first round

(4) taco, “puttin’ on the ritz”
contained
(13) the firm, “radioactive”
347-54
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/23.

Kristine Langley Mahler: Tryin’ Hard to Look Like: Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz”

My old friends, I am grateful to be back in the March Xness tournament representing yet another song with an apostrophe in the title, Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” I am graciously welcoming you the same way Taco invites everyone into the party during the video for his 2017 cover of his own song—because yes, Taco has covered his own song (“mixes”) many, many times since his original cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” I present to you 35 years of fame based solely on one song which Taco did not write and which was actually a moderate hit 52 years before Taco covered it.
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” has been in the public lexicon for 97 years—so long that it just entered PUBLIC DOMAIN—and if that fact doesn’t win this tournament for this song, I ask you to find me another one-hit-wonder with more staying power.
Put on your morning coats—or evening coat and tails, if you’re one of those Xness fans who doesn’t get around to the essays until after work—because if you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to, have I got a show for you! The tl;dr of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”: it’s a song about affecting wealth. There. I’ve set down the gauntlet like a good valet and I’m waiting for you to pick it up off the bed and pull it on over your white gloves. Did you know that a gauntlet isn’t a line in the sand? That it’s actually one of those wrist-guards old knights used to wear? Now you do.
I’ve always loved the affectations of old money. I reveled in the Whartonian tales of Gilded Age New York and spent both my adolescence and early adulthood learning how to put on the ritz because I expected, somehow, that knowledge would be called upon at some point in my life and I did not want to be caught unaware. I have maintained a fascination with Gilded Age New York for more years than I should. I have never lived in New York because I don’t ever want to live in modern New York; the only New York I would ever live in is Edith Wharton’s New York but since time travel still isn’t a possibility, goodbye to all that.
Let me get this out of the way: I understand that the Gilded Age was roughly 1870-1900 and, therefore, solidly over by the time “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was written in 1927. I understand that in 1927, the U.S. was in the Roaring Twenties, if I’m going to have to give a timestamp/era-stamp. I am relatively disinterested in making conversation about the fact that Irving Berlin wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in May 1927 yet did not publish it until December 2, 1929—about a month after the Wall Street Crash that sent the U.S. into the Great Depression.
The timeline simply is necessary to understand that “Puttin’ on the Ritz” wasn’t written about people shamming moneyed behavior even though they’d lost it all in the crash—though obviously when the film based on the song, also titled Puttin’ on the Ritz, was released in 1930, the film’s popularity was likely ascribed to the fantasy of “putting on the ritz,” the fantasy of The Ritz still being relevant when all this was over, something like imagining in 2020 we would ever go back to “normal” post-pandemic.
I digress.
The lyrics to Taco’s 1982 version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” address the listener as if she’s a country bumpkin who just arrived in New York and asked the cab driver to take her to Times Square, hopped out and is looking around, bewildered. Questions like why don’t you go where fashion sits? and Have you seen the well-to-do? are repeated, but the emotional heart of the song is the invitation to the experience, describing what the listener will see when they come along with the singer, gently mocking how the fashionable are “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper.” Inclusion.
The original 1927 version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” however, was a different animal. Instead of Park Avenue, “where fashion sits,” the listener is directed to go “where Harlem flits” on Lenox Avenue. Instead of describing the “different types of wear-a-day-coat, pants with stripes and cutaway coat, perfect fits,” the listener is told they will see “spangled gowns upon the bevy of high browns from down the levy, all misfits putting on the ritz.” Rather than trying to look like Gary Cooper, the listener is told Lenox Avenue is “where each and every lulubelle [1] goes every Thursday evening with her swell beaus, rubbin’ elbows.” And finally, instead of repeating the line about what to do if you’re blue, the listener is still invited to join the singer but is told “come with me and we’ll attend their jubilee and see them spend their last two bits putting on the ritz.”
This is not an essay about the 1927 version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” I know. I know I should probably remove this whole section because my Xness essays tend to wind up bloated, with all the facts ever, because I find them all so fascinating during research. That’s the major challenge of digging into a song for Xness, I suppose—learning the cultural contexts a song is responding to and wanting everyone to know what you know!—but then trying to pivot to the game-part by yelling THIS ONE! THIS ONE RIGHT HERE DESERVES YOUR VOTE! BECAUSE OF ALL THIS BACKGROUND!
But I think it’s relevant because the original version of the song—which is to say, the original intent—was EXCLUSIVE, not inclusive—don’t bring me that routine about how the performance in the 1930 film Puttin’ on the Ritz was famously the first hit song in America performed by an interracial ensemble. The Black folks are being mocked to their faces in the original version. The version Taco covered was INCLUSIVE, not exclusive.
I know the counter-argument. There is an early version of Taco’s video for the song which is nearly impossible to find now. The early version was taken off the air (though you can find it here for now) because it includes two performers in blackface who pop on screen to mouth the line “super duper” twice, then during the tap-dance part, they perform a shuffle-slide alongside Taco.
I bring this up—though mentioning the racist or sexist or phobic parts of either a song or their performer is usually a death knell for Xness tournament advancement—because I think it’s possible that Taco was doing two things by including the blackface performers: referencing the original lyrics, which had been obscured for some forty years in 1982 (more on that in a minute), and also making an example of the performative masks that everyone wears in “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—no matter which version—by trying to appear to be someone they’re not. In both the original and the edited Taco videos, there is also a performer in whiteface (wearing a white mask) and two performers wearing old-man masks.
Is it racist to use blackface? Yes, every time. But maybe Taco’s original video was meant as cultural commentary and intended to nod to the racism inherent in blackface. After all, the 1927 version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is super rude, using flashily-dressed Black Harlem residents as a punchline, a side-nudge like “come and watch this spectacle—they’re spending all their money to dress up but let’s be honest: they’ll never fit in. All misfits.” When the lyrics to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” were revised by Irving Berlin in 1946 for Fred Astaire’s popularized version in the film Blue Skies (these are the lyrics used in Taco’s 1982 version, btw), suddenly the song went from being a mockery of Black paraders— meant for white entertainment—into an invocation to JOIN the paraders, who were transformed into white people walking down Park Avenue.
Taco’s video for “Puttin’ on the Ritz” underscores the magnification of presentation and class elitism in the song’s lyrics. Taco walks slowly, holding a cane that’s lit up like a bluelight wand stolen from a fluorescent light, past people in rags huddled around fires like it’s Christmas Eve in A Christmas Carol. He gestures to them for the audience to witness. Taco’s character looks completely aware of their situation but nonplussed: presenting a performance right now; pardon me. Taco stops lip-synching at one point but maintains eye contact with the camera; it is all show, all a presentation. The other characters in the scenes look fake and—as mentioned earlier—sometimes literally artificial. Near the conclusion of the video, the people around the fire grab at money which has been shot into the air like the interior of the Shoe Carnival coupon box. The music video ends with blue light emanating from glass blocks that passersby walk over, as if the show happened underground. But of course that is not where the show happens. The point of putting on the ritz is to showcase, to show out, an anachronistic man in white spats and an evening cape whirling around to a Jazz Era song remixed with an 80s synth beat.
Taco is unexpected: let that be stated. It seems so obvious to simply dismiss this dude as a joke, starting with the fact that the man’s name is TACO, for crying out loud. But before you mock him out for hauling up a song from 1927 and adding synth to give the ol’ one-hit-wonder wheel a whirl, it’s time to address the original chalupa in the room.
In a 2011 interview, Taco claims that his name is a popular Dutch name. When I pull up my old friends at Babynames.com, where I used to log in for years to read the boards of women posting about their VERY UNIQUE baby’s names (and frankly, sharing too many details about their lives; it was the first decade of the 2000s, everyone shared too much), the site just claims, flatly, “The name Taco is primarily a gender-neutral name of Spanish origin that means A Mexican Food Dish.”
Yowch.
But Taco’s name is, legit, TACO. Taco Ockerse was born in Jakarta, Indonesia to Dutch parents in 1955. Taco himself admits, “Outside of the Netherlands, my name is quite unique and has been the cause for many a surprise and smiles.” It isn’t a stage name, which is about the only non-performative thing I’ve been able to find about Taco, who founded his first band in 1979. His first couple of releases were unremarkable (including “Keiner gewinnt”—Taco’s German cover of Elton John’s “Nobody Wins”), and so, when asked “Why did you decide that you would record a cover of this song [“Puttin’ on the Ritz”] as your first single?” Taco replied, “At that time, I composed and sang rock, soul and blues songs. To get away from the German pop image, I had to come up with a radical new image.”
And yet for his “radical new image,” in a 2016 podcast interview, Taco names Klaus Nomi as said inspiration. “When I was thinking about image, [I knew I] needed to change and I had done a lot of theater, including Chicago. So I had the ‘20s in mind, saw Klaus Nomi and said ‘that’s exactly what I wanted, that space-y look…damn, he’s done it already!’ So I decided to stick to the extreme makeup and go with a tux.”
Taco goes on in the podcast to share, “They put out the single and did nothing for it. My dad in the fashion business and I opened a boutique together, and about half a year later I got a phone call asking if I’d do promotion in Sweden…I just had the single, [I was] at a club, the guys were in tuxedoes and I go out and go ‘okay, give em the glam’ and they made me sing it [“Puttin’ on the Ritz”] about five times and when I left Sweden, it had gold status—and I didn’t even have an LP!”
Taco’s version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, which consequently meant that Irving Berlin—95 years old in 1982—became the oldest living songwriter to have a song in the top ten. On Taco’s American tour, he reminisces, “They put me up in a house, in Bel Air, on the top of the hill! My premiere in the U.S. was at a private party in Los Angeles; Sammy Davis was a guest. It was mindboggling.”
Taco’s album After Eight has eleven songs, five of which are covers, including “Singin’ in the Rain,” “La Vie en La Rose,” and “Cheek to Cheek.” The whole old-song-revival thing was no schtick—or if it was, it was one to which Taco fully pledged himself. Watching the video for Taco’s cover of “Singin in the Rain,” I’m struck by how Taco made a similarly updated version to his cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”: there is electronic background noise, the video is clearly set in the 1980s and meant to look like a man performing a cover. But Taco commits fully, gesturing like an actor and belting the song out, making no vocal jokes.
When Taco revived this song, I didn’t know it was a revival. “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was released the year I was born so it would have already sounded like an old radio song when I’d have become aware of it; I cannot remember a time when “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was considered a “hit.” This was the 1980s, the era of Wall Street and greed-is-good and brash stock market profiteers striving to be like the old monopolist tycoons, but they built garish 80s Deco shells, not quality brownstones. I know how to tell good construction from bad, the difference between birch adjustable shelving and the burnished scratches on old oak. Puttin’ on the ritz is puttin’ on the glitz, which is to say glitter, which is to say something I assumed was invented in the 80s because it fit the showy fakeness. Glitter was actually invented in 1934.
I try to save some Easter eggs for my real ones here on Xness; I don’t want to keep telling you all the same bits of my history when I’m trying to convince you into a vote. After all, this is the fourth time I’ve come at you in this tournament: Great White’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” faded out early in March Shredness 2018; the New Kids on the Block/”Hangin’ Tough” made it to the Elite 8 in March Badness 2020 (do you even know how many GIFs I made for that essay?); and I still haven’t forgiven the Local H fans for killing Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” in the Sweet 16 during March Plaidness 2021.
I feel like I keep picking songs to defend—or movements, as I did with my extracurricular essays on Stabbing Westward and Mall Goths for March Vladness 2019 and on pop country covers by hitmakers being better than the songwriters’ originals for last year’s March Faxness, where I argued that effort should be rewarded more than the truth. In my tournament essays, I pointed out that “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” is about a groupie who turns the tables on the skeezer, trading up and onward. “Hangin’ Tough” is about hanging in there even though everyone thinks you won’t make it. “Only Happy When It Rains” takes grunge itself in Shirley’s black-nail-polished hand and says you want this? I’ll fucking mock it first.
Ah, here we are, at the core of why I keep picking these songs. Surely you’ve already made this connection.
Puttin’ on the Ritz is the performance of wealth by the old Gilded Age tycoons who rose from ignominy—because that could still happen back then; they’re the ones to whom Americans trace both bourgeois affectations and a good amount of generational wealth. Puttin’ on the Ritz is also a pair of Nurse Johnsons, the knock-off Doc Martens upon which my sister had hand-painted flowers and then convinced her friends were actually created by a hot new designer. Puttin’ on the Ritz is the unmatched Anthropologie pieces I bought off the sale rack—brown pants with a green silk ribbon at the waist and a pink sequined top—that I wore on New Year’s Eve 2005, certain I had completed the final act of class assimilation. I had grown up lower middle class but I’d been paying attention on how to appear otherwise. I spent several years packing my most expensive clothes before visiting my boyfriend’s parents’ house in one of the ritziest suburbs of Detroit because we weren’t engaged yet; every visit felt like SHOW TIME.
I have a feeling you might be familiar with “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from the movie Young Frankenstein. I wasn’t; I’d never seen this clip before researching for this essay. I’ll direct you to 1:57-3:36, but if you don’t feel like opening another tab, here’s my summary:

Young Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) brings out the Creature on a stage in front of a fancy audience. Offstage, someone begins the 1946 version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and Young Frankenstein and the Creature dance in tandem.

The performance is appreciated by the audience. The Creature is able to masquerade and presents an appearance of gentility and restraint, except when he opens up his mouth to say the line “putting on the ritz” and his malformed language jumbles through. There is a minor mishap near the end of the show when a footlight goes out and the Creature is thrown off. Because he is no longer performing, these well-dressed, well-heeled men and women in the audience begin throwing cabbages at the Creature. Young Frankenstein begs the crowd “not to humiliate him [the Creature],” but to no avail. The Creature jumps into the audience and a melee ensues.

The breakdown of the Creature’s façade reminds me so much of the moments in Southern Charm—a Bravo reality show I’ve been watching since 2014 which features old-money Charlestonians—when two of the cast members, Thomas Ravenel and Shep Rose, lose their polished veneer and the trash shows through. I’m taking editorial license—rooted in fact—to sketch a general description of both Ravenel and Rose as indulged boy-men, pampered by position.
It’s so thinly buried beneath the surface; you don’t realize how money puts a barely intuitable veneer of gentility over their true nature until you see the upper lip curl that comes out when Thomas or Shep has had too much to drink and their disdain for others mumbles through the alcohol and their faces change—you can actually see it; at least I’ve watched this show long enough that I can see it, a rat-faced narrowing, the reveal of bad manners that moneyed breeding merely masks.
I am just now realizing that Southern Charm is essentially an extended-play of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” all these rich people putting on airs, because every Thursday Bravo invites me to sit and watch the parade, which is the performance.
It’s still relevant, that’s the thing.
Taco kept workin’ his “Puttin’ on the Ritz” fame in the years after 1982, including three different “best of”/compilation albums called Puttin’ on the Ritz (1991 LP), Puttin’ on the Ritz (2001 CD), and Putting on the Ritz—no misspelling; this one exchanged the apostrophe for the “g”—a 2008 CD.
And then there is the 2017 “Puttin’ on the Ritz” remix.
Taco, a 62-year-old man in 2017, looks more like one of the old dudes on Park Avenue than ever now that he is old and (surely!) Botoxed. The video was filmed at a “Tribute to Fred Astaire” concert to promote an album called—let’s say it together—Puttin’ on the Ritz: A Tribute to Fred Astaire, which features tracks from a handful of other musicians, including Right Said Fred.
The video makes it appear as if the intention was to bring back the old glamour of the 20s, but it just looks like the saddest theme party ever. All the guests look super modern and there are all these details in the video that remind us it’s 2017, not the least of which is the back of the DJ’s Macbook laptop screen.
Taco’s not even saying anything anymore in this video, no characters representing the menace of the rich. Everyone is just having a wonderful time dancing in their finest. No social commentary whatsoever. Taco keeps smiling and grinning at the camera, digging into the growl of “puttin’ ONNNN the ritz.” I don’t want to see these 2017 faces. They look too modern, like Dakota Johnson in the 2022 Netflix version of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion.
I can’t help but contrast the 2017 video with, say, Taco’s 1984 live performance on ZDF/Sommernacht (German TV). Taco smiles but also makes eye gestures and eyebrow raises that seem to mock what he is saying. He dances alone, ostensibly inviting in the audience with hand gestures, but it’s a performance for himself.
We’re nearly at the end and I haven’t yet told you who the Ritz is behind The Ritz.
César Ritz was born in 1850, last in line behind twelve siblings, to a poor Swiss family. After years in hotel service as a waiter and hotel manager, Ritz finally worked his way up to hotelier. César Ritz established the renowned Ritz Hotel syndicate with the backing of Alfred Beit (the “richest man in the world”) in 1896, Ritz’s very name becoming a sobriquet for glamour. What was César’s credo? “See all without looking; hear all without listening; be attentive without being servile; anticipate without being presumptuous. If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked.”
Ritz was a man who knew that to class-ascend is to be quiet and lay low.
I wrote an entire book about this approach. I spent my adolescence watching everyone—boys and girls—and paying attention to the rules of etiquette because I believed that I could be the person I was supposed to be if I learned quietly. I could fit in anywhere even if I hadn’t gone to cotillion, if I learned those lessons myself in a kind of self-directed course guided by rules so outdated it breaks my heart when I remember how seriously I took them, reading the greats (Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Brontë) and thinking I could apply their rules to my own 1990s world.
I should have read The Custom of the Country but I didn’t get to the queen of rule knowing-and-breaking, Undine Spragg, until I’d given it all up.
That is not true; I have never given it up.
I should not be confessing these things to you, my peers whom I will encounter in the aisles of the AWP Bookfair, liking your posts on Twitter, requesting your books at my local library. I’ll have to answer for them someday. Being a memoirist is so weird because it is one long show, presenting oneself in one pose and then another, aware that anyone watching can tell that none of these positions are natural. That is why I return to Taco’s version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” a song celebrating the veneer, the put-on act, the performance to which we are invited to mix with Rockefellers walking with sticks or umbrellas in their mitts. The key word is INVITED, which is another word for INCLUDED.
Did you know Dodi Al-Fayed’s father bought The Paris Ritz in 1979?
I have been watching the most recent season of The Crown and there is an episode which introduces Dodi Al-Fayed but mostly focuses on Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed. The episode shows Mohamed as a poor-but-motivated young man, street-selling Coca-Cola bottles in Egypt before he marries up—marrying a rich girl he meets behind a gate through which Mohamed is not permitted access. Mohamed’s wife gives birth to Dodi, then the episode speeds forward to show that Mohamed has become a wealthy businessman. Mohamed offers to purchase The Ritz from a snooty Frenchwoman who considers Mohamed beneath her. Yet Mohamed gets the deal, and at the grand re-opening event for the Paris Ritz, Mohamed sees a Black server and tells Dodi to get the server out of the building because the server is Black. But when Dodi tells his father that the man—Sydney Johnson—was formerly the valet to the abdicated former king of England, Edward VIII, Mohamed calls Sydney into his office and asks Sydney to teach him how to be an English gentleman.
At the risk of being too obvious, I must mention that the scenes which follow Sydney’s rehiring as Mohamed’s new valet are a series of Mohamed being fitted for “different types of wear-a-day-coat, pants with stripes and cutaway coat, perfect fits.” At the risk of being too obvious, I have to point out that Mohamed Al-Fayed, once a Coca-Cola streetseller, literally BOUGHT THE RITZ but feared he didn’t look the part. Mohamed Al-Fayed, an actual billionaire, literally had to PUT ON THE RITZ.
It’s a tale as old as time (true as it can be): 1896, 1927, 1979, 1982, 2017. The affectation of the Ritz is always going to be entertainment. Vote Taco.

[1] Lulu Belle: a 1926 musical performed by Lenore Ulric in blackface, the character is “a black rowdy who sails away to Paris with a French vicomte”

Kristine Langley Mahler took three separate courses on the 1920s during undergrad and yet she still elides the era with the Gilded Age. Author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022) and A Calendar is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023), Kristine has never been to The Ritz, but she has definitely put it on. Watch her continue to do so at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.

jackie walchuk on the firm’s “radioactive”

Ah, the 80s. The era of the SuperGroup. And the super-est of them all, at least in my opinion, was The Firm. Made up of the greatest vocalist in rock, Paul Rodgers, who already had served his time in Free and Bad Company, and Jimmy Page, whose accolades and accomplishments hardly need to be restated here. But for those of you in the back, Jimmy Page was the Super upon whom other SuperGroups had already been founded, namely The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. So how could The Firm fail to produce one of the purest, most perfect SuperSongs of the time?
“Radioactive” has all the hallmarks of the era. It’s got a great bass hook and hits you with it immediately. Then comes Mr. Page and his oh so 80s Scratch and his wah wah pedal. Finally Mr. Rodgers appears with his smooth as velvet vocals that have just enough reverb on them to make them sound eerily robotic. He’s able to growl the lyrics, then soar with the Chris Slade powerpop beat. The whole tune is so darn catchy! Trust me, you’ll be singing this little earworm for the rest of the month.
Now let’s look at the lyrics…

Well I'm not uptight…Not unattractive…Turn me on tonight…'Cause I'm radioactive.

Mastery! “Turn me on tonight”! As a person or as a radio? “I’m Radioactive”! Oooh, I’m hot, could make you meltdown, but I’m also pop-ish enough to get that active radio airplay! Whoo! Well done, Mr. Rodgers! Well done indeed!
I had admired Misters Paul and Page for so long. I was so blissfully happy to have them working together. I LOVED The Firm, and played my little cassette constantly. But, alas, SuperGroups were not meant to last. They were usually a stopover hub between other destinations for uber-talented rockstars. The Firm was no different. They put out one more album after their self-titled first album, but Mean Business didn’t do quite as well as The Firm. I think that’s because they couldn’t quite find the right combination to strike the perfect balance that makes “Radioactive” the quintessential 80s SuperSong.

Jackie Walchuk stumbled upon the Final Four of March Fadness late in the game in 2022. She was very excited to learn that she could participate in this year’s contest as an essayist. An avid music fan, and a rabid Springsteen fan, she recently attended her 38th (give or take) Springsteen concert in Orlando Florida, her current hometown.