“Moon
of Alabama” (“Alabama Song”)
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performers:
Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, 1927
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
Performers:
Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, 1930
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Lotte Lenya, 1930
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
David Bowie, 1978
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Marianne Faithfull
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Nina Hagen, 1992
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Nina Simone
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
David Bowie, 2002
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Ute Lemper
Composers:
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Performer:
Audra McDonald
Listening
yesterday to over 10 versions of Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s central song
in their Sprechstimme operetta, The Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg
und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), I realized that this just pre-Hitler
work (the music was composed in the late 
1920s), was
perhaps the culmination of the Weimar Republic’s cynical visions of the need
for alcohol, love, and, most importantly, money. There has never been a more
cynical song, particularly in its bid of goodbye to the “moon over Alabama,”
which remains also simply a beautiful ballad. It’s song that you can hate and
love equally, yet you want to listen to over and over again. And apparently
anyone, with a good voice and the guts to perform such a raunchy piece, has
attempted it.
Lotte Lenya, the original singer, still
sounds best to me, with her raspy German cabaret voice; she was after all the
composer’s wife, a perfect interpreter, which, in one recording, Weill performs
alongside her. But you can’t not love David Bowie’ (two performances of which I
have included, although I wish he might have kept the original lyrics, with the
pretty boys instead of pretty girls, given his own sexual ambiguity), Marianne
Faithfull’s, and Audra McDonald’s later performance of it.
Nina Simone tunes it down, actually using
the Sprechstimme techniques to tell the story of the early choruses, before
suddenly breaking into her wonderful renditions of the “Moon of Alabama”
interjections. She’s also such a wonderful pianist that she can torture all the
dissonance out of the song. The Doors’ version may be one of the best! And Ute Lemper is always the best interpreter of Weill songs that one can imagine. Nina Hagen does an almost drag version, which is perhaps not a
bad interpretation of the women who want whiskey, pretty boys, and dollars as
fast as they can get them—or they will die:
Oh,
show us the way to the next whiskey bar!
Oh
don't ask why,
Oh
don't ask why!
For
we must find the next whiskey bar
For
if we don't find the next whiskey bar,
I
tell you we must die!
Oh
moon of Alabama
We
now must say goodbye
We've
lost our good old mamma
And
must have whiskey
Oh,
you know why.
Oh
show us the way to the next pretty boy!
Oh
don't ask why
Oh,
don't ask why!
For
we must find the next pretty boy
For
if we don't find the next pretty boy
I
tell you we must die!
Oh
moon of Alabama
We
now must say goodbye
We've
lost our good old mama
And
must have boys
Oh,
you know why.
Oh
show us the way to the next little dollar!
Oh
don't ask why,
oh
don't ask why!
For
we must find the next little dollar
For
if we don't find the next little dollar
I
tell you we must die!
Oh
moon of Alabama
We
now must say goodbye
We've
lost our good old mama
And
must have dollars
Oh,
you know why.
This
is a world in which everything important of the past has died, and the
survivors expect that they won’t survive either, the fact of which, obviously
was borne out in Hitler’s World War II destructions of his own people; yet
here, the same fate is projected onto the American experience.
It’s utterly
amazing to me how such a truly ugly view of the world is rendered tragically
beautiful in Kurt Weill’s version, with its memory of the moon of Alabama
constantly vying with the terrible demands of human sexuality, drugs, and their
need of money. This song is a lesson in human failure and depravity without
consigning its singers to Hell. No American-born writer could possibly write
such a remarkable piece of music, I am certain. It came right out of the raw
Weimar experience, even though it pretends to be in a fantasy America somewhere
between Alaska and Alabama.
Los Angeles,
February 27, 2018
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