Back a number of years two successful songwriters known as Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, propelled by the conviction that the typical popular song could be classified as somewhere between ridiculous and ghastly, put out a book of songs burlesquing the lyric and melodic conventions of Tin Pan Alley. This collection included such masterpieces of lyric vacuity as the following lines:

"Love is like a rose

That grows and grows and grows.

I don't know what a dove is like,

I only know that love is like

A rose."

In those days, this was satire. Today, however, a song called "For Sentimental Reasons" is just fading out after about ten weeks of huge popularity, and both in its lyrics and its music it has "Love Is Like a Rose" all beat, right down the scale from conventionality to absurdity.

Don't point the finger of blame at the low taste of the public. Unjustly but firmly, it has been aimed there by publishers and songwriters, who have set up certain criteria as to "what will sell." According to them, only the most simple tunes and elemental hackneyed lyrics will sell, so a public that has lots of nickels and likes to listen to the radio and go out dancing gets nothing better and settles for what it gets. When something original and interesting comes along, such as "It Might As Well Be Spring," it usually outsells all the others, but the tinkling of the each rolling in remains unheard by publishers and song-writers in their mad effort to turn out "For Sentimental Reasons" a hundred times a year. The deaf sport is in Tin Pan Alley's car, not the public's.

A dearth of talent makes the situation worse. If tomorrow a call went out from the publishers for sophisticated, original songs, they probably would get few more than their current annual handful. During the twenties, which started off with Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern already established, every year or two along came new talent such as the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and Vincent Youmans. Suddenly the rain stopped, and today, with occasional exceptions, Rodgers, Berlin, and Porter write the best songs and the biggest hits. Kern, Gershwin, and Youmans are dead: the others can't write music forever. Somebody new had better come along, if only for sentimental reasons.