The author on Chuck Berry. “He had no education. Why would that matter? Many great songwriters hadn’t. But he wasn’t lazy, never repeated pronouns, and always looked for the identifiable and, above all, concrete detail.”

[Editor’s note: This is a condensed version of an article by Alexander Theroux that originally ran in the Reader on July 20, 1995, titled The Grammar of Rock ‘n Roll.]

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. I love it, and have from the beginning, even its attractive imbecilities. I tended to concentrate on the lyrics, which I more or less took as a form of reading. I didn’t mind nonsense. There was no end to it, but deliberate lunacies often made a song what it was. 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. Evangeline and “The Highwayman” were poetry. This was real life.

I remember, for instance, deliberating what Chuck Berry meant us to understand in the song “School Days” when he sang:

Back in the classroom, open your books.

Cheat, but the teacher don’t know I mean she looks.

An 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:

I want power steering and power brakes,

I want a powerful motor with a jet-off take,

I want air conditioning, I want automatic heat,

I want a full Murphy bed in my back seat.

Creative 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. 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.

A 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’. (“Funky” can’t legitimately be listed. Charles Dickens was the first to use the word in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.)

Chuck 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. Berry’s work is expressed as functional, resulting in, because born of, simplicity. 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. In one case, it implies a sigh of disgust, and in another, a type of sullen indignation. The language of Berry’s verses may or ordinary, but he employs it naturally and without phony attitudinizing. He had no education. Why would that matter? Many great songwriters hadn’t. But he wasn’t lazy, never repeated pronouns, and always looked for the identifiable and, above all, concrete detail. “The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.”

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. We tend to listen to lyrics, ponder the words, heed and harken to their advice. “And rock is also educational,” said Frank Zappa. “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?

It was all somehow deeply important to me: all that music, all those lyrics. I’ll take a moment here to mention that I still don’t know what a “beguine” is or have the foggiest idea what happens when one begins. And as for the word “bromidic,” as in the Rodgers and Hammerstein lyric “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific, “I’m bromidic and bright as a moon / Happy night pouring light on the dew” — bromidic? — I can honestly say after a lifetime of reading, even with a special interest in words, I might add, I have never once come across that word any other time or in any other context, even studying chemistry. I might add that it doesn’t make an appearance in Webster’s International Dictionary (Second Edition), one of the most comprehensive dictionaries in the world.

There is, of course, such a thing as poetic license. No, it shouldn’t be “Love me Tenderly” or “All Shaken Up.” The song “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” is exactly as it should be. Vox populi. Same with Wilbert Harrison’s “I’m gonna be stand on the corner/Twelfth Street and Vine” and Sam the Sham’s oxymoronic “I don’t think little big girls should / go walkin’ in these spooky old woods alone.” The kind of hip jargon and flip soulfulness that as part of the cool aesthetic allows for Wilson Pickett to say, “Yes I is” and Little Richard to sing, “I ain’t never,” language that grows from inner cultivation, popular life, is a far different thing from the artless boobery and almost malicious stupidity in a pop lyric that actually robs it of style — flat and unedited pretensions that provoke laughter rather than create mood. And there remains one of the major distinctions in rock lyrics.

Paul McCartney, in his song, “Live and Let Die,” possibly gave us the greatest one-line tautology of the 20th Century, “…in this ever-changing world in which we live in.” Redundancy in popular music, which shouldn’t be confused with repetition, is not only one of its most glaring faults, but to my mind almost always less a problem of haste than haplessness. It is invariably the result of some poor dweeb sitting down and trying to “fill” a line for rhythm the way old linotypists used slugs of lead, and often with much the same result, such as Junior Walker’s “What does it take to win your love for me?” or the Beach Boys with that line in “Surfer Girl” that goes, “And so I say from me to you.”

Should we really be surprised to learn that Cole Porter himself once advised Jesse Stone, one of Atlantic Records’ guiding lights — and author of the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and the Clovers’ “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash” — to purchase a rhyming dictionary, noting, “If you’re going to dig a ditch, you use a shovel, don’t you?”

The lyric tradition in America has long since gone by, according to Gene Lees in his book Singers and the Song: he believes it was destroyed by Elvis and the Beatles. No one, in his view, can write lyrics without knowing and revering the language, the crooning tonalities of its vowels, its aptitude for rhyme, its emotional vocabulary, the variety of its accents. And even if one thinks Lees is exaggerating or is unfair, a good case could be made for the prosecution. Not only were lyrics once an integral part of music, and keenly listened to, they were read. It mustn’t be forgotten that the record industry began as a stepchild of the sheet-music business. Popular tunes, prior to World War I, were consumed primarily through that medium. And yet it seems that with a new sort of leveling we’ve gotten further and further away from the notion of that integrity.

There is a list of howlers in popular music so long, clunkers of such scope and magnitude committed so often — but usually in songs of the Suzie-Is-the-Girl-for-Me school, a waste of shellac, invariably loping along after all those C, A minor, F, and G chords — that one has to wonder whether the composers were merely in a rush, simply had no talent, or were just plain dumb. Half the time, it’s as if, when facing the problem of trying to decide between rhyme and reason, they in fact chose neither.

Such shoddiness — shamelessness, really — didn’t always fly. For example, in the original recording of Nat “King” Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song,” he sang the last line of the bridge, “To see if reindeers really know / How to fly.” After the first pressings were released and the song became a hit, Mel Torme, who cowrote the song, pointed out to Cole his grammatical error. Cole, a perfectionist, quickly rerecorded the song, properly singing “reindeer.” The second version is virtually identical to the first, but those early first pressings have since become collector’s items.

Folksinger Bob Dylan, troubadour of the ’60s and nonconformist (“Everybody must get stoned”), to my mind underscores the truth of the theory advanced in Fyodor Tyutchev’s most famous poem “Silentium.” One should hide one’s thoughts in silence, since verbalization cheapens or simplifies them. Dylan sings in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”:

If you’re looking to get silly,

You’d better go back to from where you came

The line, at least to me, becomes the lyrical equivalent in music of having webbed feet.

Dylan’s lyrics are often so subjective and inaccessible and privately symbolic as to be almost totally meaningless, like the dim and unrelenting verses of Simon and Garfunkel, who, having developed formidable defenses against logic at a very early age, somehow manage to mix and mingle bombast, bathos, an platitude in equal measure all at once. But whether it’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “The Sounds of Silence,” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” or “Mother and Child Reunion,” the irrational jabber in such songs never fails to remind us that while almost a moral fault, incompetence in bad lyrics does more to confuse than provoke. What allegorical interpretation, for example, can give meaning to that hopeless concatenation of images evoking the thief, the joker, the wildcat, and the watchtower in Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”? Or to Mrs. Robinson’s connection to cupcakes and Joltin’ Joe? Or to Reid and Brooker’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” with its pretentious muddle of allusions to playing cards, Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” and roman vestals? Can anyone say what’s going on?

Overwriting is of course a major hobble with a lot of songwriters. Da Vinci once said that it took two artists to do a painting, one to do the painting the other to take the brush away. Great turgid songs full of mixed metaphors and incomprehensible allusions, like “MacArthur Park,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “I Am a Rock,” etc., always tend to sound far worse with all their heavy-footedness than those, say, with the opposite problem, as for example, “On the Wings of Love,” “People,” or (raised claws) “Feelings.” Strange to say, perhaps, but the best lyrics are often the ones, it seems to me, that are the plainest, or, better, simply don’t try to say more than the slim frame of rhythm or melody can contain.

Lennon and McCartney’s early lyrics, like “All My Lovin’” “Please Please Me,” and “I Feel Fine,” for example, are thin and conventional, but are nevertheless quite effective. The boys’ early success, in an opinion of Philip Larkin’s which I share, “was displaced by surreal lyrics, mystic orientalia, peace messages, and anti-American outbursts. The trouble was that as surrealists, mystics, or political thinkers, the Beatles were rather ordinary young men again. Their fans stayed with them, and the nuttier intelligentsia, but they lost the typists in the Cavern.”

As Ezra Pound noted in his ABC of Reading, “Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.” A popular defense of such stuff, of course, the notion commonly advanced, that it is the best way to express the disintegration of modern civilization — Lennon, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Dylan all have made noises in that direction — is what critic Yvor Winters calls “the fallacy of expressive form.” The irony is that, more often than not, it’s a virulent form of anti-intellectualism. It’s big on nature mysticism. “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby / than we ever learned in school,” sings The Boss in his song “No Surrender.” And what better proof could be offered than the following bit of haermorrhagia purpura, wherein he proceeds to prove it:

Madmen drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat

In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat

There are no doubt those who think grammar isn’t important. But it’s not true. “This reception has meant much to Mrs. Willkie and I,” said candidate Wendell Willkie, an ungrammatical gaffe that cost him tens of thousands of votes and, some say, the election. Good writing is an assault on cliché, bending language in order to give it new force. What’s remarkable is that the vast number of barbarisms in pop music that are so obviously bad could be so easily rectified. The bad grammar, that is. The other things — the bathos, windy splurging, anemia, and bombinating, the obstipation, the inability to hold the key of inspiration — are another matter entirely.

There are more lyrical offenses against grammar than can possibly be counted. In her 1989 hit “Straight Up,” for instance, Paula Abdul (and her songwriter) badly abuse the technique of enjambment by singing “…are you really hot for me / or am I just another page in your history / book?” with the last, insufficiently integrated word falling off the line like a steaming turd from a cart horse. Paul Anka’s fatuous and overblown composition “My Way,” virtually the signature song of both Sinatra and Elvis Presley, each of whom presents it, by the way, as if he were singing the Stabat Mater, also has the multiple distinction, for all the solemnity it appropriates, of offering not only one of the most repulsive lines ever put down on paper (“I ate it up and spit it out”), but also surely one of the most fat-witted solecisms in the history of popular music:

Regrets, I’ve had a few,

But then again, too few to mention.

I did what I had to do,

And so it proved without exemption.

Exemption? Exemption? Paul Anka, who has always seemed to be verifiable proof that the average human head needs something removed from it rather than something inserted, means “exception,” of course — “exemption” means “immunity, freedom from charge or burden” — but the words are pages apart in the dictionary, he badly needed a rhyme, and, in the Age of Shoddy, anything goes. Who knows, maybe that’s one of his few regrets. One of mine is he doesn’t have more. No, I’m not asking for High Seriousness. Nor am I asking for classicism, symmetry, or the Aristotelian “unities.” I’m asking only for a workman’s true art.

It may legitimately be asked whether popular music is in constant need of rebarbarization, as Max Lerner once said literature was. A case could be made, I suppose. It is the nature of pop music to be rebellious, and, among its practitioners, not only acceptable but even required. And while mistakes of the more pronounced sort do have (as Henry James once said of a musical comedy star) a certain cadaverous charm, one may also be driven to wonder if, um, exemptions repeated enough won’t become the rule.

It should be pointed out, finally, if not out of fairness, then for the sake of relief, that the lyrical mode not only can be done right, but also done admirably. One of the most brilliant lyricists for me has always been Buck Ram Nash (an unlikely name, but the Lord, as Mailer points out, is a great novelist) who was the manager-songwriter for the Platters. Buck could write metaphor like nobody else, a baroque master unique in rock literature — “When purple-colored curtains mark the end of day, I’ll see you, my dear, at twilight time,” and

Deepening shadows gather splendor as day is done,

Fingers of night will soon surrender the setting sun …

But what Buck Ram does that very few others do — Dylan Thomas in “Do Not Go Gentle” is another example that pops to mind — is to play, to pun, with the syntax of words. In Chomskian terms, he varies the deep structure of a syntactical element. In “Remember When,” the title tag introduces many of the lines:

I loved you then, and I still do,

I can’t remember when I didn’t love you.

It’s wonderful. The verb’s mood has changed from imperative to indicative, further suspended by the negative of “can’t” (What! After all this, there’s something the speaker can’t remember?) which is deliciously reversed by the second negative of “didn’t.” That’s style with sass. Buck Ram Nash double negatives work.

He does another “deep structure shift” in his huge hit “Only You,” where the title tag is used as the grammatical subject in a number of different lines — “Only you can make this change in me,” for example — but concludes by shifting it, almost chiasmus-like, to a predicate nominative, as well as easing it into a cliché, thereby bringing the cliché back from the linguistic dead:

You’re my dream come true, my one and only you.

Simple and unpretentious, yet done with grace and magic, that’s the way a song should unfold.

I realize this approach to pop music leaves me open to various charges, particularly, that I’m breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. It’s considered reductive to ask intelligence of it and snobbish to seek an altitude of sense, clearly. And in this failed world of ours, there certainly can be found examples of richer and much ampler incompetence. But there is already too much bad taste around, and it’s getting worse. Industry tampers with both nature and art — accepts anything — until one ends up, sadly, preferring prints to paintings, department stores to the Cape Cod dunes. Mine is not a plea for the stunningly mental, merely an attempt, as Nabokov said in another context, “to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin’s fan.” If you think it’s asking too much, so be it. I say it takes a concerned mind to make an analysis of the obvious; and ungrammaticalness, like the word, while grammatical, is nevertheless ugly.