A while ago, probably during the Music Club era, I had an e-mail exchange with Kevin about the shelf-life of today's rap songs. He suggested that the over-reliance on product placement as shorthand for style would limit the appeal of current hits in years to come. I agreed that this was probably the case by and large, but argued that an exceptional song would have no problem sustaining itself well past the era of its status symbols, and pointed to Cole Porter's You're the Top as evidence. The song is still considered one of the all-time greats, even though few people know what half of it means. (Personally I prefer the less gimmicky Porter tunes; give me So in Love or Night and Day over Let's Do It anytime).
My curiosity about the dated references in You're the Top was satisfied recently when Timothy Noah posted an exhaustive annotation. But now that Noah has posted an addendum I find myself curious all over again.
First of all, I'm curious about Noah's research methods. Particularly, I wonder why he waits until the addendum to acknowledge that someone else has already done a User's Guide (though a less thorough one). I assume that he simply didn't know about it originally (because he's not the type to crib without attribution and because he mentions the Playbill essay in the second post to correct a false assumption he'd made in the first). But what confuses me is why he didn't.
Noah states at the outset that his research method consists of Googling and more Googling. But here's his footnote to "You're a Nathan panning": "This one really had me stumped for awhile as I searched the Web in vain for a "Nathan Panning." Then I found a version of the lyrics in which the "P" was lowercase, and all became plain. "Panning" was a verb, not a surname!"
But a Google search for Nathan Panning turns up the Playbill explication on the first page. The result leaps out being the only one that's not just a page of song lyrics or a contemporary person who happens to be named Nathan Panning (or, now, Noah's own piece; I did consider that the Playbill essay climbed to the top after Noah linked to it in his second article, but Google hasn't indexed the second article yet). How could he have missed it?
On to a greater curiosity: Playbill's User's Guide mentions lyrics that were unfamiliar to me, and that do not appear in Noah's text (e.g., "You're Phenolax"). A quick Google finds a handful of sites that claim an obscure final verse that rhymes Phenolax with the absolutely unforgivable, "You're the boy who dares challenge Mrs. Baer's son, Max." A possible explanation is that Porter never published this verse, but performed it on a radio show with Rudy Vallee (hence the Vallee shout out, which no doubt killed).
