Irving Berlin wrote well over 1,000 songs during his 60-year career. Many are now standards that we hear frequently, a list headed by the all-time No. 1 holiday tune, “White Christmas,” and the patriotic number that’s more popular than the national anthem, “God Bless America.”
Most of his output is forgotten today, but every once in while one gets dusted off. “God Bless America,” for example, written near the end of World War I but mothballed until the outbreak of World War II, had paled in popularity by the Vietnam era. The Philadelphia Flyers kept it alive in the ’70s by playing it instead of the national anthem before tough home games, but 9/11 fully revived it when lots of baseball teams played it during the seventh-inning stretch. The New York Yankees still do.
“When That Man Is Dead and Gone” was another topical Berlin song, written in 1941 – before the U.S. entered the war, but two years after Adolph Hitler attacked Poland. Berlin didn’t have to use his name in the lyrics – everyone know who he was talking about even without the line about “Satan in a small mustache.” Long before Hitler’s life ended in his bunker, people were anticipating the party his death would trigger.
Once the war ended, that should have been the end of it, but the parallels with another egomaniacal strongman are obvious, and Lizzy and the Triggermen, a 10-piece big band from Los Angeles took advantage. Opera-trained vocalist Lizzy Shapiro added it to the band’s playlist during Trump’s first term, but it was only recently that it went viral on social media. It really exploded last week, when Paul Krugman linked to it on his substack.
I think the song took off because Trump’s declining health has made people long more than ever for his demise. His death will trigger the most jubilant street party the country has seen since the end of World War II, and the anticipation is palpable.
Shapiro started the band back in 2015 with jazz trombonist Dan Barrett, who played with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. While the style is big-band swing, many of their tunes are Shapiro-penned originals, like “Out of Your League.”
