Review Summary: If there was ever a figure that could honestly claim that “women wanted him and men wanted to be him,” it was Frank F*cking Sinatra.
If you really think about it Frank Sinatra is probably the coolest mother-f*cker in American music history. Sinatra was a man’s man in a time of uber-manliness, and if you take a look at his alleged mafia ties, (and by “alleged” we mean Mob bosses stayed at his house and worked with him to build Vegas), his gallivanting with JFK on their “let’s see who can bang the most random swell dames” trips, the fact the FBI followed him for 50 years but strangely never acted on anything, the fact Sinatra was thrown out of high school for being “lewd” and was actually once arrested as a teenager for railing some other dude’s wife, it’s pretty obvious he recognized the parlance of the time he was in and rode that advantage to its breaking point. All of these things add to the legend, the mystique, the feeling that makes you think “Frank mother-f*cking Sinatra” when you hear about him anywhere, any time. But they wouldn’t mean a damn thing without The Voice.
It’s the Voice that is beyond brilliant in its multi-faceted capabilities. Instantly recognizable, it has enormous power, a silky yet booming baritone that could simultaneously bring a grown man to tears while whirl-winding him to the bright lights of Vegas five seconds later. The Voice is perfectly acceptable in smoky barrooms littered with despondent drunks, in Ollie Stone movies (and a whole lot more), at funerals, at defining moments in life, in the life of the party and the consequential slow-down of the night. It’s the Voice that carries across generations, the one that ingrains itself into the souls of really old people and smattering young punks alike. Capable of summoning nostalgia regardless of age, it's might will take anyone that lets it home with little resistance. It would be pointless to talk about actual tracks on this album, and let’s face it; Frank has roughly 8,000 greatest hits albums, almost any of them classic. This is just one of them, and it’s a damn good one. The power of Frank doesn’t rely on what song you pick, what album you choose, or what situation you’re currently in. In the end, it doesn’t matter because Frank has you the second his epic gift from God graces your eardrums. If there was ever a figure that could honestly claim that “women wanted him and men wanted to be him,” it was Frank F*cking Sinatra. Even though it is utterly impossible for us to be as cool as he was, we might as well live vicariously through his legend, his catalog, his music, and what he was about. You might be a stranger to Frank, but when his music plays you couldn’t find a single stranger in a room of a thousand people, because everybody there knows exactly what is happening. Its Frank time, and in the annals of music it doesn’t get much cooler than that.
