"What Is This Thing Called Love?": Cole Porter and the Rhythms of Desire - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Ronald Schleifer

   My story is much too sad to be told,
   But practically ev'rything leaves me totally cold.
   The only exception I know is the case
   When I'm out on a quiet spree
   Fighting vainly the old ennui
   And I suddenly turn and see your fabulous face.

   I get no kick from champagne.
   Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all,
   So tell me why should it be true
   That I get a kick out of you.
   Some get a kick from cocaine.
   I'm sure that if I took even one sniff
   That would bore me terrific'ly too
   Yet I get a kick out of you.
   I get a kick ev'ry time I see
   You're standing there before me.
   I get a kick though it's clear to me
   You obviously don't adore me.
   I get no kick in a plane.
   Flying too high with some guy in the sky
   Is my idea of nothing to do,
   Yet I get a kick out of you. (122)

When Porter first wrote this song, he named Mrs. Lindbergh in the last section, but the kidnaping of the Lindbergh child--a "contingency" with a vengeance--led him to rewrite those verses and transform its proper names to generic names. Originally, he wrote:

   I get no kick in a plane.
   I shouldn't care for those nights in the air
   That the fair Mrs. Lindbergh goes through
   But I get a kick out of you.

Such a transformation repeats the musical transformation from the specificities of minor to the general unmarked major Porter effects at the end of "I Get a Kick out of You" and, as I shall argue, "What Is This Thing Called Love?"

In this song, Porter defines desire against boredom--ennui, total coldness, nothing to do, or simply going through the motions. The rhythms of the song are interesting, precisely in the ways they syncopate going through the motions. The structure of the refrain follows a regular 16-bar construction, the chord progression [E.sup.b]-Cm-Fm7-[B.sup.b]7 found in such standard tunes as Kern's "Blue Moon" or "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." But Porter syncopates the chord progression by beginning a conventional series in the middle, and displacing the C minor chord to G minor, the minor related to the tonic [E.sup.b], so that the chords progress Fm7-[B.sup.b]7-[E.sup.b]-Gm, ending the 16-bar riff on G minor, except for the end where the song sustains the [E.sup.b] major.

Similarly, the song syncopates the musical line, playing 3/2 triplets against the song's two-beat measures in 5 of the 16 bars of the refrain, starting the last musical phrase on the last beat of the twelfth bar rather than in the thirteenth bar, and transforming the rhythm of the bridge to the almost waltzlike quality of its sustained notes.

The lyrics are syncopated in their rhymes as well. In addition to the repeated, internal rhymes--"alcohol" /"all"; "if" / "sniff"; "high" /"sky"; (and "care" / "air" of the Lindbergh version)--in two of the three verses Porter adds an additional internal rhyme based on syllables not words, /rif/ of "terrific'ly," and /I/ of "idea." He also had added the "fair Mrs. Lindbergh" rhyming with "care" and "air," but the earlier discarded version lacked the wit of rendering the contingencies of sound into the necessities of meaning. My favorite of these is the semantics of /rif/, which allows Porter to import a musical term sounded in terrific'ly's syllable. But my point is that the song syncopates lyrics as well as musical line and musical structure in order to achieve a rhythm of desire. Even "kick" does this, by equating, metonymically, the "thrill" of champagne, cocaine, and flying, with the different kind of "thrill" of encountering the face of the other, the thrill of desire.