Who Do You Love?

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Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?" (download until 1/23/09), from "The Definitive Collection."

It's all about networking of course—building rather than burning bridges. Other concerns, however, often intervene. Today, the desire, or possibly rather the need, to aim for the head while shooting from the hip will trump any effort to ingratiate this writer to the graying dinosaurs of Rock Journalism.

So Bo Diddley is not primitive, and any “hip” magazine that speaks of him that way should have its pages burned and the steel girders that make up the high-rise office building that houses its offices melted down and returned to the earth from whence they came. The people who work for the magazine will have a chance to publicly renounce their error and name names before entering the re-education camp, but should they choose not to exercise that opportunity all bets are off. Rolling Stone, this is shot from the hip at the head number one.

To see the “primitive” claim clearly, “primitive” meaning among other things “first, we need, for a moment, to consider top 100 lists. Please note that the race of list item number one will always equal the race of the largest target demographic defined racially. And the royal we means “racially,” not “ethnically.” Sit down, sit down. My fellow white people can sit down. The rest of you know what I mean.

In the Rolling Stone universe—like the Marvel Universe, only for evil purposes—of top 100 lists Bo Diddley is Black Music, while Chuck Berry is the proof we're not racist, really. Rock 'n' Roll had its base in R'n'B and white country—leave off the African elements in white country—but, yes, that's the conjunction, “but”—was made more sophisticated by the dynamic geniuses of Rock, the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, all three of whose music I rush it, comforting, soothing, to say that I love in the first and third cases dearly and in the second well enough.

In the Rolling Stone universe, neither Bo Diddley nor the relative sophisticate Chuck Berry are dynamic. Each presents his form which is almost Platonic in its constancy but which, once presented simply exists, leaving the musician himself to play to small audiences in small clubs or, at best, theaters while others, will work the raw—how often has Bo Diddley's music been called “raw” by the rock music cognoscenti?—material of the African progenitor into a constantly changing, always new and therefore worthy of a constant re-investment of consumer money into new commodity, cultural product.

We have a teleology of African origins, transmission to the White Man, and then the fulfillment of the original promise of Black music by White people. I'm using capital letters now, that's right. Humanity began in Africa, and developed civilization in Egypt. But Egyptian society was static for 3000 or 3500 years, depending on whom you read. The story of Egypt after the Old Kingdom is the story of outsiders—the Hyksos, and later the Ptolemies. Akhnaten is of course inserted, but as an anomaly, a freak, really. We stress his odd cranium and proclivity for incest. More centrally, we stress not his dynamism but his failure. That the dynamic Pharoah failed is proof of the ultimately static character of Egypt and by extension Africa. It came to the Greeks, to the White Man, to take civilization and make it dynamic.

The static African, Bo Diddley's one chord. European settlers came to North America and saw an empty continent, land unused, despite the fact that the continent was not empty and the land was indeed used.

The problem here is that certain brains can't handle more than one variable at a time. This applies to history, to culture, to beauty, to anything, and it's a characteristic function, to use the hip lingo of the day, of whiteness. If your idea of beautiful hair is how it lays on a woman's shoulder, you will not see the difference between well-kept and poorly-kept locks. You will only see locks, and they won't be as beautiful as that flowing straight hair on the other lady.

If you started a magazine and put a Beatle on the cover, and that was what was hip and good and genius, and you knew with certainty that songs with middle eights and little introductions and tags were good because Lenny Bernstein was saying that there were great things happening with the kids' music, and people were calling Dylan a poet, you probably would focus on that one chord Bo Diddley was playing and think the music simple. Because if you think that musical quality varies in direct proportion to melodic variation, then Bo Diddley would at best be simple music.

But Bo Diddley did not make simple music. He called up a lot of stuff in his song and put it into play. His references to rattlesnake this and cobra were simultaneously satirical and completely serious. He knew he stretched things. It wasn't just his beat—and there's a lot more to Bo Diddley than just “the Bo Diddle Beat” for sure—but the beat, nothing at all like the sterile impersonations people my age learned as the “Bo Diddley Beat,” was very, very old, and when he played it the age in it added the type of complexity that I would think a truly great, properly aged and cellared wine had had I the palate to distinguish these things. Only more deep, and more complex, and at a fundamental level more social. The Bo Diddley Beat—not in its stereotypical form on this track, of course, but rather on “Bo Diddley”a—is in its true form a social phenomenon rather than just a series of taps on a tom-tom. It takes nothing away from the individual Bo Diddley to note that his music is the product of a social, historical development. That development brings the kind of nuance that the musical notation that would impress the Lenny Bernsteins of the world (or the type of obvious complexity that a Jann Wenner could detect) misses.

So too in the lyrics. If your idea of great lyric writing is the Dylan of, take your pick, “Blowin' in the Wind,” “My Back Pages,” or “Tombstone Blues” (my favorite of the three) you wouldn't be bowled over by “Who Do You Love?” That's because you expect the meaning of the words to be contained entirely in the words themselves rather than in the relationship between him singing and them listening. Bo Diddley's words are exceptionally specific in the social response they elicit. They refer to reference upon reference. If you haven't experienced the referential context, you can understand the tune but you miss its impact. It would seem lesser when placed next to “Tombstone Blues.” Lesser, however, it's not.