Alienated

I have to say that I enjoyed Ridley Scott's Aliens prequel Prometheus, proposed as a first step in the franchise that would establish the beginnings of this sci-fi saga up to where we first meet the fabulous action-babe Ripley. Scott's return to the franchise, and to space operas was a joy to behold, with great acting, stunning special effects , a fascinating premise and , yes, a general feeling of creepiness as the hoary warnings against corporate greed and attending evil are made tangible yet again. Not a perfect film, but the scale and power of the storytelling, albeit incomprehensible, made it an entertainment worth revisiting. Not so much for the follow up effort, Alien: Covenant, again directed by Scott. Where Prometheus added some new twists to the Alien mythos, this new effort offers little that is intriguing ; it is a make work project. We do discover the origins of the Xenomorph and are expected to marvel at their many manifestations , different shapes, purposes. But there is a dispirited element about this film. There is no spectacle to speak of, no real wow factor, conditions not improved by the pacing, which is lead footed. Especially surprising for a director of Scott's calibre: an inconsistent director for quality, even his worse films had a great veneer and, most of , all moved well. Covenant sort shuffles along and wanders through some very familiar territory, that of an exploratory ship landing on an uncharted planet with a certain set of expectations only to discover some quite, quite horrible. Not to give too much away, but anyone familiar with past efforts in this series will know when to start the Alien countdown, when crew members die horribly , one by one. Covenant feels like a place holder film, a middling and trudging action film that works best only furthering plot elements introduced in the previous film. Scott has three films in mind for this current edition of the sequence, and there is a cliffhanger, of a kind, waiting for us at the film's end, a twist so dire and dreadful that you can't help but wonder how the surviving crew members can rise above the fatal circumstances we see them in before the credits role. By movie's end, Alien: Covenant seemed to have been created , in terms of narrative, to deliver us to the cliffhanger at movie's end and to hook us for what I hope will be the last of this . 

Sgt. Peppers is 50 Years Old

(Excerpted from an older post in 2007)

Like it or love it, Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is among the most important rock albums ever made, one of the most important albums period, and forty years after it's release, it is time to assess the album free of the globalizing hype and mythology it's biggest supporters have honored it with, and to veer away from the chronically negative reaction those less in love with the Beatles and the disc have made a religion out of. 

It is, in my view, important for any number of reasons, production and songwriting among them, and for me it's not just that Lennon and McCartney have set the standard on which such things would be judged against from now on, but that they've also given us the examples with which rock critics, paid and unpaid, by which we can tell who 

is being pretentious, phony, unfocused, incoherent, just plain bad. 

Sure enough, the best songs have survived--"A Day In the Life, "Getting Better", "Good Morning, Good Morning", "Mr.Kite", but sure enough the less accomplished songs, all manner, pose, nervy and naive pseudo mysticism and intellectuality as in "Within You Without You" and "She's Leaving Home", are hardly played anywhere, by anyone, unless one tunes in an XM satellite station where the play list is all things Beatles, without discrimination.

What the Beatles did with the song craft, the central genius and downfall of much of Pepper's legacy, is that they've introduced thousands of forthcoming arty rockers to new levels of sophistication and fantastically dull pompousness. I love the Beatles, of course, that's the standard qualifier among us all, but this is the album with which rock criticism was finally created. Lovers and Haters of the disc finally had a rock and roll record that might sustain their liberal arts training. Sgt. Pepper also gave us brilliant and much less brilliant rock commentary. Here you may pick your own examples.

The reasons Beatle fans in general (rather than only) "hipsters" prefer Revolver to Sgt.Pepper is for the only reason that really matters when one is alone with their CD player or iPOD; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics succeed in being intriguingly poetic without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt.Pepper's songs, and one still perceived the Beatles as a band, guitar bass and drums, performing tunes with a signature sound that comes only after of years of the same musicians performing together. 

the half- baked nothingness of Billy Joel

The awfulness of Billy Joel, explained.:

Slate contributing editor Ron Rosenbaum asks rhetorically early on in his hissing hate note on Billy Joel about why he should spend a column excoriating the songwriter at length after the artist has been maligned by critics and snobs alike for decades already? Well yes, why another hate jerk off at the expense of the much and justifiably maligned Billy Joel? The author needed something to write about that would less use of brain power and more use   of embedded knee jerk responses to Billy Joel's name. This wasn't an overview of a bad musician's career, it was an allergic reaction with a vocabulary. Rosenbaum couldn't help himself, Joel is that rash he was incapable of not scratching.  Truth needs to be told, though. Billy is a bit better than naysayers would have you think. A bit better, not a whole lot better.  

Billy Joel is a mixed blessing. Effective and versatile vocalist, a genuinely gifted writer of not so obvious pop melodies, a frequently maudlin, pretentious lyricist (although he redeems himself when his pop sensibilities rule over his desire to Be Meaningful), a technically proficient pianist, a smarmy hambone. One may not like him on principle--I don't care for him--but I have t admit he's done some work that merits a second and a third listen. He's a cross between Harry Chapin and Elton John, I guess, with a strong after taste of the worst brands of smugness that typifies pop music in general. 

What sinks Joel is his lack of any ironic sense of himself and the material he writes to address foul matters brewing in the world; despite his working class roots, the idea of an unfathomably successful pop star sing a catchy-hummable, all so meaningful ballad to the laid off factory workers of "Allentown" informs us that his protest songs are not about the poor nor the destitute, but in making Billy Joel feel good about himself and looking good to the fan base at the same time.

Joel's sins of pretentiousness are numerable over a long career , something I noted with his first hit "Piano Man", a bloated imitation of  Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" , to the point where I stopped paying attention to him altogether with the name-checking orgasm that comprised the hit "We Didn't Start the Fire". The obviousness of his conclusions, the cartoon likenesses of his characters, the cliched contours of his examples, the barely concealed arrogance of his narrative air are the kind of thing that makes the smart people like you, I and Rosenbaum slap our foreheads and make us desire to grab either a gun or a cold beer. Unlike Rosenbaum, I am simply unwilling to get up the steam needed to pillory Billy Joel yet again. I will forgo the oratory and leave my summary judgement on BJ's body of work as this, a skilled journeyman with delusions of being something greater.

JOE BONAMASSA v GARY MOORE!

Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa seems to be the white blues guitar saviour of choice for this part of the 21st century, a situation that has me tipping my hat to his technical acumen, his taste in guitar heroes, and the obvious work he put into his woodshedding to have those fancy chops at his disposal on demand. It's just too bad that all I get when listening intently to his long and frequent solos is the work involved in the effort to get all this text-book perfect. This is superhuman execution without commensurate passion. No fire under all that smoke. At a younger and less discriminating age, I might have been a fan, excited by his melodramatic playing and the authenticity of his rasping growl of a voice. No so much these days, not after a lifetime debating the merits and demerits of Clapton, Winter, SRV and the legions of other guitar heroes that populated the sports arenas off American cities in the 70s, Bonamassa seems no more than the advanced student who's perfected every cliche he could from the generation previously holding court without working on his own style, that rare item called an individual voice. What's the point, I suppose, is the enlightened way to take all this in, or ignore it outright. The last white blues guitar slinger to give me the figurative kick in the head was the late Gary Moore.


Moore was the last of the great ones, I think, less so for the originality of his chops--save for the speed tested relish and elan of his riffing, little in the way of his velocity seemed new. Moore came by his flashiness naturally, as he loved the work of his defacto mentors--B.B., Albert and Freddy King, Buddy Guy, Peter Green, Erick Clapton--that he didn't want to insult what he perceived their greatness to be by merely mastering their licks faithfully, performing them on command with machine-tooled precision. His work sounds like the energy of someone who picked up on the tweaks, twists, and inventions of all his heroes and sought to find his way to play the blues Over the Top. There is a beautiful aggressiveness to his solos, a sublime benevolence to his fastest and flashiest note clusters. His lengthy expositions are not to everyone's taste, and ours is not a time when music fans of a younger generation speak obsessively of guitar heroes as a concern as essential as food, clothing, and shelter, but to the degree to which this musician committed himself to a style and particular approach to that style, Gary Moore's guitaring--to my tastes --was an inexhaustible font of inspired, riffing epiphanies. Moore mattered, or at least impressed the Dickens out of me, because of the obvious glee with which he took command of the blues-rock form. He might not have invented it, but he certainly ownership of it. He knew what to do with the prize he commandeered.

Joe Bonamassa just bores me with all his pro forma shuffles, boogies, rockers, and rave-ups. Slick, well constructed, and stiff as Disney robots. Technique without spirit, that distinguishing attribute that gives mastery of complex concepts a personality that distinguishes it from other virtuosos-in-waiting, isn't art but merely mechanics.

"Toku Do"-- jazz guitar with Larry Coryell

The late Larry Coryell recorded about 100 albums in his career, an amazingly prolific guitarist indeed, but as with the case of a gifted improviser with a desire to stay engaged with their art through ongoing collaborations, not every disc clicked with me. Toku Do is one of those gems, however, a crisp and swinging set of standards combining Coryell's fabled swiftness of phrase with a ongoing feeling of melodic invention and snappy delicacy of touch. There is, in fact, an uncharacteristic lightness of touch for Coryell, a musician who's hard attack at times spoiled a splendid phrase or a quicksilver run. Here, is lines are fluid, smooth, not slick. When he wanted,his technical mastery was matched by transcendent grace. More than one guitarist has mentioned that when playing with him on tour, it wasn't unusual for them to marvel at Coryell's inventions, running through ideas no other guitarist could create. Yes, he was that good, and Toku Do is the proof. These are fine readings and reinterpretations of Monk, Ellington and Rogers and Hart, with Coryell weaving, pirouetting, and otherwise coaxing delightfully animated extemporizing from the classic material. The band of Stanley Cowell on piano and Buster Williams and Beaver Harris on bass and drums, respectively, keep matters effectively swinging and rhythmically nuanced--Cowell is a sterling foil for the leader, providing richly shaded color and brightly elaborated solos of his own to the session, with Williams and Harris making sure all of this has a heartbeat the swings gladly.

COLOSSAL

Just got out from seeing Colossal, a fine indy film written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. The premise is this: a young woman loses her job and boyfriend in NYC and, unable to find work and broke as well, moves back to her hometown to stay in her parent's empty house. At the same time, a giant monster begins to destroy Seoul, Korea. The woman realizes after a while that she has a mysterious but very direct connection with the monster destroying a city a half a planet away. 

Science fiction, romantic comedy and psychological thriller in a well executed fusion of what would conflicting genres, writer, and director Galondo does not merely mash together disparate kinds of pop culture, but instead weaves them together. Without going into tidbits that would spoil the film, I would just add that the script is as tightly constructed as it is wildly imagined, and it requires suspending our disbelief a little further and, in a more challenging aspect, to suspend it in ways not usually demanded of us as viewers. Think of this: if one's actual life seems to slip, merge, evolve and abruptly change tones, perceptually, from being a comedy, tragedy, romance, and soap opera while a month, a week, a day, why wouldn't this also hold for a fictional, more fantastical world? 

Colossal does, I promise, contain all the elements I've mentioned, and they are pertinent to the story being told, but this is a narrative with the varied genre restrictions removed. For all that seems fantastic and scary, the players and their situations and how they respond to the changes that happen to them are, (ahem) human, all too human. Odd, quirky and defying genre expectations, this is a splendid and engrossing story, with a perfect ending to seemingly unresolvable complications that you didn't see coming. Fine performances by Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis.

making Sinatra grate, again

Mikal Gilmore is a good critic overall, a fine writer with a literate style. He is very much a fan of the musicians he praises, and I've read him at times where he displays a reasonable skepticism at some of his heroes' less appealing efforts. Above all else, Gilmore's rock and roll writing is vital because he's a writer who never stopped believing that music had the power to change the way people see the world and that music, as well, could inspire, empower and embolden generations to create a more perfect union. Even when I feel that all that is lost to us now, that music, even when it was routinely superb during a period in the Sixties, was always about parties getting paid their due (and more), Gilmore could convince me, for a moment, that cynicism was a callow response to world events that didn't behave according to my own private timetable. 

But there is the habit of seeing everything particular artists do as evidence of genius when in fact what is served is dried out, tired, mannered, lifeless as a stain. Sinatra and Dylan, though, are two seemingly fault-free icons of Americana that Gilmore, like more than a few old guard reviewers, goes into a bubble of a kind and create their very own mythology, a homemade dialectic. In this case, it's the convenient narrative that Sinatra and Dylan represent the thesis and antithesis of American pop music and that what's happening with Triplicate amounts to a fabled synthesis. Gilmore gets disconcertingly close to aping Greil Marcuse's worst habit, which is to treat a trilogy of albums as a Major Historical/Cultural Event. In making such claims against a word limit, it is necessary to exclude practically everything and everyone else in the historical record. His four-star review is premised on the assumption that one thinks Dylan's performance of this material is arguably good on considers other than technical skill. One can make such an argument, of course, but I don't find them especially convincing. Willie Nelson has a reedy, nasally voice, but he does have range and color and a demonstrated mastery of his abilities as a vocalist; his renditions of old standards ala "Over the Rainbow" or "Blue Skies" work rather well and are effectively reimagined, as that atrocious phrase goes. We can push this even a bit further by remembering Elvis Costello's moving and too-brief reading of my "My Funny Valentine", choice ballad one would associate with the soaring and splinter texture of Tony Bennett's offhand croon, or the rich tone poems that Mel Torme turns his vocal performances into. 

Costello style, at the time, noted for being nasal, untrained, bellowing, only occasionally tuneful in straightforward line readings, demonstrates on "My Funny Valentine" that he, like Nelson, could shore up is supposed limitations and turn them into virtues that could make the performance memorable; while we can continue on  and on that Costello's rendition doesn't come near to achieving the definitive version Bennett imprinted upon the culture, that would be to miss the point of interpretation. Costello's version is his own, his vocal apparatus had richer registers to use to approach the delicacy of the melody and simple poetry of the lyrics, the result being, I think, is that great songs are written for a great vocalist. The further point is that Costello's voice had the technical qualities to make his version worth a listen or ten.  

"Redefined "is perhaps the better word. Sinatra's songs were written for Sinatra's voice, or voices similar in color, nuance, range, and regardless of what style you wish to cast the material in--soul, reggae, country, folk, blues--the requirements for voice remain the same. Dylan's appeal as a vocalist was that he wrote his own songs and that those songs fit the limited apparatus he had. His original material, and the songs by others (early on) he selected to perform fit his voice, his rage, his tone, which he was able to manipulate in effective ways. I am quite a bit more reductionist in my opinion of Dylan's attempts to interpret the great American songbook. I think it's awful stuff, a grating and embarrassing display. That said, I am also willing to admit my view reveals my limits more, perhaps, than they do anyone else's.

Rolling Stone's record review section turns 50

The record review section of Rolling Stone turned 50 years old in 2017, and I'll admit from the first sentence that I haven't held the critical opinions in high regard for the better part of thirty years. I tend to question RSs motives in who they cover and the reasons for the favorable reviews so artists seem to get every time they release something. Music critic and pop cultural historian Jim DeRogatis, author of the Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, was once the editor of the RS review section and shared with at a book event that Jann Wenner, founder and very hands-on editor, decreed that there are artists who will never get a negative review, among them Dylan, The Boss, Tom Petty,...the usual suspects. 

 I'm convinced Wenner corrupted the integrity of his reviewers; the section isn't a place of true criticism, the practice of discussing thins at length, in detail, with the instance of rendering an honest estimation. It has been, for a long time, a tedious exercise in rubber stamping new albums with praise that rarely rise above the corroded cliches and platitudes that have haunted music reviewers for decades. There are notable exceptions, of course, chief among them Mikal Gilmore, a sterling prose stylist and a man given to nuanced consideration of history and tradition and contextualizes his praise against high standards. It should be said as well that the record review section was my most essential writing laboratory. As in the already mentioned Marcus, Bangs, Landau and RJ Gleason (and Robert Christgau at the now defunct Village Voice and Duncan Shepard at the SD Reader), these were my models for what I thought a fine critical prose should read like. For that I am grateful. 

That just makes it sadder to note that what was indeed the freshest and most invigorating forum for commentary has ceased to be a place for independent thinking and has become, in most part, a section of corporate shilling. Much of the decline in mass circulation criticism that , incidentally, gave an honest and considered evaluation of music, films and books could well be due to changing readership expectations; a cursory glance and a longer examination of the current crop of yammer among online internet outlets seems to require those would-be examiners of to have had a huge gulp of the Kool-Aid that's being served, no matter how ethically loathsome, and suspend critical standards as long as they draw a paycheck, replacing them with talking points and backstories agreed up between skittish media companies and the advertising and promotional departments of big corporations.It's beenI've suspected that if you treat an audience like fools, lemmings and immature hords addicted to fads and fashion, they will behave, in time, accordingly, accepting the faint shadows on the wall as the one reality their senses need to appreciate. 

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH

I was very saddened by the news that guitarist ALLAN HOLDSWORTH has passed away at age 70. The British-born Holdsworth, who had lived in San Diego's North County Vista community for several decades, was quickly the greatest and most original improviser I had the excellent and unreal fortune of seeing live. I first came across him in 1973 at Newport Wherehouse Records, an era where the clerks were as big musician obsessives as you were. I found myself in a long and riffing conversation with a sales clerk about guitarists. At a point, the excited chat veered into guitarists of great speed, accuracy, and original technique. I bemoaned that the realm of the speedster had already been decimated, given the sped-up barrages fashioned by the kings of the hill John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, and the abusively underrated Larry Coryell. The summary view was that younger guitarists taking up the jazz-rock tempos and swift extemporizing had turned the style into a morass of rapid and repetitious chatter.

I said something to that effect, a typical move among a good many of the music snob community who'd needed to establish their bonafide when they encounter a member of the tribe they hadn't yet exchanged judgments; it was an affectation, and it in my case at least, used frequently to obscure the fact that there were musicians I'd hadn't heard. So I  said this, maintaining my fiction of knowing something I didn't. I kid you not, the clerk snapped his fingers and asked if  I'd heard Allan Holdsworth. No, I said, and he motioned me over to the counter turntable; he took out a disc the read "Tempest" on it, eagerly but carefully slid the disc from the sleeve, and dropped the needle on the disc. What followed was a rather good blues-riff rock in a Cream mode, but with diminished and augmented chords placed in the fuzz-toned mix to add the surprising element of jazzy space, an element enhanced by the jazz background of drummer John Hiseman, who'd been the timekeeper and leader of the pioneer UK jazz-fusion band Colosseum. 

The revelation of the disc was the guitar work, which struck rapidly and dynamically like a bolt of lightning. It was Holdsworth on the frets, racing over the chord changes with runs Joe Pass might have been proud to call his own, mixing up his complex outings with finely wrought blues bends and dissonant accents and bittersweet turns in his phrasing. This was 1973. Van Halen hadn't yet been formed. This was a precursor to the vocabulary that would become the go-to style for a hard rock lead guitarist.  Holdsworth, though, was constantly evolving, challenging himself and his technique by placing it in new contexts. 

He was an improviser more than anything else, a man who'd created his own idiom. His improvisations were a match for Coltrane's high velocity, register jumping runs that did strange and beautiful turns against your expectations of where you thought his ideas might take him. His technique was peerless, and his playing was revolutionary.  Like the brilliant guitarist Larry Coryell who died just a couple of weeks ago, he profoundly and permanently changed the way we would play the electric guitar. This man has given me much pleasure in the decades that I've been listening to him, through his stints with Tempest, Soft Machine, Gong, the New Tony Williams Lifetime, Bill Bruford, UK, Anders and Anders, Jean Luc Ponty, and his own bands and albums. For all those decades, the rest of the guitar world was catching up with what this genius was already doing with unmatched fluidity and invention.

Chuck Berry's Pursuit of Happiness

Rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry passed away, age 90, on March 18 and left a long, permanent shadow that falls over those who took up the guitar after him. It's a thick, rich shade from which precious few rockers manage to completely extract themselves. He created the language and vocabulary of rock 'n' roll, both as a musician and songwriter. His body of work, indeed, is the Gold Standard against which all others are judged. The foundation of which he was the accidental architect is broad, pervasive, an idiom both unique yet familiar, subtle yet straightforward. It was music that could be adapted in many ways and continue to be renewed with each new visionary we plugged in a guitar and wrote a lyric of joy and confusion.

 He is, I think, to rock and roll what literary critic  Harold Bloom claims for Shakespeare, the originating standard of genius by which all other artists in the arena are held to. In Chuck Berry's body of work, we have a collection of songs that achieve that elusive blend of styles in precisely the proper proportions. His songs sold millions, spoke to audiences across racial lines, his rock 'n' roll changed the way we engaged the world. It rocked.

His work was, essentially, the creation of rock 'n' roll as we think of it to this day. A sharp sense of the '40s swing, the charge of a rhythm and blues beat, a guitar style combining a bittersweet sting of blues and the sprite, twang clarity of Nashville-style guitar. Berry listened widely, taking in the grit of the blues, the earnest sincerity of country, and western storytelling. The swing of R&B, charging it up with country-accented guitar lines, perfecting a limited but resolutely brilliant set of guitar licks that redefined how the instrument came to be played.

It's been argued that Berry was the most essential guitarist rock 'n' roll has ever known; one can, in my view, be a jazz guitarist, although one might not have bothered to listen to or learn Joe Pass or Charlie Christian licks. If a player decides to forgo Chuck Berry's sublime and simple genius and focus instead on the knee-jerk hi-jinx of shredding, one relinquishes the right to be called a rock 'n' roll guitarist. If you can't play Chuck Berry, you can't rock. It's that simple an equation. His solos are the best economy models, with their double-stopped bends and twangy fills, all made buoyant with a crucial sense of swing. Decades of convoluted solos, once the example of what to do on the frets, have been swept to the curb, ashes of former glory, while Berry's fret inventions are still with us, a part of the American memory. Knowing Chuck Berry's sound, feel, and off-hand playfulness is a metaphysical necessity for the rocker; it was less a style to master than lifestyle, a way of honing your wits and working your way through the tragic subject matter life awards us with.

And then there's his particular genius as a lyricist. He was, as John Lennon proclaimed in the seventies, that Berry was the original and the greatest rock 'n' roll poet. Not a philosopher, neither gloomy nor introspective, Berry had the genius to appeal to primarily white teenagers growing up in the '50s, a black man with a talent for telling stories that, while hardly meditating on the Dark Night of the Soul, took on experiences and issues that were critical to young people. Dating, school, part-time jobs, homework, cars, dealing with loneliness, trying to fit into a world they didn't make, Berry presented a splendidly idealized world of teens trying to make sense of the world as they tried to find their own path through it. What was profound was Berry's skill, his literal mastery of conveying the scenarios without prejudice or pretentious language. His diction was flawless, his word choice splendid, preferring ordinary words used in exciting ways, coming up with rhymes and resolutions at once surprising but credible. His persona was the young man on the move, a traveler from place to place, town to the big city, nation to nation, searching for pleasures and joy, an innocent hedonist, of a sort, who takes the promise that the country he lives is dedicated to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Avoiding the marsh of clichés, platitudes, and inept phrase-making about American Exceptionalism might be in actuality, Berry's True Believer hacks through the verbal foliage and offers up an American where everyone gets a seat at the lunch counter and has money for the jukebox:

Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today
We just touched ground on an international runway
Jet-propelled back home from overseas to the USA

New York, Los Angeles

Oh, how I yearn for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
God, I long to be at my home back in old St Lou

Did I miss the skyscrapers
Did I miss the long freeway
From the coast of California
To the shores of the Delaware Bay
You can bet your life I did
Till I got back to the USA

Looking hard for a drive-in
Searching for a corner café
Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day

Yeah, and the jukebox jumping with records back in the USA

I'm so glad I'm living in the USA
Yes, I'm so excited I'm living in the USA
Anything you want, we got it right here in the USA.

Ah, we're so glad we're living in the USA
Yes, we're so happy we're living in the USA
Anything you want, we got it right here in the USA

--"Back in the USA" by Chuck Berry

What makes America great? Chuck Berry isn't waxing about the morose verities of Patriotism or the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Berry, In fact, does not concern himself with any idea regarding America as a historical force; he does not tip a hat or allude to an assumed consensus view that his nation and its traditions were an inevitable consequence of unstoppable millennial forces. He had an idea to project, a narrator to create, a credible voice to fashion, and to speak of an America that might be recognizable on most citizens' radar. Berry's America was an All-Encompassing Present, where the details of revolutions, world wars, and struggles for worker and minority rights were irrelevant if they existed at all. This wasn't a country where a seeker like Berry's cheery Everyman had to genuflect to flag and statues of dead white men. This was a place of many constant and permanent marvels. Skyscrapers, long highways, California coastlines, 24-hour diners where burgers are constantly frying on the grill, this was an America as an Ideal Type that never closes, where the explaining ideology of what America was supposed to become was reversed and were now descriptions of a Nation that had fulfilled its promise to its citizens, new and old. 

 Berry won't discuss God's plan for the nation in the course of human events and isn't much concerned with destiny or ethics or the brick and mortar of building political consensus. Berry was visionary, no less than Blake, Yeats, nor Whitman, and what he envisioned was an America that kept its promise of allowing an everyman like himself (and every person) to engage in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It's a might Utopian, yes, simply expressed, but within Berry's lyrics is uncommon eloquence that brings up the idea of what the soul of a nation requires. Fewer sermons, more life, fewer lectures, more laughs, less anger and sadness, and more joy. Berry's hero was a man who wanted to have his fun and sing about it too.

Berry created the rock 'n' roll songwriter as we currently understand it, the participant of events giving hot-take impressions or a narrator framing a story of daily frustrations, habits, and quest of young Americans looking for both the meaning of life and fun. His language was colloquial, slangy, and full of advertising coinages and mispronounced foreignisms, place names, an American hybrid of words consisting of short syllables drawn from telephone chatter to movie screen patter. His subject matter was the life and times of white teenagers, a simple terrain. Still, Berry's treatment was rich, his language was subtle, his rhythmic accents were unexpected, and his rhymes were ingenious, surprising, and fresh, commanding our attention to the tale he framed and relayed like the master he was. The language was direct, emphatic, uncluttered, and scarce of decorative qualifiers. The words had immediacy and intimacy and unforced statement of being and rocked, swerved, and danced on the fast motion rhythm of Berry's fabled guitar chords.

Berry, in my opinion, the most essential singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll, has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington, Count Basie, and Louie Jordan, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was also an entrepreneur and an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one, something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing, and certainly clear narratives that wittily, cleverly, indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served. It's another aspect of country music that Berry admired and was astute enough to bring into his own reconfiguration of culturally disperse American musical styles, which was the beautifully compact, uncluttered storytelling of masters like Hank Williams. 

 William Carlos Williams (no relation), warned against abstraction or attempts to make an image or a perception seem more extraordinary than they already were. Our senses already avail us of a universe infinitely astounding as it already is; attempts to link the detail, the object, the fleeting sensation to the addled guesswork that passes for metaphysical investigation merely clouds the beautiful, powerful, and unique. "The thing itself is its own adequate symbol," said Williams, an idea not lost on Berry. As with WCW, Berry practiced an idealized American idiom, colloquial yet uncluttered with slang that would age poorly, informal but articulate and bristling with quick wit and clarity. I don't think that rock and roll as a form are played out by any means, as the occasional records I have a chance to review or a cursory scanning of what guitar new guitar throttling is available reveals hooks, riffs, lyrics, and licks that satisfy one's requirement that rock and roll be, somehow, dually dumb and refined without seeming as if the artist in question is breaking a sweat. 

What Berry did was create a kind of songwriting that was artful even as it seemed artless. For his part, I would concur that Berry didn't have it in mind to cause a musical revolution that would be such a monumental influence on an astounding number of creators over a significant number of decades. Clearly, his purpose was to write songs that could afford him a comfortable living or better. With all the keen instincts of an entrepreneur willing to experiment with his product, he set out to create music that was unlike anything anyone had done before. He was one of those artists where you could discern influences both obvious and obscure--Duke Ellington, Basie, Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, and other country artists--but, most incredibly, you were in witness of how he transformed his materials into a distinct singularity. We've discussed some of the subtextual matters that are rife in Chuck Berry's body of work, matters that critics given to close readings of texts can expand on and provide us with how deceptively simple this man's music and lyrics and worldview are; there is more here than meets the ear. Berry had no message, of course, in transmitting secret meanings, in being vague, allusive, or otherwise conventionally "poetic" with his songs. But I believe that the artist is not always aware of every submerged implication their music might have. That is the aspect that keeps this kind of music worth talking about when it's good enough to make you play more than once over a set of months, years, decades. 

He was Whitman with a rhythm section, a cogent Kerouac; he was Eliot with a backbeat. His long string of hits was tight, vibrant, concise masterpieces, ageless innovations that motivated later talents with the Beatles, Rolling Stones, John Fogarty, and Dylan. Speaking of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis remarked, without reservation, "You can't play anything on modern trumpet that doesn't come from him, not even modern shit." Decades later, John Lennon's famous line comes to mind, no less on point "If you tried to give rock 'n' roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." 

(Originally published in The San Diego Troubadour).