1. “Baby baby where
did our love go…?”
“I’ve got you babe…”
“It’s not me babe…|
2. The ductus of baby. Discuss.
3. Someday somebody will write a rich philological-historical
study of the rise and fall of babe and baby in popular song in the sixties and
seventies.
Not me, but somebody. Here’s a few notes.
4. It should be said at the outset that I use “honey” and “darling” a lot, both as endearments and
as terms of address – but I have never called anybody babe or baby who was not,
in fact, below 16 months of age.
It should also be said that, on another personal note, baby
ended for me with Soft Cell, at some point in New Orleans on the dance floor in
the Hotel Pontchatrain. It dies while I was dancing with M.P. on the stroke of
midnight, although the date and time could be the effect of a blur in my
memory.
5. Mostly babe and baby fell into that group of affectionate
names for woman (as distinct from the denigrating terms, like bitch or whore –
although as we all know, these are mix and match sets and everything depends on
the conformation of the tongue and the lips). As well, though, looking over the
set of popular songs in my data base (i.e. Youtube and Spotify), baby was also
a female term for addressing a male. And applied to the heteronormative male,
it has an interestingly dissolving libidinous effect. Who is baby?
7. In 1932, a James Hart wrote an article on Jazz Jargon for
American Speech, from which I cull this:
“A new connotation for the once highly respectable
nomenclature of the family, ‘mama’, ‘papa’ and ‘baby’ was introduced into the
American language by Tin Pan Ally. … Along with the new connotations came along
the new signification of the world ‘baby’.” Hunt cites such titles as “I wonder
where my baby is tonight” and “yes sir, she’s my baby.”
8. An interesting experiment was conducted on the Ed
Sullivan show, once. The Supremes sang a medley of the songs of the
Temptations, and the Temptations sang a medley of the songs of the Supremes.
Thus we heard David Ruffin sing “Stop In the Name of Love” and could register a
certain transformation in the sound of baby: “Baby baby I’m aware of where you
go”….
There is, I think, in the very ductus of the words of a song
an indication of the fragile autonomy of song against poem. The ductus of the
word is why performance is all too quicksilver to be one of those kinds of
things that one can hypostatize, rank, and generally treat to the domestic gaze
of established literary aesthetics. What we have going on here is a pathic
understanding. The seven types of ambiguity are as nothing to the types of
ambiguity summoned and released in the word “babe”.
9. Pathic understandings, however, are not a private
language. Instead, they emerge in communities and disappear as well. I can’t
really say that “baby” disappeared from popular song in the eighties. Anybody
can come up with exceptions. Simple minds had a hit, Don’t you (forget about
me) where the baby note – the baby as the addressee – was definitely in the
mix. However, by then there was something out of date about the word – as out
of date as Greenwich Village or the Beats or Motown Detroit.
10. “Baby Baby Baby you’re out of time.”
“Nowhere to run to baby/nowhere to hide.”
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