The deadly anxiety of “keeping up with the times” drives the army of piano-owners to the music stores to see what is “going” now, and of course it is the Yiddish moron music that is going, and so another home and eventually another neighborhood is inoculated.
But there is no popularity. Take any moron music addict you know and ask him what was the “popular” song three weeks ago, and he will not be able to tell. These songs are so lacking in all that the term “popular” means as regards their acceptableness, that they die overnight, unregretted. Directly the Yiddish manufacturers have another “hit” to make (it is always the public that is “hit”) a new song is crammed down the public gullet, and because it is the “latest,” and because the Yiddish advertisements say that it is a “hit,” and because the hired “pluggers” say that everybody is singing it, that song too becomes “popular” for its brief period, and so on through the year. It is the old game of “changing the styles” to speed up business and make the people buy. Nothing lasts in the Yiddish game—styles of clothing, movies nor songs; it is always something new, to stimulate the flow of money from the popular pocket into the moron music makers’ coffers.
There hasn’t been a real “popular” song of Yiddish origin since the Jewish whistlers and back-alley songsters of New York’s East Side undertook to handle musical America—not one, unless we except in genuine gratitude George Cohan’s “Over There”, a song which came out of a period of strain and went straight to the people’s heart.
Two facts about the “popular song” are known to all: first, that for the most part it is indecent and the most active agent of moral miasma in the country, or if not the most active, then neck and neck with the “movies”; second, that the “popular song” industry is an exclusively Jewish industry. But the inside story of the operation of this control of the people’s music presents other facts which the people ought to know, and these additional facts will appear in another article.