Chuck Berry, the original name-checker, crams more city names in 1964's "Promised Land" than anyone would think possible and he changes up the pattern. Instead of the more remarkable place names he uses in "Sweet Little Sixteen," Berry chooses places such as Norfolk, Houston, Bolder and of all places, Rock Hill, SC. "Promised Land" isn't one of his more famous tunes, though it follows a Berry-esque pattern. It opens with his signature guitar riff and follows with a break-neck backbeat that is propelled by the base. His solo is vintage Berry, but somehow it's more driven and choppy than twangy and two-step. Still, it's completely Chuck and it's completely Midwestern.
If do you know "Promised Land", you probably know either the Elvis version or the Grateful Dead version. Both Elvis and the Dead, however, turn "Promised Land" into a song about touring, which works very well. The Dead play up the not-so-subtle lines such as "high over Albuquerque" and "California on my mind" to fit their psychedelic trippy persona. And most people if they listen to one of these three versions don't really get the song. Not lyrically at least, because they are too caught up in what Chuck is so good at, making dance music, and his brand is distinctly different from someone like James Brown or Otis Redding. My argument, and it's one endorsed by several critics, is that Chuck is different because he is Midwestern and his music has no direct connection to the church or what Larry Neal defines as black music's central connection. He writes in "A Different Bag" that "black music is essentially informed by a religious sensibility...The emotional energy of the churches shapes and informs black music" (134). There is very little, if any, church in Berry's music. In fact, it's too countrified, too far from the blues. It's too suburban, too quotidian, too white, though Neal credits Chuck for at least being amplified.
Neal and other people just haven't been listening to "Promised Land." A quick survey of the lyrics proves that this song isn't about touring, it's about the African American experience and it's a protest song. Berry writes it in '64, and I don't think I need to provide a synopsis of what was happening in America at the time. The speaker who calls himself a"poor boy" hops a Greyhound and cruises toward the Promised Land of freedom, namely California. He "bypasses Rock Hill," the site of a fierce riot over a sit-in downtown in late '63, and he rides to Birmingham where the bus breaks down. Birmingham, of course, is the city where Martin Luther King, Jr is arrested for parading without a permit and where he composes his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. This city is also where some of the ugliest, most brutal violence is inflicted on protesters who give up their bodies for the cause of equality. Birmingham, the city that Langston Huges writes about, is where martyrs are made, so "the poor boy"'s plea to get the hell out of there and out of Louisiana, a place still rife with racism and poverty, is a plea for his life.
Until he makes it to Houston, where people care about him, the poor boy rides a bus, the cheapest means of transportation available. His choice of a bus also echoes the ways and means of the Freedom Riders and black musicians who, again, risked their lives when they traveled South. Once he gets to Houston, he gets a "silk suit" and "good luggage" and also takes a plane to the West Coast. As the plane touches down, the poor boy is living large, eating a steak and scrambling to call home to say he's "doing all right." Berry, in using the trope of the bus and the city-list, then hearkens to a previous and specifically American trope. He becomes like a pioneer of the 1800s, seeking his prosperity and freedom in the idea of the West. He also echoes an older motif.
The song is titled "Promised Land" which resonates both in the Bible and in America. The ancient Israelites wander the deserts for 40 years, until they find the Promised Land, a place endowed and entailed to them by God, because they were the chosen people. The African slaves forced to America too used the Promised Land to signify their freedom in code songs and in church sermons. The Civil Rights movement picks up the trope too, and in his last formal speech before he is assassinated, King refers to the utopic equality he envisions as the "promised land."
So Berry's tune isn't just the fun dance song or hymn to road trips and touring that the public and the Dead make it out to be. It participates, of course, in a tradition that Berry himself helped forge, the car-as-freedom motif that the Beatles will subsume in "You Never Give Me Your Money." Musically, it's just as driven and tight as any of his other songs, perhaps more so, and Lennon lifts the solo for "You Can't Do That." Neal, who is horrified by the deadness of white culture, calls this musical influence an "insulting parody of the black lifestyle" and believes that "the Beatles joined in the historical bastardization of black art at the hands of white musicians." Though I disagree with some of Neal's stance, what I do see is not a parody of lifestyle, but a borrowing of a motif that Berry invents, and that's part of the subversive rhetoric of rock-and-roll.
Soon after "Promised Land" scores of protest songs flood the radio, including Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" in 1965. Later sixties protest songs include Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio," CCR's "Fortunate Son," Brown's "Say it Loud," Dylan's "Oxford Town" and Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Berry helps kick open the door for these artists, to show not just an up-yours mentality to the establishment, but to demonstrate things were not fair for all people in the promised land of America. Neal believes the motivations for white folks in protest songs are "essentially racist." Maybe "Promised Land" does sound completely ridiculous in the mouth of a cracker like Elvis, and the Dead drain it of its subversive power. But, the final image of the poor boy calling back home to Norfolk works like a Biblical prophesy, the future ringing up the past, the backward establishment that crushed people with its blind racist hegemony, to inform them that the dream is actualized and real. The "poor boy is doing fine" and the milk and honey tastes like freedom.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tough Choice
For the past few month, some friends and I have been participating in a cd exchange. Nine people have each created a cd built around a particular theme or idea, burned multiple copies, traded the cds, listened to them, and then gathered to discuss them. It’s like a book club, only with cds.
In making newest version of the cd, I, like always, have been torn about what to include and what to jettison. The choice gets more difficult the more I think about it, and the theme this time—high school mix tape-- only made things more complicated. In addition to haggling over which artists to keep, I’ve been debating over two songs by the same artist. The two finalists are both REM songs, “Man on the Moon” and “You Are the Everything.” Both songs are terrific and both are meaningful, for different reasons.
REM was one of the first bands I obsessed over in which the passion was not directly rooted in the relative attractiveness of one of the band members. Disclaimer: I have been known to wax poetic over Michael Stipe’s hotness, and still will on occasion, but his physical charms were not the reason I liked REM so much. I liked REM for their lyrics and their music and I am willing to bet I would have liked them any way, even if I had never seen what they looked like. They seemed vaguely Southern, their music vaguely danceable, but they were completely cool. That coolness was exponentially connected with the obscurity of their lyrics.
That lyrical opacity was due to two things: the mumble-ly, scattered way Stipe has of singing and the utter inscrutability of some of those sets of words. Stipe’s voice can hardly be called melodious and he doesn’t have that large of a range. The percussive, staccato delivery often makes some of the words he sings hard to hear. When I first fell in love with REM, I spent many a pre-Google night in my room, with one hand poised above the pause button of my stereo and the other furiously scribbling what I thought Stipe was saying. There were frequent rewindings and frequent mishearings, providing some of the best mondogreens I’ve collected. For instance, “Country Feedback’s” line “this film is on/on a maddening loop” became “this film is on/on a man named Lou.” My friends and I heard “Oh no!/Kevin Crock/look at that” in “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Still, almost 15 years later, these silly slips leave me in stitches. Maybe we thought Stipe was name-dropping every person he ever met, but the point is, his words are hard to hear. They’re hard to understand too.
When our collective tape-listening sessions were actually successful, we still didn’t know what to do with the right words. What exactly was Stipe getting at when he said “these clothes don’t fit us right”? What does bergamot have to do with finding rivers? What is bergamot? Why should I care if Stipe believes his throat hurts (because it does, right? So why “believe” instead of “my throat hurts”?)? I’m not sure, and frankly, I wouldn’t believe Stipe if he told us what they meant. They didn’t necessarily have to mean anything. That’s what engaged me. I could spend hours thinking about what he was saying, crafting my own meaning, instead of figuring geometry proofs or learning to use a graphing calculator. Those lyrics sounded like jumbled Beat poetry to my untrained, unlearned self, and I loved them.
I also loved that I could muse with my best friends about them while we sat in someone’s living room. Or when we pretended to be the band itself. It’s true. On more than one occasion, several friends and I would crank the music and hop around, strumming badminton rackets, golf clubs and baseball bats, singing into invisible microphones. Yes, I was a little old to be pretending to be in a band, and yes, it’s a little weird I wasn’t pretending to be Courtney Love or Lisa Loeb. But REM connected me to what I was—someone who loved words—and pointed me toward what I would become---someone who would channel that affection into so many things, including her future career. Someone who would never be embarrassed to break it down on a dance floor, and who frequently was the first in an audience on her feet. (Besides, who doesn’t pretend, almost daily, to be someone they’re not?)
So, why these two songs? Truth be told, the song should be “Nightswimming” that exquisitely beautiful thing on the second side of Automatic For the People that so eloquently speaks of the awkwardness and thrill of being young and so pointedly reminds me of my friends that sometimes, it hurts to hear. (I remember one cold night during Christmas break after my first year of college. We had gone to the Waffle House and Lee, Ginnie, Gail and I drove back to my parents’. We took the long way around so we could finish listening to “Nightswimming.” The windows of my 626 were fogged from so much talk and so many tales). But, a fellow cd-club participant had already used it on a previous disc, and no one wants to be a copycat.
“Man on the Moon” seems an obvious choice. I actually listened to it in high school and it connects with the fun bouncy-ness of my senior year, when the whole world seemed wide-open and shiny. It felt like that move Stipe makes in the video for the song where he swings himself onto the cab of an 18 wheeler; he’s wearing a straw cowboy hat and grinning big. But, this is REM, after all, and the buoyancy of the song is tinged with a kind of hesitation.
It pits belief against empiricism, replacing St. Peter’s Basilica with a truck stop; pairing Moses with Newton and his scientific harnessing of nature’s laws; mentioning (gasp!) Charles Darwin. Belief wins out in this song, but Stipe continually questions. He subjunctifies-- asking “if” instead of saying out right “Andy Kaufman’s crazy life is proof there is more than what you see and touch. There is something bigger and beyond your perception.”
Something of that attitude is what I seized when I graduated high school. I thought “I’m not sure how this will turn out, but I have a pretty good idea this will be fun.” I didn’t know it, but I believed it. And I was right. Plus, “Man on the Moon” was a number our pretend band could really rock out on. Lots of opportunities for hopping around.
“You Are the Everything,” then, is a little different. It’s a song I didn’t begin to like until college, though I was aware of it. It’s not the REM that hooked me either: its music is quiet, its lyrics straightforward. At the time, I thought it overly sentimental, not “very deep,” which meant I could hear and understand all the words. So I thought.
When I listen to it now, it seems like a more accurate description of who I was—and who many high school students probably were too. In fact, the centrality and the flexibility of the “you” in the title make it a perfect variable for any one. “You” can actually be you, and what high school student doesn’t think that her problems are the only ones, that she and her world are, in fact, everything?
I was no exception. I was “scared for this world,” worried about true global calamities like starvation and poverty and natural disasters. I was also worried about personal failures, mainly the possibility that no one would ever love me back as fervently as I loved him. However, what I thought was sentimental-- the insistence on simply being in a kitchen with some other person, with the comfortable familiarity of listening to known voices reverberate through a home—that is what the song is about. I couldn’t quite understand that then. I couldn’t understand the importance of home, because I had never left it.
The song itself is retrospective. Stipe entreats “eviscerate your memory”—to violently slash away at whatever fear prevents you from looking backward. Looking back is painful because of what you might see (like your high school self pretending to be in a band) or because you can’t see. Your cynicism, your defense, clouds your vision. Or perhaps what you looked back for was never there in the first place or it isn’t there any more, it’s evaporated, faded, gone. We don’t want to look back, but this song insists we do.
What do I see when I look back? I see a girl sitting at a table made of old wood fastened together by handmade nails. The wallpaper is a riot of color and pattern: all sorts of fruits and vegetables spilling out of baskets onto tables and cutting boards, dizzying in its variety and faithfulness to late 70s chic. She is usually surrounded by her parents and her brother, often by her best friends. They talk all the time, sometimes so they won’t have to say their scared, but mostly because their talk is like music, and because it fills the room with a kind of light. That girl didn’t know that then, that this place, these people would continually help direct her steps, to help make her what she was to become and is still becoming. She didn’t know it then, but, now, she believes it.
In making newest version of the cd, I, like always, have been torn about what to include and what to jettison. The choice gets more difficult the more I think about it, and the theme this time—high school mix tape-- only made things more complicated. In addition to haggling over which artists to keep, I’ve been debating over two songs by the same artist. The two finalists are both REM songs, “Man on the Moon” and “You Are the Everything.” Both songs are terrific and both are meaningful, for different reasons.
REM was one of the first bands I obsessed over in which the passion was not directly rooted in the relative attractiveness of one of the band members. Disclaimer: I have been known to wax poetic over Michael Stipe’s hotness, and still will on occasion, but his physical charms were not the reason I liked REM so much. I liked REM for their lyrics and their music and I am willing to bet I would have liked them any way, even if I had never seen what they looked like. They seemed vaguely Southern, their music vaguely danceable, but they were completely cool. That coolness was exponentially connected with the obscurity of their lyrics.
That lyrical opacity was due to two things: the mumble-ly, scattered way Stipe has of singing and the utter inscrutability of some of those sets of words. Stipe’s voice can hardly be called melodious and he doesn’t have that large of a range. The percussive, staccato delivery often makes some of the words he sings hard to hear. When I first fell in love with REM, I spent many a pre-Google night in my room, with one hand poised above the pause button of my stereo and the other furiously scribbling what I thought Stipe was saying. There were frequent rewindings and frequent mishearings, providing some of the best mondogreens I’ve collected. For instance, “Country Feedback’s” line “this film is on/on a maddening loop” became “this film is on/on a man named Lou.” My friends and I heard “Oh no!/Kevin Crock/look at that” in “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Still, almost 15 years later, these silly slips leave me in stitches. Maybe we thought Stipe was name-dropping every person he ever met, but the point is, his words are hard to hear. They’re hard to understand too.
When our collective tape-listening sessions were actually successful, we still didn’t know what to do with the right words. What exactly was Stipe getting at when he said “these clothes don’t fit us right”? What does bergamot have to do with finding rivers? What is bergamot? Why should I care if Stipe believes his throat hurts (because it does, right? So why “believe” instead of “my throat hurts”?)? I’m not sure, and frankly, I wouldn’t believe Stipe if he told us what they meant. They didn’t necessarily have to mean anything. That’s what engaged me. I could spend hours thinking about what he was saying, crafting my own meaning, instead of figuring geometry proofs or learning to use a graphing calculator. Those lyrics sounded like jumbled Beat poetry to my untrained, unlearned self, and I loved them.
I also loved that I could muse with my best friends about them while we sat in someone’s living room. Or when we pretended to be the band itself. It’s true. On more than one occasion, several friends and I would crank the music and hop around, strumming badminton rackets, golf clubs and baseball bats, singing into invisible microphones. Yes, I was a little old to be pretending to be in a band, and yes, it’s a little weird I wasn’t pretending to be Courtney Love or Lisa Loeb. But REM connected me to what I was—someone who loved words—and pointed me toward what I would become---someone who would channel that affection into so many things, including her future career. Someone who would never be embarrassed to break it down on a dance floor, and who frequently was the first in an audience on her feet. (Besides, who doesn’t pretend, almost daily, to be someone they’re not?)
So, why these two songs? Truth be told, the song should be “Nightswimming” that exquisitely beautiful thing on the second side of Automatic For the People that so eloquently speaks of the awkwardness and thrill of being young and so pointedly reminds me of my friends that sometimes, it hurts to hear. (I remember one cold night during Christmas break after my first year of college. We had gone to the Waffle House and Lee, Ginnie, Gail and I drove back to my parents’. We took the long way around so we could finish listening to “Nightswimming.” The windows of my 626 were fogged from so much talk and so many tales). But, a fellow cd-club participant had already used it on a previous disc, and no one wants to be a copycat.
“Man on the Moon” seems an obvious choice. I actually listened to it in high school and it connects with the fun bouncy-ness of my senior year, when the whole world seemed wide-open and shiny. It felt like that move Stipe makes in the video for the song where he swings himself onto the cab of an 18 wheeler; he’s wearing a straw cowboy hat and grinning big. But, this is REM, after all, and the buoyancy of the song is tinged with a kind of hesitation.
It pits belief against empiricism, replacing St. Peter’s Basilica with a truck stop; pairing Moses with Newton and his scientific harnessing of nature’s laws; mentioning (gasp!) Charles Darwin. Belief wins out in this song, but Stipe continually questions. He subjunctifies-- asking “if” instead of saying out right “Andy Kaufman’s crazy life is proof there is more than what you see and touch. There is something bigger and beyond your perception.”
Something of that attitude is what I seized when I graduated high school. I thought “I’m not sure how this will turn out, but I have a pretty good idea this will be fun.” I didn’t know it, but I believed it. And I was right. Plus, “Man on the Moon” was a number our pretend band could really rock out on. Lots of opportunities for hopping around.
“You Are the Everything,” then, is a little different. It’s a song I didn’t begin to like until college, though I was aware of it. It’s not the REM that hooked me either: its music is quiet, its lyrics straightforward. At the time, I thought it overly sentimental, not “very deep,” which meant I could hear and understand all the words. So I thought.
When I listen to it now, it seems like a more accurate description of who I was—and who many high school students probably were too. In fact, the centrality and the flexibility of the “you” in the title make it a perfect variable for any one. “You” can actually be you, and what high school student doesn’t think that her problems are the only ones, that she and her world are, in fact, everything?
I was no exception. I was “scared for this world,” worried about true global calamities like starvation and poverty and natural disasters. I was also worried about personal failures, mainly the possibility that no one would ever love me back as fervently as I loved him. However, what I thought was sentimental-- the insistence on simply being in a kitchen with some other person, with the comfortable familiarity of listening to known voices reverberate through a home—that is what the song is about. I couldn’t quite understand that then. I couldn’t understand the importance of home, because I had never left it.
The song itself is retrospective. Stipe entreats “eviscerate your memory”—to violently slash away at whatever fear prevents you from looking backward. Looking back is painful because of what you might see (like your high school self pretending to be in a band) or because you can’t see. Your cynicism, your defense, clouds your vision. Or perhaps what you looked back for was never there in the first place or it isn’t there any more, it’s evaporated, faded, gone. We don’t want to look back, but this song insists we do.
What do I see when I look back? I see a girl sitting at a table made of old wood fastened together by handmade nails. The wallpaper is a riot of color and pattern: all sorts of fruits and vegetables spilling out of baskets onto tables and cutting boards, dizzying in its variety and faithfulness to late 70s chic. She is usually surrounded by her parents and her brother, often by her best friends. They talk all the time, sometimes so they won’t have to say their scared, but mostly because their talk is like music, and because it fills the room with a kind of light. That girl didn’t know that then, that this place, these people would continually help direct her steps, to help make her what she was to become and is still becoming. She didn’t know it then, but, now, she believes it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)