Rock has rarely known a performer so affectionately and self-consciously obsessed with the mechanism of pop and the apparatus of stardom as Bryan Ferry. These Foolish Things is an inspired chronicle of his passion, from the Broadway show tune which provides the title to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil."
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But, unlike David Bowie's
Pin Ups or the Band's
Moondog Matinee, this album is neither an effort to pay homage to an era nor a chronicle of the singer's past. Instead, Ferry attempts to discover a contemporary context for the matinee idol — in the role of pop singer — and to validate an aesthetic mythology which began, long before Elvis Presley, on the stage, in the movies and with the big bands.
Ferry knows better than most singers with an interest in rock theatrics that there is an older and broader tradition into which rock fits; it bothers him not at all that that tradition's original expression was dramatic rather than musical. Ferry is interested in using his music to project an identity; more than any other current singer, he delves into the showbiz atmosphere of the Thirties and Forties, not only for material (as Bette Midler and the Pointer Sisters have overdone) but also for his persona. Against the rock star's usual fascination with the music of urban and rural blacks, or that of unsophisticated country whites, he sets a fascination with cosmopolitan, mainstream pop. He also knows that the trappings of cinema and the theater — props, costumes, dialogue—are not, as too many theatrical rockers suppose, what gave earlier culture heroes their power. Ferry knows that Errol Flynn's swashbuckling, Clark Gable's suavity, Frank Sinatra's romanticism were threads in a seamless tradition of which Presley and Jagger's overt eroticism is merely the most recent part. His genius is to be able to encompass all of it — Sinatra's romanticism with Presley's hip wriggle, Jagger's demonic glee with Flynn's blustering heroism. So, like the big-band leaders who were forced off the stand by rock's arrival, he wears a tuxedo (and a slight, modish sneer) onstage. Then, as if to reassert that it isn't clothes which make the idol, he wears a simple T-shirt on this album cover and remains as debonair as Gable in a hand-tailored suit.
But most of these songs aren't taken from that earlier tradition: Almost every one of them will be familiar to even casual rock and pop fans. Ferry has greater scope than any other contemporary singer, though; he moves easily from the avant-rock of Roxy Music (with whom he regularly performs) to the pop songs here: a show tune, an Elvis oldie, a Beach Boys smash, a Motown standard. His range encompasses both art and trash, not to mention trashy art (look at Roxy Music's album covers) and arty trash (look at this one).
Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," for instance, is presented, simultaneously, as a joke, a piece of nostalgia, a serious statemen
