ABSTRACT
The accordion occupies an odd, marginalized position in American musical culture. Perhaps more than any other instrument the accordion always sounds its connections to ethnicity, on the one hand, and schlocky kitsch on the other. Since the mid-1950s, the image of the accordion in popular culture has been dominated, even stereotyped, by Lawrence Welk and Myron Floren, whose work managed to combine folk tunes, popular songs, and transcriptions of European classical music. In more recent years, it is still in the peculiar corners of commercial popular music that one encounters the accordion. Weird Al Yankovic, for instance, builds on the Welk stereotype and lampoons Top 40 hits by rewriting the lyrics and accompanying himself on solo accordion, the ultimate musical insult. The Knack’s “My Sherona,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and Madonna’s “Into the Groove” became “My Bologna,” “Eat It,” and “Into the Nude,” all of which received considerable radio airplay in the 1980s. Nirvana’s melancholy ballad “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam” uses accordion as primary accompaniment, utterly without spoof, bestowing the instrument with an unusual dignity. The accordion as a sometime country & western instrument has been utilized with great gusto by k.d. lang and the reclines on her album Angel With A Lariat (1987). lang and co-composer Ben Mink faintly recall the accordion’s link to European cabaret on lang’s Ingenue (1992), her song cycle of unrequited lesbian love. The final track on this CD is “Constant Craving,” the Grammy Award-winning single that features a prominent musical “hook” on the accordion.
