So Square It's Almost Hip

Yeah, here's another of those weird posts that's a bit out of a lot of people's comfort zones.

Happy Days and Lonely Nights (1954)

This is the really square shit that your white bread grandparents listened to while the  meatloaf cooked and the TV was only in black and white and brought to you by cigarettes. And on that black and white set weekly would come the Perry Como Show the ultimate bland as vanilla, non-threatening, oatmeal flavored, cardigan wearing motherfucker as ever crooned a smooth pop song.
A man who made Lawrence Welk seem edgy.

And one of the acts that would regularly grace this beige fandango was the Fontane Sisters. A trio of moderately attractive young ladies who swung lightly without the lurid gyrations of concurrent rock and rollers and whom you might consider bringing home to meet your mother so they could share jello mold recipes.

Adorable (1955)

But then I find something kind of fascinating about this stuff. It's a time capsule.

And various flips reveal non-hip people aping hipness and failing, but in the same moment achieving another level of hipness in how absolutely square it ultimately becomes. This is just about as white as you can be before becoming translucent and in that there's a certain purity of form.

The B-side here is the winner with a nod to beatnik patois and a song called "Daddy-O"

Seventeen (1955)

This is my personal favorite of this trio of singles because nothing says teenage quite like a song written by a professional middle aged songwriters. It's a toe tapper.

Put it in context against a contemporary Elvis track and you can begin to imagine how raw and primitive his early material must have seemed to the teens of the day.

I like both.