of a follow-up to a statement I made about “enjoying this album unironically” on Dr. D.’s blog. Pat Boone made an infamous stab at contemporary relevance with his metal album, and Johnny Cash has counter-intuitively immortalized many a modern rock classic in his American series. The most direct parallel I can think of to this project in terms of overlapping material is the self-titled Moog Cookbook album from 1996, which I wrote about in more detail here.

However, the key difference between Moog Cookbook and Rock Swings, and a difference that makes enjoyment of the latter a bit difficult, is that Anka isn’t “in” on some kind of an inside pop culture joke -- perhaps Anka himself is the joke, but I’m not willing to snark up my appraisal of Rock Swings just to get a few laughs flaying the easiest pop music target since Michael Jackson. (I’m looking at you, Bjorn.)

In a way, the straight-faced approach is what makes this album provocative. While Anka’s brand of interpretation makes for a few embarrassing missteps (a swing cover of “Tears in Heaven” strikes me as particularly cheap, especially given the song’s well-known back story), it also helps to recontextualize a few ubiquitous 80s and 90s tracks as “standards.” The most memorable example: Aside from actually Googling the lyrics, I’d never really understood the first line in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a cover choice that would border on sacrilege if it weren’t already such a cliché (I’d save my Nirvana purist rant for the Bad Plus, or maybe Gus Van Sant, who will get his own vitriolic post soon enough).

Anka really does offer a unique, even refreshing take on the song, if only in those opening moments, simply by enunciating -- whether or not the song is actually any good is debatable, but it’s at least thought-provoking. It raises the question: can anything constitute a “standard” given the right amount of popularity or generational significance? If that's the case, I would be interested to see what Anka could do with, say, “Get Low.” The absence of hip-hop on this album (along with on the Cash or Boone or Moog or whoever equivalent) suggests that a rock template is a prerequisite to canonization in a more classicist form.

The album has value outside of theoretical musings as well. At times, Anka actually improves upon his source material -- I honestly prefer his version of “It’s My Life” to Jon Bon Jovi’s original, because his take is so much less self-serious than Bon Jovi’s. Also, the reference to Sinatra makes more sense in this context. This particular cover, unlike the Nirvana cover (which is a bit awkward after the novelty of enunciated lyrics wears off about ten seconds in), better illustrates the link between Anka’s “classic” and a more contemporary modern rock radio conception of the word. Here, Bon Jovi’s bravado, tedious in a guitar rock context, really does seem sympathetic with Sinatra’s, and is subsequently more hip. And not in some ironic bachelor-pad sense, either; Frankie is legitimately, effortlessly, mythically cool where Bon Jovi gets upstaged and humiliated by dog puppets.

But then, Bon Jovi could have been upstaged (by Triumph or Paul Anka or Frank) twenty years ago, which leads to another major flaw of the album: timing. If we’ve established that this is not, in fact, an “ironic” album (and what swing album professedly could be?), then it follows that its value either stems from experimental novelty (which I’ve suggested) or, more simply, from its appeal as a money-maker to the widest demographic possible. Though I’d argue for the former, this is unlikely given both Anka’s timeframe (Moog Cookbook wasn’t even particularly timely a decade ago) and also his broad genre criteria for inclusion, which includes everything from “Jump” (classic) to “The Way You Make Me Feel” (redundant) to “Lovecats” (wait, what?). Even if Anka's target audience is in reality unknown-to-nonexistent, the album still lies somewhere between curio and cash-grab, with a significant leaning toward the cash. That's a disappointing middle-ground for a project that has more power as a catalyst for reconsidering the “standard” than as a reliable 4th of July flag-stuffer. Ultimately, Johnny Cash covered this terrain with more personal honesty, while Pat Boone at least did it more brazenly (I’m only referring to the album’s notoriety since I haven’t actually heard it).

The best that can be said of Rock Swings is that some of the songs are good, even when freed of smug projected irony, and most tracks are at least adult-contempo-pleasant. Still, the album is on the whole too stagnant and humorless -- which isn’t to say it’s as stone-faced as Chris Cornell. If it were more consistently interesting, I might expound more on the emerging “classical” (not “classic”) status of rock music in a more general sense, perhaps another sign of the genre's waning relevance. But as it is, Anka’s rock swingin’ is -- well, kind of boring.

(I eagerly await Dave Grohl’s “classical” take on David Banner. Then we can start talking irony.)