The Daily Feather — Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

“They asked me how I knew my true love was true

Oh, I of course replied

Something here inside cannot be denied

They said someday you’ll find all who love are blind

Oh, when your heart’s on fire

You must realize smoke gets in your eyes”

The song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was originally written in the 1930s by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for the Broadway musical Roberta. In 1951, it was mentioned in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. But it took on a new life when The Platters recorded their own version in 1958. Their take on the song, a lament of one blinded by love, was a massive success, topping Billboard’s Hot 100 music charts. Notably, Kern’s widow disliked The Platters’ version and wanted to sue to halt its release, but quickly dropped her plans to do so upon learning of the massive royalties she would receive. More recently, the song inspired the title of the pilot episode of Mad Men, in which advertising mogul Don Draper struggles to conceive a marketing campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

At QI, we’re beginning to feel like the nameless “they” in the song’s lyrics, judging the singer for letting their emotions cloud their perceptions of reality. We saw markets react with joy to the June jobs’ report upside surprise, wiping away all memory of the prior day’s ADP data, and ignoring the less-than-sightly underlying fundamentals. (Who cares that the participation rate fell to 62.3%, a December 2022 low, or that discouraged workers who thought no jobs were available to them jumped by 67% to 637,000, the highest since December 2020?) But then again, who are we to blame traders for wanting a head start on their Fourth of July festivities?