How you know it's the Forties
Let's play a game. You're watching a film. It's set in the Forties, maybe during the war. The scene is a dance, but a cool one. People in their uniforms swinging each other round. A band with lots of trumpets. What song is playing?
You know the one. The song that always gets played when they want us to know it's the Forties.
Or it's the opera. They want to let you know it's the opera. A soprano. And it's that one song.
Weirdly, typing "that song they always use for the forties" or "opera ah ah ah ah ah song" into search doesn't cut it. Well, it does for the opera because there is actually a song called that. Opera, man. But not the song I'm looking for.
A Reddit Name That Song post describes it as "Opera that goes Ha hahahA HAha Haha Haaa....." which everyone will look at and know exactly what they mean. But the response didn't give the name, just a youtube link. Which is dead. Infuriating!
So I watched several compilations along the lines of 'top female arias' and eventually found Der Hölle Rache from The Magic Flute.
For the Forties song I found a list of 1940s swing songs and looked at a picture and thought, sure, it's got a lot of trumpets. And that was the one. First time! Sing, sing, sing by Benny Goodman.
Probably most people already knew this. Probably I should have asked one of them. But really I'm just interested in the ubiquity, the shorthand of it all.
There's an article The Dance Hall, Nazi Germany, and Hell: Accruing Meaning through Filmic Uses of Benny Goodman's “Sing Sing Sing”:
"Sing Sing Sing" operates as an instant sign of authenticity for the time and the characteristics of the time
It's on JSTOR, so anyone who has access to JSTOR, have fun.
That was a very satisfying half an hour solving some mysteries and learning new things.