«Puttin’ on the Ritz,» written by Irving Berlin in 1929 and rewritten with new lyrics in 1946, is one of the defining songs of American high-society glamour, forever associated with top hats, tailcoats, canes, and a strutting, syncopated walk — an image cemented by Fred Astaire’s celebrated performance of the song in the 1946 film «Blue Skies.» By 1993, the song (and, for many listeners of the era, its 1982 electro-pop cover by the Dutch group Taco) was familiar enough in Russia to serve as an instant shorthand for a certain kind of gaudy, top-hatted, money-drenched fantasy of the good life — exactly the fantasy playing out in the narrator’s head as the taxi pulls away.
"Puttin' on the Ritz"
