Post 019: Post-Barbra
On the reign of her parade (Or, as she sings in Sadie, Sadie: all day the records play)
I don’t know when exactly the collecting of this star’s records was born, but it must be at least ten years at this point. I probably stumbled upon her face in the local Goodwill, among the bottom-shelf records that were all a dollar. But, I must be honest and say my first exposure to her was likewise second-hand, via one Rachel Berry on Glee, which I watched Live on Fox when it aired. (I know, I know.) In the 2009 finale of Season One, Rachael, played by Lea Michele, defiantly belts “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, the Broadway show that starred Barbra Streisand in 1964 (and Lea herself in 2022).
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been listening to my collection of Barbra records: 38 and counting, which means I own the majority of her six-decade discography which consists of 37 studio albums, 12 compilations, 11 live albums and 15 soundtracks.
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In the Summer of 1967, 135,000 people gathered in Central Park to hear Barbra. The back of the vinyl from the performance (which begins with applause, to which she says “I haven’t done anything yet!”) notes the residue left by the crowd, which “took the NY Sanitation Department 4 Days to collect the 5 tons of flotsam and jetsam1 strewn about.” The notes continue, sharing that “[a]mong the remains, more exotic items included empty vintage champagne bottles, a Scrabble set, a Russian-English dictionary, a half-eaten Hebrew National Salami, assorted empty wine bottles representing 8 foreign countries, a Sterling silver champagne bucket, and upper plate, a jar of quail eggs, an 8-day alarm clock, a Merry Widow bra and a black, pleated mini skirt!”
Indeed, this assortment feels like an accurate description for Barbra’s sweeping, lasting sensibilities: it’s a mixed bag, it’s a mashup, it’s international, it’s impressive and it takes a long time to get through. Her first three albums, simply titled The Barbra Streisand Album2, The Second Barbra Streisand Album3, and The Third Album,4 were released between February 1963 and 1964, when she was 21. The Second Barbra Streisand Album reached #2 on the charts and included “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” which last year was the inspiration for my exhibition with Maggie Wrigley at Bullet Space.5
Born Barbara, she changed her name to Barbra when she began her career as a teenager. This dropping of the “a” reminds me of Warhol—who also dropped the “a” of his birth name Warhola, which he could too ethnic. (Barbra’s gesture to keep her last name6 was the opposite of Andy’s choice, of course.) Indeed, her early albums include My Name Is Barbra (1965), My Name is Barbra, Two (also 1965), Je m’appelle Barbra (1966), Simply Barbra (1967), and Barbra Joan Streisand (1971). These titles emphasize what seems like one of the driving factors of her career: her singularity. Many times, you are listening not because of the song, but because she is the one singing it. Moreover, many of these recordings, even if they are reinterpretations of songs written by others and for other contexts, end up being fascinating reflections of biography and her specific positionally. I think of charming self-referential moments, like the ad-lib of her birthday on “I’m Five/A Kid Again” on My Name Is Barbra, which features a picture of five-year old Barbra on the cover taken by her brother. Other moments reveal self-awareness, like in a skit between her and a producer at to the beginning of The Broadway Album, where, cueing up a cover of Sondheim’s “Putting It Together,” Barbra scoffs at the producer’s hesitation about the material. “No one’s going to buy it . . . No one in Middle America, anyway,” they say, but Barbra disagrees, though does concede “Advancing art is easy . . . Financing it is not!” Barbra has the last laugh, of course, as the album went on to hit #1 on the Billboard charts and earn her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
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Of course, over the last 60 years, she’s become a larger-than-life public figure who has, for better and worse, made her points of view known. She’s supported and fundraised for Democrats ranging from McGovern7 to both Clintons, along with issues ranging from Prop 8 to Ukraine. She’s also (disappointingly, disgustingly) been a long-time Zionist and supporter of “Israel,”8 performing at a 2011 concert for the IDF.
The edges show in the music, too.
She dedicates 1969’s What About Today “to the young people who push against indifference, shout down mediocrity, demand a better future, and who write and sing the songs of today,” offering tepid covers of “With A Little Help from My Friends” (released two years prior) and Paul Simon’s “Punky’s Dilemma” (released the year before). Her strength has not usually been contemporary covers—I think she’s best when reviving across time.
In 1987’s One Voice, hosted during the Reagan Era at her Malibu home to fundraise for Democratic causes, she jokes about the ticket price for her show: “I’ve spent more than a few sleepless nights wondering what I could possibly do that would be worth $5,0009 . . . then I figured out that I would be singing about 3,924 notes and that comes to a little over a dollar a note.” Later, she “Aren’t we all the same, really? When a mother holds her baby, her joy is the same no matter what country she lives in. Lovers are lovers no matter under what government they make love. We all inhabit this tiny planet and, if we are to survive, it will have to be together or not at all. We must recognize we are all just people… who need people.” At the end of the concert, in the concert, after “Happy Days,” she doubles down with “America the Beautiful,” encouraging the well-financed audience to join her.
The vinyl insert for 2018’s Walls includes pictures of Barbra in her garden alongside a gray-scale image of an anonymous hand gripping a wire fence. She notes she’s “been especially moved by the millions of young people in the United States and around the world who have found their collective voice and are demanding to be heard. They are more interested in building bridges than walls. They are the very definition of hope. They’re on my mind…and I dedicate this album to them.” The first song, of course, is “What’s On My Mind,” which includes the lyrics (co-written by Barbra): “Sometimes my eyes wants to cry / How did we come to this divide? / Is this God's creation? / One for all, but millions left behind / That's what's on my mind.”
The album continues with a mashup of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World,” a gratuitous rendition of “What the World Needs Now” and ends with “Happy Days Are Here Again.” She notes that while she’s performed this standard “at least 100 times,” on this album she wanted to “present a symphonic version . . . that could express my sadness about the state of the country.” She continues: “As a woman, I would have been so proud to call Hillary Clinton my president . . . I believe there is a better road to take for our magnificent country. And history has shown us that when we are resilient in the face of adversity, truth prevails . . . I hope that in the not-so-distant future, I’ll be able to sing [Happy Days] the way FDR used it as his 1932 . . . to celebrate the times with optimism.”
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I choose not to get stuck in the rain of the sad, liberal, Zionist, millionaire reality/delusion of Barbra because, as she says in Funny Girl there are “a thousand jokes.” And indeed, for me, Barbra is best in her joking, which she always claims on her terms. When she started going on the Tonight Show in the 1960’s, even Groucho Marx found her funny. Who else would release a themed album called Wet10 with “Splish Splash” and “Kiss Me In The Rain?” Who else would release multiple Christmas albums and sing with earnestness and zeal? Who else would open a concert with “Sing” from Sesame Street and release a duet with Kermit the Frog11? Who else would be credited with the finger cymbals on a TV special called Barbra Streisand and Other Musical Instruments? Who else would not only include pictures of her dogs on more than one album but clone them?12
Timing is key with delivering a joke or a note, and perhaps enough good timings make timelessness. There are few with as many decades of making and with such an iconic persona as Barbra. Dolly and Liza are among the few that similarly meet her stature. It’s too simple to reduce Barbra to the humor, of course. In the titular song from Funny Girl, she sings: “That’s me I just keep them in stitches / doubled in half / and though I may be all wrong for a guy / I’m good for a laugh.” Looking at Barbra, in all of her limitations, she is good for more than a laugh. She is large! She contains multitudes! She has reshaped the role of the popular singer, or at the very least made a unique version of it for herself. Barbra knows how to get what she wants—she’ll march her band out, she’ll beat her drum. She simply has to! Behind the winks is a brilliance, and behind the character and absurdity there must be some Taurean groundedness. I love the bits and that’s where I see Barbra’s self-awareness and autobiography—and maybe that’s the best gift from this complex star that takes up so much room on my shelf.
Upcoming
This month’s Long Poem Support Group is Hart Crane’s The Bridge, guest facilitated by the great Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (check out his Substack here). Join us tomorrow (Tuesday, May 27th) on Discord!
Our season of exquisites at Aberdeen continues on June 5th with a shining lineup:
On June 6th, I’m excited to be reading with some old and new friends at Hive Mind Books:
I had to look this up: “Flotsam refers to debris floating on the water surface, often wreckage from a shipwreck or accidentally lost cargo, while jetsam is cargo that was deliberately thrown overboard from a ship in distress, usually to lighten its load or to prevent sinking.”
“When it came time to title the album, Streisand declared, “I can’t stand those other made-up titles.” She chose The Barbra Streisand Album as the title, after rejecting one of Columbia’s suggestions: Sweet and Saucy Streisand. ("Sounds like a barbeque sauce, ya know?")” (Barbra Streisand Archives.)
She told a reporter: “My new album is called The Second Barbra Streisand Album, because that's just what it is. Why should I give it some fancy name that no one remembers anyway?”
She told the Columbia Records art department, “It’s my third album, so let’s just call it what it is: The Third Album. I guess I like straight-forward titles even though the songs are less than straight-forward songs.”
My exhibition text-poem read: “Of course Barbra opens and closes her second album with the Arden and Mercer standard: Free and easy, that’s my style, she croons, the lyrics then claiming impermanence as a lifestyle lackadaisical -- indeed, we embrace home’s ephemerality, relish in how hat-dropping quickly it can congeal; sometimes needing not much more than people, than a doormat or a placemat, than a feeling: practiced imperfect and by accumulation, gathering, neighboring -- it is that magic that contains the potential and the danger of the feeling, the practice, the idea of simultaneously: fireplaces can comfort and burn :: red-lined cities cut grass, install cold benches with divides; markets and municipalities and mayors conspire with land/lords to tease tenants, play fast and loose with rent-hikes and destabilizing evictions, shrugging as if it isn’t always systemic nod on-purpose // who affords a home? what kind, and where? // dangers are in the stories, the images, the songs, of home too -- establishing a home is sometimes just colonialism, building buildings is sometimes just gentrification -- you want your home to be where someone else’s was, that your desires are more important than the desires of others -- and the images, always the images, like the glossy ones in magazines where there is apparently no dust and nothing out of place because a gendered, raced body labored just out of frame and just in time for the shoot or for the gathering, hidden in the pixels and half-tones -- and the songs, all of the songs that occupy home metaphors that construct, manifest-destiny and migrate -- which does not let pale Barbra off the hook free or easy (though it is a slightly different tune when sung by Sammy just a few years later) // home is as much a mist of ideas as it is a set of specificities and objects, first and last names on records or letters or petitions or guests books, patterns of iron gates, diagonals, phone lines, the framed drawing that hangs above your couch and features on your video calls, the ephemera from and of friends, the place you draw or photograph again and again because in more ways than ones you know it, you live there: or here, perhaps, in this city, in this building, in this time of genocide and fascism and neoliberalism all of which reject collective ideas of home in favor of individualized ones, which deploy language against people, all of which no one should have to or want to inhabit”
In a recent interview, she comments on people mispronouncing her last name (It’s Strei-sand not zand): “It’s the funniest thing to me that people still can’t seem to get my name right,” she said. “Even today, I had to correct my new assistant.”
Live Concert at the Forum in 1972 grossed over $300,000 but the McGovern campaign only received about $18,000 after expenses.
Omar Sharif’s involvement in Funny Girl apparently angered the Egyptian government because of Barbra’s support of Israel.
About $14,500 today adjusted for inflation.
“Rainbow Connection” in 2021’s Release Me 2, originally intended for Wet.
There’s so much to say about this. It recalls the recent episode from Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and this essay by Joseph Osmundson in Orion (“To clone her beloved dog, Streisand used ViaGen Pets, “America’s Pet Cloning Experts.” The company’s tagline: “Lasting Love. The worldwide leader in cloning the animals we love.” Online, ViaGen lists its prices: “The total cost of dog cloning is $50,000, paid in two equal installments”).