And in that moment I thought that between these two little New Yorkers and this cab and this beautiful day, Frank's Homegoing Day, that maybe New York could be the greatest city in the world and could live up to being sung about by Frank Sinatra. Not that Mr. My Way could sing the music he once adjudged ''a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac,'' as with typical elasticity of principle he eventually tried to. And not that his Northern, urban, assimilationist style had any rock and roll in it. But it wasn't as antithetical as Rudy Vallee's, Nelson Eddy's, Mario Lanza's, John Raitt's, Eddie Fisher's, or, shit, Tony Bennett's. Like innovators from William Wordsworth to Chuck Berry, Sinatra was driven to intensify formal language by making it more speechlike.
Pop is a cornucopia and a continuum.
Either way, most of the music I adore is rock and roll. But not all of it. And none of it excludes any of the rest. So when a savvy young critic praises Sinatra for delivering her from punk's canon of authenticity, I feel sad. When a broadly experienced older critic uses Sinatra's genius to bewail the impersonality of contemporary pop, I pray my arteries hold up.