Sinatra, like a lot of famous people that have become famous for reasons that aren't really quite true to themselves, is famous for all the wrong reasons. I was first exposed to Sinatra because he's a classic. My parents never exposed to him, my friends never listened to him, but he's out there enough in the world in the music of TV and movies, that sooner or later you get to hear Sinatra and you get hooked into his sound.
That's the thing that Sinatra is famous for, his sound. It's something that is one of a kind, something that you can't forget, and something that a lot of people have tried to replicate, but have never quite duplicated. The sound is what grabbed me and dragged me in, and then what got me to stay was the dirty old man that was hiding behind those lyrics.
He wore a suite and tie to every performance. He was clean cut and clean shaven. If you're not paying attention and know what you're doing he looks like the 'good ol' performers' of a lost generation. If you're cautious you'll start playing I Get A Kick Out of You, and not hear what he's actually saying during certain verses (hint in some versions (which I can't find) he has a section all about cocaine not giving him a kick). But then you stop, you hear his lyrics of songs that you thought you once understood, and you start to realize that Sinatra is not the poster boy for being a clean cut, stand up guy, but is in fact, one of history's dirty old men that managed to hide the dirty, ugly part of their lives from the history books.
Sinatra falls in line with Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other greats that have spotted history with their talent. They're known for being great at what they did, and it's true that what they did was amazing, and it's so amazing that it even overshadows the darker side of the history book where our historical people are rude, crude, racist, sexist, and just generally dirty old men.
The test for finding out if someone can be classified as a dirty old man is this simple rule of thumb - if they did everything that they did in their life, now, what would the reaction be? If Chaucer wrote the way he wrote, with the same polarizing style, with the same progressive approach towards everything and the complete disrespect of everything while doing it, what would the result be? If these greats still did everything the same, but just put it in a different time period, what would the result be? Typically, for a true dirty old man candidate the results typically would end them up in jail, if not be politically shunned from main stream media because of their fringe beliefs.The only tricky part of classifying the dirty old men as dirty old men is that once you see it, and once you understand them as such, trying to convince people around you that what they think are pure and innocent aren't.
Sinatra is a voice that I love to hear, and I love to appreciate, and I love it all the more because every time I listen to him I hear the dirty old man singing and I love him for being that dirty, raunchy, perverted old man, but everyone around me only sees him as the clean cut lounge singer that can do no harm.
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