Rock has rarely known a performer so affectionately and self-consciously obsessed with the mechanism of pop and the apparatus of stardom as Bryan Ferry. These Foolish Things is an inspired chronicle of his passion, from the Broadway show tune which provides the title to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." But, unlike David Bowie's Pin Ups or the Band's Moondog Matinee, this album is neither an effort to pay homage to an era nor a chronicle of the singer's past. Instead, Ferry attempts to discover a contemporary context for the matinee idol — in the role of pop singer — and to validate an aesthetic mythology which began, long before Elvis Presley, on the stage, in the movies and with the big bands.

Ferry knows better than most singers with an interest in rock theatrics that there is an older and broader tradition into which rock fits; it bothers him not at all that that tradition's original expression was dramatic rather than musical. Ferry is interested in using his music to project an identity; more than any other current singer, he delves into the showbiz atmosphere of the Thirties and Forties, not only for material (as Bette Midler and the Pointer Sisters have overdone) but also for his persona. Against the rock star's usual fascination with the music of urban and rural blacks, or that of unsophisticated country whites, he sets a fascination with cosmopolitan, mainstream pop. He also knows that the trappings of cinema and the theater — props, costumes, dialogue—are not, as too many theatrical rockers suppose, what gave earlier culture heroes their power. Ferry knows that Errol Flynn's swashbuckling, Clark Gable's suavity, Frank Sinatra's romanticism were threads in a seamless tradition of which Presley and Jagger's overt eroticism is merely the most recent part. His genius is to be able to encompass all of it — Sinatra's romanticism with Presley's hip wriggle, Jagger's demonic glee with Flynn's blustering heroism. So, like the big-band leaders who were forced off the stand by rock's arrival, he wears a tuxedo (and a slight, modish sneer) onstage. Then, as if to reassert that it isn't clothes which make the idol, he wears a simple T-shirt on this album cover and remains as debonair as Gable in a hand-tailored suit.

But most of these songs aren't taken from that earlier tradition: Almost every one of them will be familiar to even casual rock and pop fans. Ferry has greater scope than any other contemporary singer, though; he moves easily from the avant-rock of Roxy Music (with whom he regularly performs) to the pop songs here: a show tune, an Elvis oldie, a Beach Boys smash, a Motown standard. His range encompasses both art and trash, not to mention trashy art (look at Roxy Music's album covers) and arty trash (look at this one).

Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," for instance, is presented, simultaneously, as a joke, a piece of nostalgia, a serious statement and a hit. (It made Number One in England last year.) It would be futile and silly to measure this version against Dylan's, however; Ferry brings an approach the author couldn't. When the lyrics ask, "What did you hear my blue-eyed son?," Ferry decorates the answer with sound effects that deflate Dylan's sometimes pretentious, overwrought imagery nicely. His exaggerated phrasing, which throughout the album threatens to become (though much more successfully) as grotesque as Dylan's singing on Planet Waves, adds another note of irony. But the music is full of hooks; like all great rock, it demands to be heard.

Ferry flirts with camp constantly. But the Seventies camp idea is basically a reactionary one — it resists precisely the kind of novelty and innovation Ferry works toward. He is only able to avoid the pitfall of nostalgia by singing songs for which we all feel, even more than affection, commitment. The difference between Ferry's "Sympathy for the Devil" and Rod Stewart's "Street Fighting Man" is the difference between the approach of a pop intellectual and that of a Rolling Stones fan.

"Sympathy" has always been recorded with, if not seriousness, at least earnestness. Ferry delineates its essentially ironic pose, both by using an electronic big band (reminiscent of Roxy Music) and by drawing the lyrics forward with his overemphasized phrasing, so that we can see the slightly corny, vaguely ridiculous tenor of them. Yet, this isn't a dismissal of the calamities enumerated; this version is horror-flick scary; You know you'll recover, but you're not sure when. Still, six ironic minutes are half-again too many, the track could use a good edit.

The impulse of "Sympathy," like so much else Ferry does, is dramatic. On the Beach Boys' epic ballad, "Don't Worry Baby," the original anxiety (Can I win the race?) is intensified until it's almost unbearably spooky. The strings and female chorus (used much more sentimentally than song-writer Brian Wilson could have afforded to in 1965) don't mock the terror, though; they accentuate it. The most casual fears are made to seem most significant, the kind of everyday wisdom in which Wilson specialized. Ferry understands, of course, that this song, like the rest, was not intended so self-consciously. But he knows he's good enough to get away with taking each of them to its limit.

Whenever necessary, his subtly absurd vocal style allows him to remain aloof. Even if "I Love How You Love Me" moved you to tears when you were 16, it's not acceptable to act so ingenuously when you're 25. It's nice to get a whiff of the original emotion, though, and Ferry has managed both, through skillful if occasionally mannered singing and arranging.

The album's focus, like the focus of pop and its heroes, is fantasy and illusion. "You won't see me," he sings, then fantasizes—rather than a legitimate, confessional self — several, possibly more interesting, others: the devil; the weird, dislocated observer in "Hard Rain"; the square in "Baby I Don't Care"; Smokey Robinson's sorrowful clown in "Tracks of My Tears"; the hotrod racer in "Don't Worry Baby"; the broken-hearted adolescent of "It's My Party"; the broken-hearted sophisticate of "These Foolish Things"; the ecstatic lover of "Loving You Has Made My Life Sweeter than Ever." Strangely enough, this confusing array builds an ever-stronger notion of the man who presents it. Ferry is reintroducing us to our own popular musical culture, in a new way: not as "oldies," but as something like history. These songs matter as more than memories, and listening to Ferry sing them is the best way to find out why.

Ultimately, by masking himself with this odd pastiche of trash and tapestry, Ferry reveals everything. His voguish dalliance with potentially trivial artifacts, like Humphrey Bogart's hard-guy shell, lets us focus on the part of the man for which we can care. For me, the measure of his success is Smokey Robinson's "Tracks of My Tears." When he sings my favorite lines by my favorite songwriter — "My smile is my make-up/1 wear since my breakup with you" — he reminds us that this is true not only of pseudostoic, lovelorn romantics but also of every jumbled media hero we ever knew. Bryan Ferry may come to stand with them, because he knows that simple secret and expresses it so perfectly. (RS 167)

DAVE MARSH