uTopianTurtleTop

Sasha Frere-Jones has a good piece in the New Yorker on the incompatibility of short stories and rockin’ pop songs, taking as Exhibit A the new Springsteen album. I haven’t heard much by Bruce in recent years, but what I have heard makes me nod my head in agreement with Sasha’s take. But then I thought of counter-examples. Woody Guthrie.

Chuck Berry.

Newly interested in the question, I listened to two of Chuck’s masterpieces from 1964, “You Never Can Tell” and “Promised Land.” The first of these captures a unique mix of powerful emotions.

The exuberant joy of young love and marriage, chiefly communicated by the horns and piano and rhythm.

The stress of making ends meet, in the words and Chuck’s delivery.

The pessimistic encouragement of the young couple’s elders, who showed up at the wedding and wished them well, and who get the song’s tag line: “C’est la vie say the old folks, It goes to show you never can tell.”

And the tenderness of Chuck’s vocal, especially in the reprise of the first verse.

“It was a teen-age wedding and the old folks wished them well.
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle.
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell.
C’est la vie, say the old folks, It goes to show you never can tell.”


The ingenuous happiness of the couple as propounded and profoundly pounded by the band; and the consciousness in the singer’s tone and the old folks’ words that such happiness is a rare and lucky happening.

A delicious tinge of bitter in a sweet sweet wine.

The complexity of the emotions -- the full weight of truth given to the joy of the young and the humane cynicism of the old -- gives “You Never Can Tell” a unique tang and life to the story it tells.

American vernacular music has the capacity to convey that emotional complexity extremely well, and across genres. Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family (his biggest influence) sing with stoic detachment and play guitar with urgent passion, conveying a depth of emotion beneath stoic surface. The jazz of Armstrong and Ellington and Mingus and Kirk is rich with such complex emotional tangles. Even a record like “I Will,” where Dean Martin sings in a flirty and self-deprecatingly sexy, almost jokey tone, the band pounds an insistent riff of the-lust-that-shall-not-go-away.

I haven’t heard the new Springsteen, but other post-Nebraska stuff I’ve heard makes me think that he, like Gillian Welch, has missed the point of Guthrie and the Carters -- as Sasha puts it, he “seems to be stuck in the lowtemperature affect of a certain kind of American short story.” Guthrie and the Carters can move me to tears because of the contrast between the stoic singing and the urgent passion of the accompaniment, the complexity of the whole.

Since I’ve been dissing Bruuuuce, I should say that his speech a couple months ago inducting U2 into the Rock Hall rocked, swung, and cracked jokes at his own and at U2’s expense. And, coincidentally, now that I’ve re-read it, I see that Bruce expertly describes how each player in U2 contributes to the emotional complexity of the band’s whole sound, similar to the complexity I’ve been trying to describe here, that pop and rock and folk and jazz and country can be so good at. (I came across Bruce’s speech via Tim Riley).