L-R: Janis Siegel, Tim Hauser, Cheryl Bentyne and Alan Paul.

It’s hard to be just plain daggy these days. Thanks to the internet, the most banal and ephemeral moments in pop culture are archived for all to discover. And often, they’re championed by new fans for whom an arch appreciation of dagginess has become cultural discernment. A prime example is the blog of awkward found-video footage, Everything Is Terrible!

Then there’s Yacht Rock. Created by JD Ryznar in 2005, this online video series finds comedy in the imaginary personal and professional rivalries of American soft-rock artists of the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was loads of intertextual fun for existing fans of the Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross, Loggins and Messina, Hall and Oates, Chicago, Steely Dan, Toto and the Eagles.

But it also put back on the coolsie radar the lush, commercial music that alt-rock fans had previously snubbed. Ryznar didn’t just give ’smooth music’ a catchy name; he provided it with an instantly recognisable iconography: Hawaiian shirts; aviator shades; captain’s hats; sunbleached California foreshores and marinas.

The debates that followed Yacht Rock’s mainstreaming revealed a certain defensiveness over taste. It became important to claim a pre-existing ‘authentic’ appreciation of daggy things – thus, transforming dagginess into coolsiness and remaking forgotten mainstream heroes as alt-gods. The now-departed Stylus magazine used to stage this sort of cultural-capital-flaunting re-evaluation with its “Bluffer’s Guides” and its series, “The Diamond”, on albums that have sold over 10 million copies.

Still, certain daggy phenomena appear to have escaped both mocking ironisation and defensive lionisation. They just get ignored. They are absolutely uncool… they are hipster-proof. In this column, we’ll be suggesting some possible candidates for this increasingly eroded corner of popular culture.

"Rrrra-ta-DAH-ta-DAH!"

First up, the Manhattan Transfer. They’re best known in Australia for their version of ‘Chanson D’Amour’, which hit number one in the Aussie charts in 1977, but this New York vocal quartet have been plying their trade since 1972, and released their most recent album, The Chick Corea Songbook, in 2009.

They are the brainchild of bass singer Tim Hauser, who as a teenager had been in a doo-wop group called the Criterions. After the breakup of the first, five-piece incarnation of the Manhattan Transfer, Hauser was moonlighting as a New York taxi driver; soprano Laurel Massé was one of his passengers. Her boyfriend was a Broadway musician who’d worked on Grease with tenor Alan Paul. Hauser met alto Janis Siegel through a mutual friend who was a drummer.

This lineup recorded three studio albums (The Manhattan Transfer, Coming Out and Pastiche), plus a live album, before Massé was in a terrible car crash in 1978 that necessitated her jaw being wired shut for three months. Afterwards, she quit the group. The remaining members moved to California, where they recruited Cheryl Bentyne. This new lineup recorded two more albums, Extensions and Mecca For Moderns, that saw them moving further towards jazz. In 1981, the Manhattan Transfer made music history by winning Grammy Awards in both pop and jazz categories.

Since then, they’ve dabbled with swing, doo-wop, world music and orchestral albums, but their specialty is a brand of jazz they dubbed “vocalese”, which sets lyrics to jazz instrumentals and uses harmony to reproduce the original arrangements. Their much-praised 1985 album, Vocalese, was nominated for a stunning 12 Grammy Awards and won two – only Michael Jackson’s Thriller has received more nominations in one year.

I know all this because I researched it for this story; I am not going to claim I’ve been a fan of this band for years, because I haven’t. And, importantly, even though the TV series Glee has brought close-harmonisin’ vocal groups back into the pop-cultural spotlight from their dorkxile as part of people’s high-school and university ’shame years’, the Manhattan Transfer have enjoyed no alt-revival.

Indeed, even in the 1970s people found it difficult to get their heads around the Manhattan Transfer. They played hip New York clubs such as Max’s Kansas City and were championed by Ahmet Ertegun, yet nobody could put them in a genre – “Cabaret Rock” or “Disco Sha Na Na” were some of the appalling coinages at the time. Later, they battled with Atlantic Records over whether to take a pop or a jazz direction, recorded two albums with Columbia to disappointing sales, and guest-starred on the TV series Home Improvement.

What is it about this group that makes them hipster-proof? For a start, they’re still plugging away, touring and recording new material. This is the kiss of death to hipster appreciation, which likes mining the past for nuggets of gold. And you only get a nugget if a band had a short blaze of glory before a descent into obscurity. The Manhattan Transfer is more like a long, thin vein of gold.

Second, their sound is hard to dance to, so it’s no good for party mixes or ironic DJ sets. The exception to this is their swing and doo-wop stuff, but that only appeals to swing-dancing and other retro subcultures – not to cool kids in general.

Third, the live videos of them on YouTube sound really bad. On record, the Manhattan Transfer are amazing – tight, subtle and well-balanced – but the balance between the vocalists always seems to be out in the live recordings, so YouTube commenters end up defending the recorded versions. There aren’t many recorded versions of Manhattan Transfer songs online. This clamps down on new people discovering the group, because existing fans don’t want to recommend to their friends a group that sounds awful.

The Manhattan Transfer also like cheesy costumes, dance routines and even cheesier staging. (This video of their unlikely disco hit, ‘Twilight Zone/Twilight Tone’, looks like it was filmed in a theatre restaurant.) But, importantly, they can’t be claimed as kitsch, because they aren’t absurd or avant-garde enough to be laugh-out-loud funny or for people to want to parody and ironically post to Twitter and Facebook. Theirs is a modest, even boring, kind of cheesiness.

Finally, their ‘vocalese’ technique angers jazz purists (the worst kind? Discuss), who accuse them of ‘ruining’ the original instrumentals. The vitriol in this YouTube comment thread about their “live in Tokyo” performance of the Weather Report’s ‘Birdland’ really has to be read to be believed. You would think this video depicted a hate crime rather than four middle-aged American singers poncing about.