This is from Mark Steyn in The New Criterion in 1994:
<<< Martha Bayles holds out till page 20 [of her book Hole in Our Soul ] of her book before slyly sidling into pop culture’s all-purpose anthem: “At some point,” she writes, “every critic tries to unpack Ellington’s famous title, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.’” No need to feel so sheepish. As a distillation of the key distinction between pop music and the conservatory crowd, it’s hard to beat. But is the title Ellington’s? He sure enough wrote the tune, but the lyric is credited to Irving Mills, Ellington’s (white) publisher, an old-school Alleyman with an eye to the main chance, who wasn’t above passing off staff lyricists’ work as his own and cutting himself in on the songwriting royalties.
I don’t suppose Miss Bayles is aware of Mills’s claim, but even if she were, who wouldn’t rather believe in Ellington? On the one hand, a cool cat doodling at the keyboard and intuitively hitting upon the definition of what he does; on the other hand, an opportunist Tin Pan Alley hack measuring out the syllables and contriving a hit title to fit. It’s no contest. But the likelihood is that the phrase is Mills’s. It is, after all, in the preferred form of his opening lines: “When my sugar walks down the street/ All the birdies go tweet-tweet-tweet” or his suggestion for a novelty song about the first woman to attempt transatlantic flight, “You took a notion/ To fly across the ocean.” (“Mr. Mills,” his trainee lyricist Dorothy Fields protested, “nobody takes a notion to fly across the ocean.”) To those who believe that popular music is raw, soulful, earthy, authentic, passionate, Mills is everything they despise. “There is a sharp dividing line,” Miss Bayles writes, “between the ‘folk’ artist (black) and the ‘bourgeois’ exploiter (white).” The requirements of myth dictate that popular music’s most exhilarating philosophical statement be assigned to Ellington. We make our choice, Ellington or Mills, and thereby hang our tale.
The finest achievements in pop culture are a coalescence of art, which is incidental, and craft, which is crucial. To George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess was an obsession, and he had no choice but to write it out. To his brother, Ira, it was a professional lyricist’s latest assignment. Pop music today has its smattering of fitful artists but a conspicuous lack of craftsmen—those who provide the rules, set the standards, ensure there are minimum entry requirements. It’s instinctive. When Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Merce [pictured] wrote “I Thought About You” . . .
I peeped through the crack
And looked at the track
The one going back to you
. . . they didn’t sit around figuring “Hey, this is a train song, so we need lots of monosyllables with plenty of ‘k’ rhymes to bounce staccato off the notes and thereby emphasize the clicketty-clack rhythm”: that came naturally. Is it better than Schubert? That’s up to you. But at least it’s efficient. Confronted with “Fuck the Police” by Niggaz With Attitude . . .
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product
Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin’ narcotics
. . . Mercer would barely have registered the content, but he would have raised an amused eyebrow at the attempted rhyme of “product” and “narcotics” and, more than that, would have been astounded at how the words are not, in any way, musical words shaped to the notes or intervals. Martha Bayles is a child of the Sixties, so it’s a pleasant surprise to find that she rightly identifies as Bob Dylan’s principal defects his “deliberate obscurity, self-indulgence, pretentiousness, and (most damning) indifference to the aural texture—the music—of words.” He might be a great prophet, he might be America’s true political opposition, he might be a handsomely bound Ivy League-approved poet, he might even have “the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch” (Robert Shelton in The New York Times), but he is not, on the whole, any sort of songwriter. >>>