It was all somehow deeply important to me: all that music, all those lyrics. “How to ask a girl for a date, what love is like.” And oh the deep, wide, far-ranging questions we faced, from Jimmy Clanton’s “What am I gonna do on Saturday night?” to Jimi Hendrix’s “Have you ever been experienced?” Do you wanna dance? Am I blue? Will you still love me tomorrow? “And rock is also educational,” said Frank Zappa. We tend to listen to lyrics, ponder the words, heed and harken to their advice. It was modish, especially in the latitudinarian ’60s, to speak of the lyrics of rock as “poetry.” And to a degree, a certain few lyrics - quixotic, inventive, careening, or reflectively lyrical - came sufficiently close. “ The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” But he wasn’t lazy, never repeated pronouns, and always looked for the identifiable and, above all, concrete detail. Why would that matter? Many great songwriters hadn’t. The language of Berry’s verses may or ordinary, but he employs it naturally and without phony attitudinizing. In one case, it implies a sigh of disgust, and in another, a type of sullen indignation. In “Too Much Monkey Business,” for example, every verse rhymes, and when words cannot fill the existing spaces, the artist fills them with a flexible “aah,” which concludes each verse change each time it is verbalized. ![]() Berry’s work is expressed as functional, resulting in, because born of, simplicity. Charles Dickens was the first to use the word in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.)Ĭhuck Berry’s lyrics, charming, and naïve, represent a certain primitivism (what Richard Goldstein in The Poetry of Rock calls “accidental art”), particularly in his innocent notion that poetry should rhyme and that all rhythmic spaces should be filled, even if filling them necessitates juggling words or even the creation of new ones. The romantics among us - or is it the romantic in each of us? - will add that certain phrases can be properly turned only in a moment of true inspiration, when we have lost our self-consciousness and calculating natures, and thereby can express our authentic selves.Ī whole vocabulary - in one sense, an entire language - has come from such music and the pioneering black radio stations (like WERD in Atlanta, WYLD in New Orleans, WLOU in Louisville, WDIA in Memphis, known throughout the South as the “Mother Station of the Negroes,” etc.) that in the late ’40s and ’50s pushed and played it, and consequently we’ve been left a lovely great catalogue of finger-poppin’ R&B words like hincty, zoo-zoos, whuppin’, juicehead, poontang, hamfat, gleeby, mogatin’, motorvatin’, lickin’ stick, jelly roll, scronch, poppa-stoppa, dicty, spo-dee-o-dee, good booty, shag on down, and meekin’. I want a full Murphy bed in my back seat.Ĭreative illiteracy, of course, goes back even before 1945, to the very beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll - long before pop music became whitened and mechanized…part of a deep and heartfelt, soulfully and stylistically undiluted fold tradition, vocal harmonies and gentle wails and shouted blues, born of a slavery that prevented even a smidgen of education for 400 years. I want air conditioning, I want automatic heat, I want a powerful motor with a jet-off take, I remember, for instance, deliberating what Chuck Berry meant us to understand in the song “School Days” when he sang:Ĭheat, but the teacher don’t know I mean she looks.Īn article in Goldmine (January 29, 1988) cites Chuck Berry’s “powerful facility for letter-perfect encapsulation,” which is generally true, although for reasons of rhyme he is often forced to throw in not only the odd semi-enclitical phrase, such as in the word-salad cited above or the line “ watch her look at her run, boys” in “School Days,” but, as in the song “No Money Down,” even to reverse them: ![]() Evangeline and “The Highwayman” were poetry. What I particularly enjoyed - even found myself listening for over the years - were certain phrases and squibs in various songs, usually hip, that compiling in my mind could be read as a documentary of slang (and somehow paraliteracy’s) progress, if not in modern America, then at least in my high school and among my friends. There was no end to it, but deliberate lunacies often made a song what it was. I tended to concentrate on the lyrics, which I more or less took as a form of reading. I love it, and have from the beginning, even its attractive imbecilities. Rock ‘n’ roll music, any old way you choose it, is one of the things I know I’ll most miss when I’m on my way out. But he wasn’t lazy, never repeated pronouns, and always looked for the identifiable and, above all, concrete detail.”
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