Rock & Roll -Led Zeppelin
Rock and Roll - Mos Def
Rock'n'Roll - The Velvet Underground
Rock and Roll Heart - Lou Reed
It's Still Rock'n'Roll to me - Billy Joel
More Rock'n'Roll - Ruarri Joseph
Rock'n'Roll - Ryan Adams
The King of Rock'n'Roll - Prefab Street
We Built This City on Rock'n'Roll - Starship
Rock'n'Roll Suicide - David Bowie
The joke being, of course, that none of these songs are rock'n'roll ... or are they? Or, as Stephen Fry used to say ... are they?
Before an Oasis fan complains again, the only reason Rock'n'Roll Star isn't on the list is because it is a a bit too close to actual rock'n'roll. Or is it? Or IS IT?
For what is Rock'n'Roll? Well, for one thing, it was the most overused phrase in my vocabulary for some years. I'm not sure that there was anything that wasn't rock'n'roll. How was your day? Rock'n'roll. I just bought some apples? Rock'n'roll. My uncle just got hit by a bus. Rock'n'Roll.
I think the above songs encompass fairly well the various meanings of rock'n'roll for various people down the years. There's some great songs and some terrible ones in there. Indeed 'We Built This City ...' has been officially voted the worst song of all time, and it's hard to argue. Nothing could be further from true rock'n'roll than this abomination.
My favourite song on the list is probably the Ryan Adams one, a deathly quiet 2 minute ditty on his overly loud but also overly slagged 'Rock'n'Roll' album. "Everybody's cool, playing rock'n'roll, I don't feel cool, feel cool at all" is its refrain.
[By the way, that U2 Blackberry ad is on the TV as I write and my blood is boiling. I don't mind the fact they're advertising BlackBerry, i mind every single other thing about this most awful of bands. If they are rock'n'roll, then rock'n'roll is truly dead. Nice chaps, apparently]
The Mos Def song is brilliant, daring, but questionable. "Elvis Presley ain't got no soul, Little Richard is rock'n'roll, you might dig on the Rolling Stones but they ain't come up with that shit on their own" and various other such juxtapositions, including the deeply unfair to white people "Kenny G ain't got no soul, John Coltrane is rock'n'roll". Well, no one's disputing that, but that's hardly a conclusive argument of anything.
To be honest, the whole "white people stole and commercialised black music to make diluted modern rock'n'roll" argument is an over-simplification. The rock'n'roll music people love, the real starting point of the greatness that stopped it being a fad i.e. The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan owes just as much to country, folk, music hall, tin pan alley etc as the blues.
But what is Rock'n'Roll really, now. To go back to Oasis, they would wholeheartedly describe themselves as a rock'n'roll band, but as Keith Richards said of them "Where's the Roll?"
Is Rock'n'Roll the attitude, the sound, the look, is it the whole thing? Can it be all things to all people. If it's a state of mind, a way of being, I have to admit that the almost 31 me would mainly consider people who act in a "rock'n'roll" way to be, well, boorish, rude, selfish, not my kind of people at all .... must I now accept that I'm the least rock'n'roll person I know? Hell, no. I still wear flairs and drink caffeinated tea.
So maybe rock'n'roll is just a narrow definition of a certain kind of music (any old way you choose it, it's got a back beat, you can't lose it) made by splendid but limited people like Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Chuck Berry and occasionally revived so that music journalists can applaud a song's rock'n'roll feel - but maybe it is the whole thing, the whole thing that has dominated the Western World for 50 years, though most of it's got no roll, a lot of it doesn't rock, from Elvis Presley through The Beatles and James Brown and Martha Reeves and The Byrds and Nick Drake and Carole King and The Clash and the Human League and The Pixies and Public Enemy and Blur and Wilco and Girls Aloud and La Roux. Everything is Rock'n'Roll. Except U2.
ROCK'N'ROLL, SECOND DRAFT
After all the slamming winters
which almost brought you to your knees
you'd made yourself safer than Harlech
overlooking the storm-tossed seas.
Bless those wild lives left behind,
battered by the mocking gales -
easy to gaze from the tallest tower
on all those pretty, fragile sails.
An entreaty, on a call from nowhere -
"Help me sing, sing of the unsung"
- daring and trite enough to lead you
to bite down on your thawing tongue.
The Classics, not the Romantics, sway you
to dip pen into tales of old -
"So, dear friends, here's my next trick ...
to rewrite the history of rock'n'roll."
When Echo finally had stopped calling
and self-portraits'd been calmly defaced,
still, some voice begged of your vanity
not to let it all go to waste.
The memories of grandest failure
now had enough sweet bathos to swallow,
for rock'n'roll to be reimagined
as less Dionysus and more Apollo.
I had intended something bigger, slower, complicateder, but couldn't tie it all together - not sure i've tied this together either - and it was kind of tortuous. This is a second draft, but that's not in the title, so you could call it Rock'n'Roll, Second Draft, Second Draft, if, like me, you're a twat.
Anyway, i guess themes are obvious in a way - there's a book by Ruth Padel, her who was recently embroiled in an Oxford Professor of Poetry rock'n'roll academic scandal, called I'm a Man ,which looks at what Rock'n'Roll owes to Greek mythology. No wait, it really works! If I'd discovered it before I finished my degree, i might have been able to justify what i was studying to myself. Classics are the new Rock'n'Roll.
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