I like the 1950's. And when I say I like the 1950's, I'm not talking about poodle skirts or leather jackets or pompadours or Elvis. Nor is this about some bygone era when men were men, women women, children seen rather than heard, and everyone had a steady job and the Ten Commandments tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. That world only existed on television, and it was meant for children. Actual grown-ups did not need a bunch of beret-sporting hobos with track-marks on their arms and delusions of literacy to tell them that the world was more complicated than The Donna Reed Show let on. So let's just bury the cliche, shall we?
Besides, Donna Reed was hot.
No, I like the entirety of the 1950's. I like the paranoid B-movies, the blunt nudge-nudge humor, the determination to have painfully dry martinis ready at 5 o'clock. I like fedoras and drab charcoal suits, and conversely, Ultra-Modernist pastel styling. I like rocket-ship cars. Basically, after 20 years of war and depression, capitalism was again set free to make and sell cool new stuff, and I dig it in all its stuffy silliness.
Most of all, I dig the music. All of it. I love the wang-bang guitar blues, I love the castrati doo-wop. I love the Jazz in the beginning of its decline, both the mannerism of Cool and Modal and the unlistenable punk of Bop. And, to tack somewhere near my point, I love the first incarnation of Rock n' Roll, when it was a couple of country or blues (like there's a difference) riffs sped up to a swing beat. It was the last music you needed a partner to dance to, and the first thing I could even think of liking as a kid in the 80's when everyone was all up Michael Jackson's butt (and that's twice I've made a point of giving him crap in one of these. I feel really bad about this. Really).
This means liking Chuck Berry. Everyone who is passingly familiar with 50's rock likes Chuck Berry. He's easy to like. He wrote a dozen songs that are all the same song, and all of them remain infectiously enjoyable. He wrote a dozen other songs that are all the same song, yet different from the first dozen, but not a lot, and those remain classics. Basically, in a very narrow idiom, he achieved the kind of greatness of which history is made.
But can you listen to them now?
Don't know if you can or not. Don't know what your expectations are. He's neither punk, metal, nor psychedelic. He's not "lush," whatever the fuck that means. He sings about cars and girls and being in trouble. His guitar lines are idiot-simple. His songs are short. He's not going to challenge your conceptions of what music can be; what music is now comes largely from his original blueprints. If you care about any of the above too much, you aren't going to dig him.
A good many musical abortions have been justified along the terms I'm using, stuff that was to be excused for its badness by its lack of pretension. I'm not going to justify Chuck Berry on those lines. He doesn't need it. The songs he wrote are simple, and they are good. They are fun without being childish, brash without being blaring, sexual without being lecherous. If you let them, they hit right in the sweet spot. Whether you do so or not may well depend on whether you can let the 1950's turn you on.
Grade: LL
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