I Hear America Swinging

If America smokes thinking men's cigarettes, it sings feeling men's songs. The Rock 'n' Roll Romantic today beats out the worries of the age; he synthesizes the intellectual (Charlie Brown), the successful (Elvis Presley), and all other concerns into a libidinal lyric. One big bopper says more about America than Max Lerner; and the CRIMSON, never unpercipient of current social and intellectual trends presents its quasi-annual song round-up. Harvard if not singing should keep swinging.

The products of the past few months form together an epic quest of the American for his soul. The rock and roller starts off on his Twentieth century Odyssey by defining his goals of success. The vision which Billy Parsons offers of the goal rivals Dante's path through Paradise. Parsons builds on the Presley legend for his model:

Y'all gather 'round cats and I'll tell you a story

About how to become an all-American boy.

Buy you a guitar, put it in tune,

You'll be arockin' and arollin' soon.

and tells how the hero buys his guitar, learns to play, and leaves home for the big city (Memphis) after an altercation with his papa ("He was a square--he just didn't dig me at all"). Then he continues:

I's arockin' and aboppln' and I's gettin' the breaks,

The girls all said I had what it takes.

Then up steps a man with a big cigar,

He said, come here, cat, I'm gonna make you a star.

Put you on Bandstand--

Buy you a cadillac--

Sign here kid!

He makes the top; he's a hit. Yet security is fleeting, even for an idol, and the saga ends with the sad refrain:

But then one day my Uncle Sam

Said, (three knocks) here I am.

Uncle Sam need you, boy--

I'm gonna cut your hair off.

Take this rifle, Gimme that guitar.

But the singers of the country realize that success means more than prestige and crass material gains. They catch the intellectual rewards of education and the higher things of life with an apotheosis of the Academic, a song which is titled after the symbolic intellectual of today's campuses, "Charlie Brown." It begins,

Fie, fie, fy, fy, fo, fo, fum.

I smell smoke in the auditorium.

Set contrapuntally against this is the inner lament of the thinker, persecuted because of his mental superiority: "Why is everybody always pickin' on me?" Even the intellectual, while inwardly tortured, must maintain a stoic facade, however; and the song offers an austere ethic:

Walks in the classroom, cool and slow;

Who calls the English teacher Daddy-o?

Of course, the American is chiefly concerned in his search with resolving the tension between the imperious demands of his body and the restrictions of society. As in all true epics the goal of the quest is right love, and the Rock 'n' Roller searches for this highest of human expressions. Jimmy Reed shows the semi-existential predicament:

Well my fingers start 'o bopping

And my knees started knockin.'

I'm gonna find my baby

'Fore my pistol starts rockin.'

Overtones of the Oedipus complex are subtly woven into the main theme. Mother love is a distraction on the path to perfection:

Well, she's my mamma loocha

And she do the hoocha koocha.

When she starts to lovin'

I holler great googly mooga.

Naturally, the American singer is sophisticated enough to realize that love involves submission; and he struggles with the question of whether this submission involves a higher freedom or mere restrictions. The late Big Bopper caught this metaphysical problem and reduced it to concrete terms. His lyric wrestles with the problem of freedom on three levels, the personal, the social framework, and the allegorical transcendental dialectic:

Honey, what's this jazz about love, honor, and obey

That cat's talking to me? (laugh)

All look at these good lookin' bridesmaids standing around.

Hell-loo--baby, and the man in charge keeps saying

"Look here! do you take this woman or don'tcha?

Do you want this woman or don't cha?"

And I say, "pardner, I don't believe I do."

Lemme out of here.

As the pilgrimage of life goes on, other temptations crop up to distract and subvert the voyager. The temptations of the desert become, in America, the allurements of society.

I see you in my martini, laffin' at me,

Hidin' in the olive, laffin' at me.

I take you to my lips and swish you 'roun'

Then you holler, please, don't drink me down!

You're laffin', laffin', laffin', laffin', at me.

Another temptation replaces the first in "Love Eyes:"

Hey love eyes! I mean you,

You in them levis.

You've been eyeing me since you walked in.

Your glances speed my heart and heat my skin.

Yeah, love eyes!

The quests, of course, are not yet finished; the American suspended in mid-twentieth century is still in the middle of his voyage, and his lyrics show this. The Rock 'n' Rollers are the troubadors of transition, and it is unfair to expect them to give us the final beatific vision.