second round

(5) Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
outglitzed
(4) Taco, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
320-211
and will play in the sweet 16

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 3/15/23.

BUHM BUHM: irene cooper on “tainted love”

The primary image is disembodied: me seeing me in the backseat of a rust-ruffled Ford Country Squire station wagon, aurally bathed in the subject of this essay. And isn’t that always at issue, this idea of being in or out of the body, or of realizing the Schrodinger state of being both in and out of the body until some practical, clinical asshole says different.

I am sixteen, July 17, 1982, and soon to be headed to Rio de Janeiro as a Rotary exchange student, when the synthpop single peaks at #8. It is entirely lost on me, though not for long, that I am to be released from the paranoid Catholic lockbox of my childhood into the technicolor (albeit still Catholic) extravaganza that (to my virgin eyes) is coastal Brasil.
I am not, at this point, a virgin by choice. In 1982, presumably straight Catholic boys in Queens are less tempted to sin than one might presume.
Gloria Jones records the original version of “Tainted Love” and releases it as a B side in 1965, the year of my birth. Jones re-records it in 1976, and includes it on the album Vixen, produced by her lover, glam rock icon Marc Bolan, of T. Rex. In choosing to cover the single, Soft Cell duo Marc Almond and David Ball cite Bolan, as well as the rough and ready UK Northern soul club scene—manifested in clubs such as Va in Bolton and Wigan Casino, which spin Black American soul music out of Chicago and Detroit almost exclusively—as major musical and aesthetic influences.
Soul. Glam. Industrial. Conceptual. Wowza.
And then there’s the video. WTF.

July 17, 1982, is seven months and six days away from Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, the final day of Carnival, the celebration that precedes Lent, the Catholic period of deprivation before Easter. Growing up in a predominantly Irish enclave in Queens, I understand the sere implications of Ash Wednesday. The absence of meat on Fridays, the giving up of one’s pleasures—be that chocolate or bread or alcohol or, secretly, masturbation—is an imitative martyrdom endemic to what I understand as faith, and subsequent redemption. Sacrifice is holy; just say no. Nothing comes before Lent, and Lent is always coming.
Plucked from the muffled greyscale grit of a Jacob Riis photograph, I would drop, that next February, into the psychedelia of a Pablo Amaringo painting, 3D and fully animated, sound up. During Carnaval do Brasil, parades of samba school dancers, strategically feathered and blindingly bedazzled, lead a six-day party in an ecstatic orgy of indulgence that almost requires the restorative promise of forty days of sobriety. It’s a suspension of reality, a free pass on no-holds-barred dancing, drinking, and sex that ceases, cleanly, according to doctrine, on the threshold of the most somber liturgical observance in Catholicism.
A week or so before Carnaval, I am travelling in the north, in the Amazonian city of Manaus, staying with friends of my Carioca (Rio de Janeiro-based) host family. I am seventeen and still, reluctantly, a virgin. The couple who has welcomed me into their home are in their twenties (perhaps the man is thirty), and new parents. The woman is preternaturally gorgeous, if visibly tired. The man smiles at me a lot, says, repeatedly, I should stay in the north for Carnaval.
The woman takes me aside at some point to warn me about lança-perfume. My Portuguese is not yet fluent, but I manage to get the gist of it: lança-perfume (akin to poppers) is a mix of ethyl chloride and scent, emitted from a pressurized canister and inhaled for a quick and short-lived rush. During Carnaval, it is not uncommon, the lovely woman tells me, for someone to sneak up on an unsuspecting (non-consensual) other party with a blast of lança-perfume. Along with the high, I learn many years later, ethyl chloride ingestion can result in arrythmia, diminished motor coordination, dizziness, drowsiness, slurring of speech, loss of feeling in the legs, and hallucination. I have yet, at seventeen, to hear the phrase, rape drug. It’s all in good fun, the madonna says. There’s a song about it. But I am made aware: giving oneself up to the moment is not necessarily an act of generosity; it can, instead, look and feel a lot like sacrifice. The lamb does not consent.

In the video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Marc Almond’s disembodied head leers over the cosmic boredom of a young man tormented with sleeplessness, subjected to the intrusion of fiery blue balls of light and the cage-dancing antics of two mudflap girl starlight demons more interested in each other than in him (though he is clearly, also, disinterested). Almond is Puck, is Mephistopheles, is a Pee Wee Herman’s evil cousin of a second-tier god, toying with the virgin, whose dream and subsequent awakening lie somewhere outside his closet of an apartment.
My own sexual awakening, unbeknownst to me, is concurrent with the emergence of what would be an epidemic of HIV and AIDS. I live in Houston after returning stateside from Rio. House of Pies in Montrose is more tenderly known as House of Guys. I work at a Stack ‘n Stash with Milton Doolittle. We sell fashionable doodads to organize one’s various closets. Still relatively recently deflowered, my worst case scenario involves herpes, maybe chlamydia, the odd crab. Milton, barely forty, eschews the clubs that yet pulse and throb with young men, is perpetually trying to quit smoking, and has a penchant for eating cold casseroles over the sink, despite intestinal troubles. He asks me to go with him to visit a friend in the hospital. Milton is afraid of hospitals. We bring a king-sized bag of M&Ms. A man who might have been young lies in a bed behind a curtain at the end of the ward. He is skeletal, and lesioned, and somehow funny, in his whisperings.
AIDS is wildfire and information is repressed, as it will be for years to come. There is medical infighting and a proprietary tussle between western nations over research of a disease that is not being mitigated, let alone championed.
In July 1982, Terry Higgins dies, the first acknowledged British casualty of AIDS. In 1982, AIDS is still widely held to be a Gay disease, a reckoning for a tainted love contained to a so-called deviant population.
In September 1982, the Tylenol Murders terrorize Chicago. In December 1982, surgeons perform the first heart transplant into a human, who lives 112 days. Also in December, Time’s “Man of the Year” is not a man, but a computer. By 1982, everything is or will be tainted: the water, the air, and of course, love. We know a kid one block over who jumps to his death, full of yearning and poisoned hope. Occasionally, a leaking body is found in the trunk of an abandoned car in the Kmart parking lot, across from the tennis courts. A ninth grade girl goes into labor in the stairwell of the E wing of the junior high school. Purity, in respect to that which is untainted and untouched, is not a thing, and certainly not a thing to be confused with innocence, a state of being wholly separate from inexperience. Innocence, in our case, does not preclude knowledge, but absorbs it, transcends it. Aspirationally, to be innocent is not to be unbroken, but to live joyously in defiance of the caustic drippings of those legacies that would make broken our only signifier.

New Zealander singer-songwriter Lorde’s 2021 cover image for her album Solar Power celebrates this kind of freedom with the depiction, photographed from below, of her very own taint, a slang term for the part of the body defined as the area of sensitive skin between the genitals (scrotum or vagina) and the anus; the perineum. Taint this, taint that. Tis, though.
For release in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the image of Lorde’s taint is obscured by a sunburst. Sunlight is, for all purposes, shining right out her ass. “[H]oly light,” one Weibo user in China suggested. And indeed, the image recalls the prominent print of a crucifix emitting heavenly light that hung in my grandmother’s boarding house.
Taint obscured or in full view, Lorde’s cover reads unavoidably wholesome. Is this a generational shift, this sun-kissed embrace of oneself? But then I remember all the beautiful men and women on Ipanema beach, back in 1982, a slip of lycra to keep the sand out of the bits, bodies burnished and glowing and turning to and loved by the sun; me in my second-hand maillot, prim as a pre-Vatican II habit, shame-splotched patches of exposed Irish-Scottish flesh blistering at the suggestion of freedom and vitamin D. Love and light (as in sunlight—not neon, not dashboard, not the cloaked glow of a streetlamp) was not how I experienced, or how I believed I could experience, love. I thought (I may yet think): One must be seeded and grow in the sun to be of the sun.  

Voiced by Almond, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” is an exaggerated wink at the indulgences and excesses of the moment, a pleather-chapped nose-thumbing to the would-be utopians of the previous decade. You can smell the cocaine, it’s been said. Jones’ earlier, arguably more soulful rendition is plaintive. She’s got to—buhm-buhm—get away. In Soft Cell’s video, while the young man does indeed flee the teasing of the two curvaceous star-figures, it feels less like an escape and more like a rejection of a heteronormative fantasy.
In the 1980s, Pee Wee Herman, aka, Paul Reubens, animates Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A childlike jester, Pee Wee embodies both innocence and bedevilment. Never sinister, Pee Wee yet emits a whiff of grown-up naughtiness, an awareness that is both costumed in and elucidated through heavily made-up character. Truth and complexity otherwise inexpressible can sometimes breathe through the veil of entertainment, the arena within which such dichotomies of innocence and knowing are allowed. But only within. Without the suit and the bowtie and the makeup, there’s just Paul Reubens, getting arrested in Florida for lewd conduct—reportedly masturbating in a pornographic theater, which was presumably pretty dark and likely hosting other people engaged in similar behavior. Gay, as Black, is an acceptable anomaly in entertainment: a costume, a stage persona, acceptable—celebrated—as long as it remains contained to the arena. Self-love: Tainted love.
Unless the situation calls for a pariah. Should anyone be tempted to confuse the popularity of the resurrected Queer Eye as evidence of widespread social progressiveness, the father of the man who shoots up the LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs in 2022 provides a reality check when he tells the press that he thanks his god his son wasn’t in the club to dance, that he wasn’t infected with the gay. Whew.

Other covers of “Tainted Love” include recordings by Marilyn Manson (2001) and by Spanish cover band Broken Peach (2021). The latter, especially recorded for Halloween, features three zombie insane asylum patients playing guitar, bass, and drums, along with three zombie nurses performing vocals. The undead: Tainted love.
Broken Peach’s version mixes in riffs from Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and what one YouTube commenter identified as the intro from German hard rock’s Rammstein’s Deutschland. Controversy exists over whether Rammstein’s philosophy is, as the band maintains, left wing; or if it promotes, as some critics insist, a right wing national agenda, the very agenda that manifested the Holocaust. Nationalism, as Fundamentalism: Tainted love.
In an interview with fellow Soft Cell member Dave Ball, Marc Almond talks about their efforts at the onset of the endeavor to turn their art school, multi-media aspirations into something commercially attractive. Almond uses the term, Industrial Cabaret. Ball suggests they were after an amalgam of Northern soul + Kraftwerk; Almond chimes in that maybe they were more like Kraftwerk meets Judy Garland—Kraftwerk being the iconic pioneers of electronic pop.
The original members of Kraftwerk (trans., power plant), Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, cite influences from German Expressionism including film directors Fritz Lang (Metropolis), and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), as well as architects of future-focused and unsentimental movements such as New Objectivism and Bauhaus. The period after World War I and before World War II was, for Germany, a highly creative and artistically dynamic moment, and not a naïve one. No one didn’t know trouble lay ahead. But some artists and thinkers tried to stem it.
Of Kraftwerk’s ambitions later in the century, Simon Reynolds of NPR Music writes, “Kraftwerk were inventing the '80s…Crucially, it was music stripped of individualized inflection and personality, no hint of a solo or even a flourish. ‘We go beyond all this individual feel…We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine.’”
Reynolds talks about riding in a car on the actual Autobahn between the Black Forest and Cologne,  listening to Kraftwerk’s music: “It might have been…‘Autobahn’ itself—I had to [BUHM-BUHM] turn my face away and look fixedly out of the window to hide my tears. I’m not sure why the music, so free of anguish and turmoil, has this paradoxical effect. But…[it has] to do with what Lester Bangs called the ‘intricate balm’ supplied by the music itself: calming, cleansing, gliding along placidly yet propulsively, it's a twinkling and kindly picture of heaven.”
Gloria Jones is at the wheel when Marc Bolan dies in a car accident at 29. Clean, self-propelling machines that they are, Schneider and Hütter travel from venue to venue by touring bike. By July 17, 1982, I have no taste for sloppy tragedy or fresh air utopia, but I crave, oh, how I crave, the inflection. How I ache for flourish.

Despite Soft Cell’s spoken aspirations to the likes of Kraftwerk, something is most definitely lost (or scuttled) in translation. There is no heaven in Soft Cell’s driving “Tainted Love.” I do not cry in the backseat of the station wagon (going nowhere), nor do I feel cleansed. Technically pure, I am scoured, too, by the scraping losses of the seventies, and broken enough to let in a kind of joy, even innocence, forged in ruin, sharp as Eliot’s shards, crusted in last night’s cocaine shared among last night’s friends and lovers at the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that is 1982, if I can make my way to the right dimly lit place, away from the basements and fluorescent sprawl and mall-infested interstates of suburban paranoia. Love is all there is, teases the emcee through the greasepaint, and isn’t it resplendent, tainted through and through.
Touch me, Baby, please.

Irene Cooper is the author of Found, crime thriller noir set in Colorado, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family, & spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, & elsewhere. Irene is co-founder of The Forge writing program & Blank Pages Workshops. She teaches in community & supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, & lives with her people & Maggie in Oregon. irenecooperwrites.com

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.